Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Growing up in the western Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka, Jesperson and his brother enjoyed a bucolic childhood. “We had five acres,” he said, “a pasture surrounding the house, a stream and a woods, and lots of horses, dogs, cats.” Inside their home, it was a less idyllic atmosphere.

  Jesperson’s mother, a former executive secretary who’d become a homemaker after having kids, was a fragile woman with myriad problems. Carolyn’s father had died when she was two, her mother when she was six. She’d spent her childhood bouncing around between different relatives. “She grew up feeling like ‘I don’t belong, like I’m not wanted,’” recalled her youngest son. “She was, I would say, a little unbalanced as a result. She had some mental issues. Some drinking issues. She had some depression too.”

  Carolyn’s problems impacted Jesperson’s early childhood. One of the most haunting memories of his mother came when he was six years old. “She’d been drinking and took some kind of medication and came into my room and just collapsed at the foot of my bed. We had to call an ambulance that pulled up on the lawn and carried her out,” he recalled. “I was aware of my mother being difficult, because of her mental state and her drinking and the pressure that it put on my dad. I really thought they could divorce at a certain point.” Carolyn would improve after spending time in a mental institution in Prescott, Wisconsin. “They helped her get better, and things were fairly normal after that. I mean, things were always a little dodgy, especially when she drank too much. But she ultimately came out the other end.”

  Life in the Jesperson house was one of deep inquisitiveness and intellect. His father, a salesman for Curtis Circulation Company, which distributed the Saturday Evening Post, among other publications, had a genius-level IQ. Both his parents were lifetime bridge masters and voracious readers. Neither, however, was particularly musical. “When stereo sound came in,” said Jesperson, “my mom actually said, ‘Oh, I don’t like to be surrounded by music’—she just liked the one speaker over in the corner.”

  Jesperson, on the other hand, loved the feeling of being enveloped in sound. His earliest musical memories, as a tot, were hearing Elvis singles—“Hound Dog,” “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.” Thanks to his older brother Alan—who would go on to become an accomplished bluegrass picker—he also got swept up in the early ’60s folk boom: the music of the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; and Minnesota’s native son, Bob Dylan, whose 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was a particular favorite. From the first, Jesperson was a passionate advocate for the artists he liked. “Even as a kid, I defended Dylan’s singing voice,” he said. “I thought those who criticized him weren’t listening.”

  In early February 1964, just a couple of days before his tenth birthday, Jesperson’s life changed for good. He’d heard of the Beatles—the Liverpool foursome then descending on America amid a wave of unprecedented anticipation—and dug their first singles on the radio. That Sunday night, as the band made its historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, his family was eating dinner with the television on in the background. When the Beatles came on and the screaming began, Jesperson rose from his chair, almost in a trance.

  “Peter Louis Jesperson!” scolded his mother as he pressed right up to the glass of the family’s Zenith, lost in the sound and vision of the four figures in front of him.

  “Seeing the Beatles, it was such a fundamental, profound thing that happened to me,” said Jesperson. “It felt like destiny, like this was my music. As people, they were funny and irreverent too. I fell so hard, so fast, for them.”

  The next day he went to Record Lane at the nearby Knollwood Mall and bought a copy of Meet the Beatles. “This was the first time I felt like ‘I need to have this record.’ I remember putting it on my dresser and, before I fell asleep each night, looking at the album cover. I just couldn’t stop staring at it.”

  That rush of discovery, the sweet, almost narcotic quality of losing himself in a new band or record, was a feeling Jesperson would become addicted to. He began to devour the music of the British Invasion: the Beatles and Stones, the Kinks, Yardbirds, and the Who. He loved American bands too, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Cryan’ Shames, and the Left Banke. He also adored local Twin Cities favorites like the Castaways and the Jesters, who were featured on the Big Hits of Mid-America compilations put out by the Minneapolis-based label SOMA.

  As a kid, Jesperson delighted in turning his family and friends on to his latest finds, playing deejay on his little portable turntable as he recited liner notes and recording details from memory. By the time Jesperson hit his teens, it was obvious he didn’t care about girls or sports or anything but music. His mother would admonish him: “You’ve taken something that was intended to be a hobby and you’ve blown it all out of proportion.”

  Though Jesperson took drum lessons and had a solid sense of time, he felt he’d never be able to play an instrument “like the people I held in such high esteem.” Instead, he began hanging out with some junior high friends who had a garage group called The Gross Reality. Jesperson referred to himself as a “Band Aide”: he helped carry their equipment and suggested material for them to cover. They mostly played dances at country clubs or school functions, and Jesperson would be at the gigs, fussing over their performance, a pint-sized aesthete consumed with the minutest details. He fancied being a rock-and-roll impresario, like Beatles patron Brian Epstein or Rolling Stones producer-manager Andrew Loog Oldham. “They seemed like pals with the band,” said Jesperson, “like they hung out and were really hands-on, an extension of the groups.”

  By the time Jesperson reached Hopkins-Lindbergh High, he’d started growing his hair long and was going to concerts and getting into drugs—pot, then psychedelics. Somewhat ironically, given what lay in store in his life, it was years before Jesperson ever took a drink. “We didn’t like drinking, me and my friends,” he said. “We were part of that generation that was into mind-expanding drugs, and drinking was something the older generation did. But another part of the reason I didn’t like it is that I saw my mom and what it did to her. To me, drinking and getting drunk was just an ugly thing.”

  After getting his heart broken by a girl his senior year, Jesperson’s behavior became more bellicose: he refused to have his picture taken for the yearbook, finished his classes through independent study, and skipped the formal graduation ceremony altogether.

  In the summer of ’72, his father’s publishing company began doing a trial run selling New Musical Express (NME) out of the United Kingdom. Jesperson landed a gig hustling copies to all the newsstands and record stores in the Twin Cities, earning a nickel for each issue he distributed. (“My first real job in music,” he recalled.)

  The NME experiment didn’t fly and ended after just a few months. But one of the record stores on Jesperson’s route—located in South Minneapolis—was a place called North Country Music, owned by Wayne Clayman. In early 1973, Clayman sold the business to Vern Sanden. A gruff family man who’d worked as an air traffic controller, Sanden seemed an unlikely figure to buy a record store. But he was a passionate rock-and-roll fan, who took the titles of two favorite records—Oar by Skip Spence and Folkjokeopus by Roy Harper—and renamed the store Oar Folkjokeopus.

  “Everyone thought he was crazy,” said Jesperson. “All the adjacent businesses—the hardware store across the street and furniture store next door—figured, ‘Oh, this place will be gone in a month or two.’” But Oar Folk, located at Twenty-Sixth and Lyndale, flourished thanks to a dedicated clientele of record collectors, music freaks, and heads like Jesperson, who was a fixture at the store. One afternoon he was browsing the used LPs when Sanden approached him. “Vern could be such an intimidating guy. I remember thinking he didn’t like me. When he came up, I honestly thought he was going to say, ‘Get out of my store!’” Instead, he offered Jesperson a job.

  Jesperson started work there in April 1973 and also attended a broadcasting school called the Brown Institute, in the hopes of becoming a l
ate-night radio deejay. He realized that ambition soon after graduating, landing a graveyard slot on KFMX, a “gold record only” station in town. Jesperson chafed, however, against its limited playlist. He broke format once, spinning John Lennon’s version of “Stand by Me” without permission, and nearly got fired for it. He finally quit the station in 1975, blowing off his shift to go see a Bruce Springsteen show at the Guthrie Theater. By then, Sanden had offered Jesperson a full-time gig to manage Oar Folk.

  With his fussy, fastidious nature—down to the crisp white dress shirts he wore, buttoned all the way to the top—Jesperson didn’t so much manage Oar Folk as curate it, gradually building it into the best record store in the region. When the UK punk explosion hit in 1977, Jesperson began express air-freighting the latest singles from England directly to the store. The day the Sex Pistols’ debut arrived, there was a line out Oar Folk’s door of customers waiting for the UPS truck. Soon the shop was hosting in-store appearances by the likes of Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson and David Johansen; the Ramones, Dead Boys, and Talking Heads all became regular visitors as well. Customers began coming from far and wide—Chicago, Milwaukee, even Canada—as Oar Folk became known as “The Rock ’n’ Roll Head Quarters for the Upper Midwest.”

  By the midseventies, record stores in the Twin Cities—not just Oar Folk but the Wax Museum and Electric Fetus, among others—were the only real oases of rock-and-roll culture. Minneapolis had flourished as a music town for much of the sixties, with a strong folk and blues community, a post-Beatles garage band boom, and a colorful psychedelic scene. But that golden era came to a crashing halt in the early seventies as professional cover bands came to dominate the local music landscape.

  As Tim Holmes would write in a historical survey of the city for Trouser Press: “By the end of the [1960s], a band’s worth was measured by how precisely it could replicate the hits of Britain and the Coasts and a certain daffy originality got lost in the struggle towards Serious Musicianship. The local band scene became, not untypically, the province of human jukeboxes. Most anybody with real talent split town in order to be heard.”

  Among the only people left playing original music were wispy folk singers and white blues bands on the West Bank. The quietly thriving African American R&B/funk scene in Minneapolis was confined to a relatively segregated area on the north side of the city and was invisible to the public at large—at least until the emergence of Prince in 1978.

  The lack of original live music was compounded by the abysmal state of radio at that time. The city’s big FM rock station, KQRS, was long deteriorated from any sense of its free-form, underground roots and was playing the worst kind of ’70s AOR (album-oriented rock) schlock. In general, the Twin Cities was among the most conservative radio markets in the country. When local band Lipps Inc. scored a number-one Billboard hit with its disco number “Funky-town” in 1980, there wasn’t even a station in Minneapolis that would play it.

  The first stirrings of change came in the summer of 1974, when the New York Dolls made an appearance at the Minneapolis State Fair, playing the Teen Stage, in support of their Mercury Records debut. The band was late getting to the show, stuck in traffic, as the crowd—which included many future players in the local punk and indie rock scene—waited eagerly. When the Dolls finally arrived onstage, singer David Johansen took to the microphone, looked out over the fair—still very much a rural, farm-based event—and chided, in his gravelly Long Island accent, “What I really want to know is: who won da pie-eatin’ contest?”

  The Dolls’ state fair performance was instructive: they played short, sharp songs that heralded a return to the simpler 1950s roots of rock-and-roll. The impact was felt by local bands like Thumbs Up—a group, fronted by white soul shouter Curt Almsted, aka Curtiss A, and featuring guitarist Bob Dunlap, that would transform from a covers act to playing original material. A handful of other bands, including the early Rolling Stones–influenced outfit Flamingo, and the Nuggets-digging garage crew the Hypstrz, soon emerged with the same back-to-basics sensibility.

  While all that was happening in the city, Minneapolis punk was being birthed in Peter Jesperson’s home suburb of Minnetonka. That’s where two boyhood friends, singer-guitarist Chris Osgood and drummer Dave Ahl, launched the Suicide Commandos. “Dave and I both hated everything we heard on the radio, and we knew we wanted to form a new kind of band,” said Osgood. “We listened a lot to Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, that’s what we were thinking.”

  The second bass player they auditioned, Steve Almaas, joined in the summer of ’75, and the group was off and running. Though the term had not yet come into vogue, the Commandos were a “punk” band—playing a batch of fast, reductive originals, much like the Ramones, who were developing a similar sound in New York City.

  While the Commandos had a definitive musical identity, they had nowhere to play. In the fall of ’75, Oar Folk employee Andy Schwartz convened a meeting in his apartment to address the situation. He gathered together the Commandos and other frustrated acts, including Flamingo and Curtiss A, and pitched a plan. “It was my thought that we got all these places that are exclusively booking cover bands, but we got other bars in this town, some of which have no music or used to have live bands in the ’60s,” said Schwartz. “What if we just approached them or canvassed them and said, ‘Let us play for the door’?”

  The Commandos beat the pavement and got a foothold playing shows at the Blitz Bar, located in the basement of The Roaring Twenties, a strip club in downtown Minneapolis. Beyond finding venues to play, the bigger goal was to will a new rock scene into existence. “We even wrote a little manifesto,” said Osgood, “that we wanted to change the center of gravity of the local scene from the West Bank and the blues to Twenty-Sixth and Lyndale and rock-and-roll.”

  In 1976 the Commandos put out their first two singles. The recordings were engineered by a brainy twenty-four-year-old studio owner named Paul Stark.

  The son of a successful hardware wholesaler from Minneapolis, Paul David Stark was born into a fairly conservative family with a legacy of black sheep artists. He attended the prestigious Blake School, alongside future Saturday Night Live writer-producers Al Franken and Tom Davis. A financially adroit youth, as a freshman in college Stark ended up buying a house in Dinkytown at 606 Thirteenth Avenue Southeast. He rented the upstairs bedrooms to some friends to cover his mortgage and turned the first floor into a recording studio, called P. David Productions. He cut a number of odd projects there—from a piano-playing Catholic priest to pre-fame new age musician Yanni—before hooking up with the Commandos.

  By 1977, Stark and Osgood both saw the obvious need for a new independent rock label in Minneapolis. “The indie labels of the sixties had come and gone, and there weren’t any other real companies operating at the time,” said Stark. He and Osgood decided to start a record company with Charley Hallman, a sportswriter and sometime rock critic for the St. Paul Dispatch. Hallman had championed the Suicide Commandos and could supply the needed seed money for the label.

  Stark figured he’d handle the business and recording side, and Osgood would serve as the label’s talent scout and A&R (artists and repertoire) man. But by then, the Commandos, having made a splash at CBGB’s in New York, had signed a major-label deal with Polygram’s punk imprint, Blank Records. Osgood bowed out of Stark’s venture, but not before recommending Oar Folkjokeopus manager Peter Jesperson as his replacement.

  Despite having diametrically opposed personalities—Jesperson was passionate and excitable, while Stark was measured in the extreme—something clicked between them. “Paul was a very unique individual, very smart,” said Jesperson. “He liked rock, but knew about classical music. I found that all very interesting.”

  Stark, Jesperson, and Hallman began meeting weekly over drinks at the CC Club to hatch plans for the label, which Jesperson suggested naming Twin/Tone. They drew up a list of local artists they wanted to work with. Twin/Tone would feature Curtiss A as its flagship act. “Curt was the
main reason I wanted to get involved in doing a label,” said Jesperson, who’d been watching Almsted tear up the Tempo Bar and other local venues for several years. Fingerprints—who included two of Jesperson’s childhood friends, drummer Kevin Glynn and guitarist Mike Owens, along with singer Mark Throne and bassist Steve Fjelstad—would also join the roster. Glynn and Owens also moved their recording gear into Stark’s Dinkytown digs, launching Blackberry Way, which would become Twin/Tone’s in-house studio.

  In hopes of finding a new band to round out the roster, Twin/Tone threw an audition party at Blackberry Way in January 1978. Half a dozen groups turned up and played, including the one they signed: the Suburbs. The Suburbs were a juxtaposition of high musicianship (in the case of the gifted pianist Chan Poling), appealing amateurism (most of the rest of the band were still learning their instruments), and art-school conceptualism (they wore monochromatic suits and played in front of a postmodernist stage backdrop designed by guitarist Bruce Allen).

  “I didn’t come from blues and rock,” said Poling. “I liked the packaging of rock. I liked Bowie and Roxy Music. I liked everything about the showmanship of it. I dug the idea of having a band logo and dressing a certain way. That was a big part of it, as much as the music.” Early on, the Suburbs fit into the punk/new wave mold largely on the strength of front man Beej Chaney’s manic stage presence and a clutch of minimalist, minute-long tunes like “Chemistry Set” (“I’m into chemistry and that’s about it.”)

  Twin/Tone would formally launch in April 1978, with EPs from Curtiss A’s group the Spooks, Fingerprints, and the Suburbs. Despite a manufacturing snafu—Allen had designed the jackets too big for the printer’s template, so everyone had to chip in and hand-fold and glue several thousand sleeves—the records themselves were a surprise success. They were all well reviewed—written up in Trouser Press, the New York Rocker, and the UK’s New Musical Express—and sold through their initial pressing. Emboldened by their first slate of releases, which included a couple more singles from Fingerprints and the Jets, Twin/Tone decided to put together a snapshot of the growing local scene. They went to Amos Heilicher of SOMA Records and got his blessing to produce a spiritual sequel to the label’s Big Hits of Mid-America compilations. Featuring a dozen tracks from the Suicide Commandos, the Suburbs, Curtiss A, the Pistons, and the Hypstrz, among others, Big Hits of Mid-America: Volume III, released in early 1979, cemented Twin/Tone’s place as the leading rock label in town. “We used to joke that Twin/Tone was really forced into existence,” said Jesperson. “There were so many groups, someone had to record them. We figured it might as well be us.”