Back in eighth grade, I used to ride to school with my sister. I was taking two high school classes, Geometry and German I, so I would start the day in the ninth-grade building, just across the lot from Howland High. After those classes I would walk across East Market Street and down the road to the junior high school for the rest of the day. This was the 1986–1987 academic year, and Tia was a senior and had parking privileges. I must not have cramped her style too much, because I don’t remember her complaining about having me along.
Tia drove a two-tone Oldsmobile Firenza—probably the most 1980s-looking car you will ever see—and without fail she drove with her left foot on the dashboard and Hot FM 101 on the radio. WHOT was a Youngstown channel, 101.1 on the dial, sprayed across the Valley from a transmitter somewhere in Campbell. I remember Eddie Money and “My Sharona” (Apple Music, Spotify) and Josie’s on a vacation far away (Apple Music, Spotify) and Billy Squier and Mr. Mister. AC McCullough was the DJ—this was before Kelly Stevens joined this shift in 1989, and AC flying solo went by “AC in the Morning.”
AC had a side gig DJing school dances around town. My first school dance was the Halloween dance at Howland Junior High in 1986. I’d lived in the school district all my life, but for the prior five years I’d gone to a private school down in Youngstown (see “Your Time Will Come”). I had been back in public school for just under two months. I knew a bunch of kids from my classes, but I wouldn’t say that by this point I had made any good friends.
That’s not to say I didn’t have any friends. I was close with the three Carrier Brothers down the street. Brad was in my grade, and Bob was in seventh grade. I was about midway between them in age. Their younger brother, Mike, was a couple years younger than Bob. When I first moved to Springwood Trace a few years earlier, I was feeling pretty grim. Pulled three miles clear of my old gang and I had to start all over in a new neighborhood. My mother suggested I go down to the Carriers’ house and knock on the door. So I did that, and one of them—Bob, I think—opened it. I needed to ask for somebody, so I asked for Brad. “He’s not here,” Bob said, and he closed the door. Well, that sucked. Bob would have done just as well.
I was able to overcome that first tactical failure, and in the intervening years I became tight with all three Carriers. Like, walk into their house without knocking and rummage in their pantry for food tight. Looking back I can’t imagine Barb Carrier loved coming downstairs to find me standing in her kitchen eating spoonfuls of Tang powder out of the can. But it cracked her kids up and she tolerated it, because she was (and is today) a lovely human being.
We were a good group, the four of us. We had two two-seater go-karts—the Carriers had one, and I got one for my birthday a year later—and we rode up and down the street together on them, round and round and round and round, until finally the cops pulled us over and told us paved roads were off-limits. (It didn’t occur to me until just now that someone in the neighborhood must have called and complained. Now I’m wondering who it was.) So fine: we went into the woods and raked out trails. Woods-riding was more fun anyway, grabbing inches of air over bumps, slinging our back tires around corners. Back behind my house were a series of electrical transmission towers, laid out in a straight line cut through the woods. The power company had cut a straight-line path between them, wide enough to get their trucks in to do repairs. The path was overgrown enough that we didn’t bog down in mud on it after it rained, which was an advantage over our hand-raked loop trails. We would thunder down that path in our go-karts, weaving around and underneath the towers—a Fearsome Foursome: Brad, Brad, Bob, and Mike.
It was around the time of that Halloween dance that I started to grow closer to Brad than to the other brothers—we were in the same grade, and it just made sense. When the school announced that Halloween dance, I pleaded with Brad to go. In the time since, I’ve grown perfectly comfortable going to lunch, to movies, to rock shows by myself. When you’re thirteen years old, you see things differently. You just assume that everybody in the HJH gym is going to see you walk in through those doors alone, they’ll all deem you unfriended and therefore unfriendable, and goddam it you just got to this school and your window for social progress has closed forever.
This was before either of us disclosed to the other that we were interested in girls. Up to and through October 1986, we were all about go-karts, (indoor and outdoor) fort building, cutthroat games of backyard croquet, and pickup basketball. Brad was not up for the dance. He offered up a movie night instead at his house. No, I told him. I think I’m going to go. I went home and slapped together a costume, which consisted of the following:
a pair of joke glasses with an elephant trunk hanging from them;
a T-shirt I’d bought, probably at Spencer’s Gifts, that was in all respects copped in style and layout from the FRANKIE SAY RELAX design, except that instead it said WHY BE NORMAL; and
a pair of knee-length Jams (kids, ask your parents).
Not sure if I had my purple Chuck Taylors that early in the year, but if I did, I definitely wore them. [pauses] Yeah, I did. I had them and I wore them, to complete the ensemble. Let’s go with that.
My parents dropped me at the dance. I survived the arrival. Turns out you just enter the gym quickly, casually but with purpose—like you have business being there—and no one notices you came in alone. The next part was harder. I mingled with the crowd as best I knew how: I spotted groups of people I knew and I approached them, lingered nearby, cracked jokes when there were opportunities: i.e., when there was a period of relative quiet between songs and no one else was talking. 37 years later I’m not any better at this and generally apply the same strategies.
After about a half hour of this, I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, Brad was there, wearing a pair of Groucho Marx joke glasses and grinning ear-to-ear. His brother Bob was with him, too. I had never been happier to see anyone than I was laying eyes on these two. From that point on, the dance went great. Boys on one side and girls on the other, of course, with the dance floor all but vacated when the slow songs came on. Maybe there were a few couples out there, and we looked at them with mixed and conflicting feelings of envy/ never in a million years.
And AC was at the desk, spinning tunes and setting the agenda. Not “AC in the Morning,” because it was Friday night. He was just AC McCullough, which seemed like kind of a big deal. This wasn’t Michael Jackson, exactly, or Springsteen or Jon Bon Jovi. (“Livin’ on a Prayer” (Apple Music, Spotify) was a huge hit at these eighth grade dances, but maybe not this first one—per Wikipedia, that single didn’t drop until exactly on Halloween.) Not even Mr. T., who passed through town a few years earlier to open a hardware store and was supposed to have lunch at my grandfather’s restaurant.1 But AC was at least a local celebrity, a figure of some note in the life of the Mahoning Valley.
I have always remembered AC presiding over these dances from above. Like he was on another level. Yesterday I went online and did a Google Image Search of Howland Middle School, as the Junior High is now known, and I was able to find a photograph of the gymnasium. There is indeed a raised stage in the gym, running along one side of the basketball court. That would have been where AC was set up: on the left side, as I recall. When we approached him to make requests, we had to reach up toward him, and like a king, he would bow his head down to hear our appeals.
In moments like these I would ask him to play, I dunno, “(Forever) Live & Die” (Apple Music, Spotify) by OMD, and AC would shake his head no and pull away, straightening back up into position behind his DJ desk. Fair enough, I would conclude. That’s the single off their new record, but it’s not the jumpiest number. So I would negotiate—waving him down again, in my direction, to make a second bid:
How about “Stay?”
“By who?” Reasonable for him to ask, given there were dozens of songs called “Stay,” and amid the chaos and background noise I didn’t have the breath to spell out the full title of my request, which was “Stay (The Black Rose & the Universal Wheel)” (Apple Music, Spotify).
By OMD, I would answer. Same album. And I would get yet another thumbs-down from AC McCullough.
AC and I went through several rounds of this during the course of the school year. I would come at him with deep album cuts from OMD, the Pet Shop Boys, maybe the Thompson Twins. Sure, maybe only a handful of us knew these songs, but they were eminently danceable, and what teenager wouldn’t instantly dig on “Stay,” “Paninaro” (Apple Music, Spotify), or “Tokyo” (Apple Music, Spotify), if any one of them came on over the PA? All it took was a DJ with an open mind and the moral courage to challenge his audience.
AC McCullough was not that DJ. And it was clear we—others in our class, too, had pie-in-the-sky requests to take up to his desk—were getting on his nerves. At some point, we decided that AC McCullough sucked. Which was absolutely unfair, but we were in eighth grade and if you weren’t with us you were against us. I read on Friday that AC passed away last year, after 52 years at the mic for WHOT. With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t doubt that the same instincts AC followed at our Howland Junior High dances contributed substantially to his longevity on the job. A DJ has to play to the whole room, not to the gawky kids in the corner who baselessly believe they have it in them to be tastemakers.
Rest in peace, AC on Friday Night in the HJH Gym: you were the DJ we deserved, not the one we needed. We cursed your name, because you could take it.
Jump ahead four years, to academic year 1990–1991. As seniors in high school, we—that is Steve, Hans, Mark, Bob, Sean, Brad, and I—somehow convinced the administration to hire us to DJ dances. It may simply have been (1) we had indicia of trustworthiness (good grades, few detentions), and (2) we were willing to do it for free. Others had preceded us in this role, and we learned from their experiences. For example, if you play “Mony Mony” (Apple Music, Spotify), everybody in the cafeteria will yell HEY! GET LAID GET FUCKED! between the verses, and Mrs. King will run over to the desk and pull the plug on you.
Bob and Steve had most of the necessary equipment—we did have to buy a crossfader from Radio Shack—and the AV skills to rig it all up. Steve’s younger brother was into R&B and hip hop, and given this was all anybody was listening to in those days, we could rely on Jason’s extensive collection to fill out the lion’s share of our playlist. All we needed were weapons-grade speakers, and we borrowed those from Dave Sadler, a classmate I knew from drumming in marching band. Dave’s speakers were massive, and we kept six hands at least on them at all times when we were moving them.
There were a handful of us involved in this project who contributed next to no value, other than to bicker about how far we could push our audience with alt-rock song selections. Still smarting from my earlier engagements with AC McCullough, I was on the radical side of the question. It’s OUR time now. If they fire us, they fire us. Yet for all my my Thomas Paine/Sam Adams, throw the goddam Bell Biv DeVoe records into the harbor rhetoric, a more sensible, moderated, and politic view prevailed on these questions (my work life even today is governed by much the same dynamic), and consensus was reached on the proposition that we would just have to hate 95% of the songs we played at the dances.
Even so, there were some songs in our CD collections (i.e., not Steve’s brother’s) that had earned enough radio airplay—possibly even on WHOT—that we could get away with shoehorning them into the playlist between Vanilla Ice and Snap. “Love Shack” (Apple Music, Spotify) was one of these, along with “Personal Jesus” (Apple Music, Spotify) and [sigh] Jesus Jones and EMF. The alternative kids in the grades behind us knew what we stood for and actually came to the dances with hope in their hearts. They’d ask us to play the Meat Puppets and we’d bargain them down to R.E.M. A year earlier I’d written a term paper about Animal Farm, and in those moments this last line of the book weighed heavy on my mind:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Now that we were behind the desk, were we any different from AC McCullough? The moderates in the group would answer that there was at least give and take in our relationship with these listeners. Yes, fine—that was a technically correct, if not fully satisfying answer. Not that I was into the Meat Puppets, anyway.
I can’t talk about our DJ days without telling a particular story that has become a big part of the lore this group of friends has cultivated and cherished over the years. One day after school we were at Steve’s house, in his basement, running an equipment check in advance of a gig we had at school the following night. Bob wired up all the connections, we hit play on a CD, and we heard a POP. For twenty minutes after that, Dave Sadler’s speakers were kaput. Dead. Blown out, we thought, and irreparable. During that 20-minute span of sheer panic, one of us—I won’t name names here, but I’ll tell any paid subscriber who asks—announced that none of this was his fault and he was quitting the project. He ran off up the stairs and drove home.
Bob and Steve subsequently got the speakers working again, there was no permanent damage to the borrowed equipment, and we played the dance the next night without incident. Over the course of the next day, our deserter came crawling home and asked to rejoin the DJ group, and after some discussion of the question, we welcomed him back. Just you try and find that kind of magnanimity in America today.
You wanted to be in the group not so much because we covered ourselves in glory during the dances, but because we would set up early and rock out to our own songs for 60 to 90 minutes, before the rest of our classmates arrived and insisted we play all their bullshit. During one of these pre-parties I was kicking around to Morrissey’s “Interesting Drug” (Apple Music, Spotify) in our brand new cafeteria space, and my shoe flew off and put a hole in the drop ceiling. Nowadays I know those ceiling tiles price at about $2 per square foot. At the time the school was treating the cafeteria reno project like they’d built the Taj Mahal in Warren, Ohio. In any case, we never answered for this.
You wonder why we’re only half-ashamed, because enough is too much. But look around: can you blame us? CAN YOU BLAME US?
Anyway.
Another of the dances sticks out in my memory, I expect much less so for the others. That night I was going through something—can’t remember what now—but at the time I was convinced I was living through the next John Hughes movie. The beats were a-bumping, as they say, and I was seated off to the right of our table in a funk, writing “I Am the Resurrection” (Apple Music, Spotify) over and over and over and over on all our request sheets, then passing them off to the others on my left, partly to press my ongoing political agenda about the content of our playlist, but also partly to signal to them my state of mind. Who knows—could have been I’d seen The Shining recently: All work and no play, and all that.
Eyes were set rolling, for sure, and maybe one or more knowing glances were exchanged among my friends, but nobody told me to stop or otherwise acknowledged what I was doing. From time to time, other students came to the table and inscribed the names of other requested songs in, between, and around my litany of requests for the Stone Roses. I don’t think anyone at the table wouldn’t have agreed that “Resurrection” was an excellent song; the problem was it was also eight minutes long, with a time change in the middle, and few others at the dance had ever heard it. My gang was never gonna play “Resurrection” at a school dance, and I knew that. The point of the exercise was to set up my friends to fail me, so that when they did, I could roll that failure into my more generalized snowballing snit about, well, Everything.
Time passed, and my snit snowballed as planned. But then, like a deus ex machina, came the opening bars of “The Only One I Know” (Apple Music, Spotify) over the PA. Not the Roses I’d asked for, but the Charlatans UK, who were pretty much the next best thing, and with a Hammond organ to boot. I mentioned the Charlatans last week: Brad had bought this very single on CD when it first came out, and I think the debut album, too, Some Friendly, sometime after that.
As I was pulling this story back into my mind over the weekend, I was struggling to remember what the song was that my band of brothers played in that moment. I knew that it was one of the Madchester bands—and that the song was especially groovy—and for that matter, groovy start to finish, as “Resurrection” is not. Was it the Happy Mondays’ “Step On” (Apple Music, Spotify)? Or “I’m Free” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Soup Dragons or something by 808 State? Then I sat down and played “The Only One I Know” over my computer, and as soon as that bass solo landed at 2:45, everything clicked for me.
I was out on the dance floor, moving like a spider, like a jellyfish, like Bez himself from the Mondays. I was lighting it up in a dance-scrum with all the Top 40 and hip hop kids, who for at least four minutes were every bit as into the Charlatans as I was. And for those four minutes my heart soared. Whoever was calling the shots behind that DJ desk had proved the concept: if you just suck it up and play a damn good song, people will dance to it.
I don’t know which one of the All-Time Greats in my life made the decision to cue up the Charlatans that night, and I certainly won’t claim they were responding to my antics—more likely it was in spite of them. But I like to think that somewhere across town at that moment, AC McCullough felt a little bit of a jolt, sat up in his chair, and nodded yes.
This fell through, and in a last-minute switch Mr. T. dined at the Living Room instead, directly across the street. I asked my uncle what happened, and he said, “Politics.”
I only made two dances senior year. I volunteered my weekend nights at the Red Cross/Safe Rides program all over Trumbull and Mahoning Counties. I do remember everyone wanted hip hop music, kind of like my roommates that I had in Pittsburgh.