Part 1: The decision, and a life nearly completed before it even began

We last left off on a cliffhanger of a tale: What could possibly be such a life-changing decision for me? Is that even possible these days? Well, I'll tell you this... I'm not going to answer that just quite yet. Haha. Instead, I shall share with you a little more of my history to fully lay the rest of the groundwork.

Though I was the inadvertent outcast in high school, I discovered an "in" which tied in perfectly with my penchant for technology and computers. I became... a shutterbug.

During my junior year, I discovered that the front office had a bulky digital camera that, by today's standards, was basically like the glorified joke-of-a-camera on my cellphone. It could shoot about 30 640x480 pixel photos on a 3.5 inch floppy disk (remember those?), as the image compression was so strong that most images were about 40 KB in size. By comparison, a single jpg photo from my current camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XSi, takes up the equivalent of about 3 to 5 1.44 MB floppy disks.

Also that year, I took a class on HTML and wound up as the only person in the class who really cared about it. So much so that I pretty much took over the school's website and did about 8 times as much work on it as the rest of the class combined.

My newfound love for photography combined with the means to distribute it in the pre-Facebook era (remember life before then?) actually gave me a reason to interact with my classmates beyond simple and routine drudgery. Nice.

Anytime there was a sports event or something else happening at school and I cared enough to go, I'd grab the camera from the office as well and get a few random shots of the event and my classmates, both candid and posed. It gave people a reason to talk to me beyond simple and routine drudgery. Nice.

[Green Day's Dookie is my current soundtrack, and "Basket Case" came on right as I hit here. More cool timing.]

Fast-forward to college. Freshman year I didn't do much of anything with my camera, though I did take a black and white film class in the spring semester. Funny side story about that: I actually wound up befriending a girl who I inadvertently captured as she was passing by on her bike in a scenery picture I shot for class. It was pretty much a simple matter of later on running into her in the dorm and being like, "Where have I seen you before?"

Towards the end of freshman year I was presented with the opportunity to become a "U-Crew". Essentially like an assistant CA/RA with none of the perks, though you get to help out with floor events and essentially are a role model for incoming freshmen.

Also, largely on a whim, I ran for Hall President for the following year at my building, Middlebrook Hall. With a campaign centered around a picture of me as Tony Montana from Scarface (it's the only picture I've ever used on my MySpace), I won by only a few votes over a to-be junior who eventually wound up running for and winning the vice-presidency anyway.

Unfortunately, I couldn't be both a U-Crew and Hall President. Not just because the responsibility would have been too great when combined with my classes, but because the U-Crew position that was offered to me was in Bailey Hall on the St. Paul campus.

I was faced with quite a dilemma. Should I stay in Minneapolis in a building I know and be its president, or should I take the U-Crew position in St. Paul and be only minutes away from all my classes for the foreseeable future? I had just recently transferred out of Computer Science in the IT Honors department into Graphic Design in the College of Human Ecology, later known as the more-sensibly named College of Design. (IT Honors was a total fucking disaster; my first college semester's GPA was 1.556 because I basically bombed all my ridiculously hard honors classes, which I hated to begin with. My next semester, which wasn't in IT Honors and didn't suck? 3.5 GPA.)

It was a total coinflip situation, but one in which, had it gone the other way, almost none of you would know me right now. Most likely I wouldn't even exist to your knowledge, which is a strange thought considering that I'm about as inseparable from the Twin Cities music scene at the moment as peanut butter is from jelly. Sure you can take them apart, but it's just not right...

I chose to take the position as Middlebrook Hall President (which you knew or maybe at least had surmised by now) for the 2005-2006 school year and stewed at home in Albert Lea over the summer, eagerly waiting for September to come and my "good" life to begin again in the cities.

[The new album by Muse, The Resistance, is now my soundtrack. It could make for some weird irony if I told you one of my strangest stories about being Middlebrook Hall President, but then again, maybe not. Either way, it kicks ass. Not as much as Black Holes and Revelations, but whatever, I just like good music.]

So how did being president of a dorm make me a rock and roll photographer? It didn't. But I met some people who essentially functioned as my first band-muse, of sorts. (Hey, there's some nice timing.)

Before I break into that story though, I have one last tale of preparation: The night I almost got on stage with Green Day. (It's different than when I saw Green Day for the 3rd time back in July this year, as I actually tweeted that entire show and have a much more tangible memory of it as a result.)

September 16th, 2005. Twelve days before my life changed forever, it already did, in a way.

I had a pair of tickets to see Green Day for the 2nd time that night. I had first seen them less than a year before at the Target Center, and this time around they would be at the Xcel Center.

[Sidebar: While digging through my computer files to find any previous write-ups I've done about this story which I've told many a time to many a person, I found some really emo bullshit I wrote way back when as well. Yikes.]

I brought a female classmate of mine from one of my sophomore design classes to the show and we arrived on the floor right as opener Jimmy Eat World started their opening set. They played all of their well-known stuff, though the only songs I knew were Pain and The Middle. Fun, and a much better warmup than Sugarcult and New Found Glory last time I saw Green Day, at least to me.

After they finished, the wait was on for a while, but as I expected, the infamous pink bunny (or rather, some guy in a costume) that tours with Green Day made an appearance on stage. He was chugging a few beers and tossing small stuffed bunny dolls to the crowd, all to their amusement.

The bunny departed and Green Day came on soon afterwards, opening with American Idiot (recall, this is back in 2005). Played it brilliantly as usual. They followed with Jesus of Suburbia, a great track to be a part of live. Then came Billie Joe's self-proclaimed giant "fuck you" to George W. Bush, Holiday. Estatic. A short interlude followed and they predictably continued into Are We The Waiting/St. Jimmy, smoothly going into Longview after that. Kick ass.

After Longview my mind grows fuzzy on what they played, but I know they did Hitchin' a Ride, Brain Stew & Jaded, King For A Day, 2000 Light Years Away (with a kickass solo that doesn't appear on the studio version), Maria, Minority, Wake Me Up When September Ends, Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, Basket Case, She, All By Myself, a cover of We Are The Champions, a cover of Shout, a cover of something I didn't know, and Good Riddance. Not all in that order though. Thrown in there somewhere was the most important song of the night for the fans though...

At the time, the song they always had people come up on stage to play with them was "Knowledge", a cover of an Operation Ivy song. It's literally only a D C G pattern of closed major chords. So simple that I could do it in my sleep... maybe.

So with my friend and I having successfully worked our way close to the front of the stage, I beckoned Billie Joe like the other 20,000 people in the arena to "PICK ME PICK ME!" to play when that song came up and they were searching for people to accompany them. He grabbed a drummer from the right edge of the T right away, then drifted over our way looking for a bass player.

Amazingly, Billie Joe Armstrong literally looked DIRECTLY AT ME, asked if I could play bass (obviously I responded with "YES!"), and then asked the same of someone next to me wearing a pink shirt and glasses. He spent a short while debating over whether to pick me or the guy next to me, but eventually picked Mr. Pink Shirt. Fuck.

Then he went back to the other side of the stage and got a 10 year-old kid up to play guitar. And as luck would have it, it was literally the kid's birthday that day. The first thing Billie Joe told the kid was something like "Hey kid, you're gonna get laid tonight cause you're playing with Green Day!" Hilarious.

So they went through the rest of the song, as usual, but then the bastard who got to play bass did what still continues to be the stupidest thing I have ever seen. HE SMASHED THE BASS GUITAR TO PIECES ON STAGE. Oh my god. The crowd was in shock for a moment until the dumbass got his ass beaten down by security and dragged off to deafening boos. Total idiot, and Billie Joe played him off as such without missing a beat. The drummer got to do the only stage dive of the night and the kid who played the guitar got to keep it, so long as he promised not to smash it of course...

Truth be told, had it been me up on stage playing with Green Day, I wouldn't have smashed the bass. No, I practically would've kissed Billie Joe and subsequently died a happy 19 year-old at the time.

But that's not what made me a rock photographer, though what did happened in the midst of a few huge shows for me. I already knew that it was a big deal I was getting to see 4 awesome national shows all within a few weeks of each other: Green Day, Franz Ferdinand, Foo Fighters/Weezer, & The Bravery. (None of which I had a camera at, go figure).

Boy, was I in for a (now-not-so-)little surprise though. One that set me on the path which has spiraled out of control to the point where there's no going back, no other choice, nothing I would rather do but live a life deeply connected to rock and/or roll through my photography and my passion for music. Keep on reading for the story of my birth... in the Twin Cities music scene.