Inspiration Case Study #6: The Case for Dwelling on What Might Have Been

[Published on the Facebook Thunkity Thunk: Open Ideas forum on April 5, 2020]

Now of all times, with so much time on our hands and our mortality as tangible as it will ever be, surely I'm not the only one passing through veins of contemplation about the past, like a gold miner stumbling upon buried treasure in his own home. What has happened gets plenty of attention, the bulk of it often immediately after key events or even as they transpire. What could have been is another matter: it's the lonely only child of a third marriage on the edge of the family reunion of self-reflection, pointed at periodically from afar by the central movers-and-shakers of our psyches and pitied as someone who won't get far in life. But actually What Might Have Been is a kind of Jungian shadow self, constantly circling through the party and manipulating others' interactions, until it's unclear who is bequeathing the family fortune and who is due to receive it.

These are the thoughts that began percolating in my head as soon as I finished reading the April 3, 2020, SFGATE news article about the departure of Aaron Axelsen from San Francisco radio station LIVE 105. I don't know this guy from Adam, but suddenly I saw an alternative path my life could have taken... rising through the ranks of an influential alternative radio station.

In this article and the 2018 SF Weekly profile of him linked within it, I learned Axelsen grew up in Livermore, CA, about a half hour southeast of my hometown of Oakland. As I did, he began listening to LIVE 105 in 1986, as soon as it switched from Top 40 to what was then called Modern Rock; and with both of us this station held a large sway over our adolescent zeitgeist. In high school, I would get dropped off on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley by my parents, or ride the bus there, to buy music at Rasputin's and Leopold and Mod Lang -- and so would he. He, like I did, probably attended some of the free concerts LIVE 105 put on in San Francisco. Before they hit it big, I danced to the likes of Belly, James, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Radiohead outside at Embarcadero Center. (In fact, for the past couple decades Axelsen has had a side gig of running a weekly music showcase that helped launch the careers of Amy Winehouse, Lorde, Vampire Weekend, Sam Smith, Calvin Harris, and many others). In the mid-90s, though, our parallel lives veered apart.

in 1995, when I was in my second year at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Aaron Axelsen landed an internship at LIVE 105. At some point after that, he got a paid position there. Then, in 1997 -- the year I graduated and settled into a long stretch dedicated to mostly just soaking up downtown Olympia's music and arts scene -- he got promoted to Music Director of LIVE 105. That's just two years! I was an intern myself on the administrative floor of an Olympia nonprofit for a year and a half and, following that, once I was hired, I never got anything like this kind of professional advancement over the course of almost five years, much less enough duties to switch from part time to full time employment. The strange contrast between his life and mine is cast even more into relief when you consider a large writing project I began and then set aside at the turn of the century.

Called "The Book of Friends and Aesthetics," the chronicle of my 20s in Olympia that still is just 126 pages long actually begins earlier, where my stream-of-consciousness memoir of my adolescence -- written as a college project -- left off. And, in explaining how I came to have the taste in music I had as a young adult, I first discuss LIVE 105's influence on me -- for no less than 10 pages. Here is one small section of that part of my unfinished book:

I was so into the idea that music -- like many other areas of life I was quickly noticing -- was best appreciated by employing a cut-and-dried hierarchical system that I even listened religiously to Casey Kasem's weekly Top Ten Countdown.

I might have ridden this wave far into a cookie-cutter future, except that KITS, to which I was stubbornly dedicated, changed from Top 40 to an experimental format few other radio stations in the country had yet taken on: Modern Rock. Starting in 1985, when I was ten, unbeknownst to me because it was on too late, a young DJ named Steve Masters began to feature an eclectic roster of artists from all over the world (though mostly England, with Australia edging out America for second) on his midnight 'Modern Music Hour.' About a year later, his show's success led this San Francisco station to switch formats and names (it became LIVE 105), and to give him not only the choice prime time slot, but also the crucial job of Music Programmer.

For the next seven years, Steve Masters and his fellow DJs influenced my taste in music, but, more than that, they steered me toward the shores of an indefinable world. When sieving through all the possible non-mainstream rock to present to its audience's ears, LIVE 105 certainly favored a few, broad, musical characteristics over others (melodic over atonal punk; introspective over overtly political; quirky over formulaic), but, in the end, what distinguished this station was the chaos of its playlist. Madness or the English Beat's second wave ska might be followed by a macabre Oingo Boingo sing-a-long, which might lead into a gloomy New Wave song or maybe the art school stylings of David Byrne or Talking Heads. The exact opposite of Top 40's common denominator aesthetic reigned here: the sense that in a true melting pot, rather than melt, things should bump up against each other like a stew of irreducible chemical elements.

Doesn't that last sentence also describe the big stew of influence we all swim around in? It's true, some people follow in their mentor's footsteps literally, like little kid Aaron Axelsen listening to Steve Masters's Southern California cadence extolling the latest obscure band he was about to throw on the turntable -- only to take over the station's Music Programmer's office himself a decade later, and add his own voice of influence to Bay Area radio speakers. But other people, like myself, carry the badge of influence in a more baroque, circumspect fashion, like epaulets made of mirrors that only signify my rank when I'm looking in them. Or a medal that can only be pinned on my chest by the ghost of what might have been.