So far there have been two KSHE book signings for the book In Concert: KSHE and 40+ Years of Rock in St. Louis. Both have been events that had left me stressed, humbled and very grateful for taking on this project. The first at Vintage Vinyl was filled with a continuous line of people that ran for two and half hours. The organizer, Jim Utz, was caught off guard with the amount of people who came to get books signed and the former KSHE alumni who were there to sign books. We were crammed around an 8-foot long banquet table with DJs stretched out in the aisles of the record store. The folks who came were old KSHE listeners with a few high school friends. There were a few memorable moments. There was “Smokehouse” who wanted his book inscribed with his magnificent nickname. And then there was an old hippie like dude who asked me to sign it to one name, I wrote another name someone called out, and he simply instructed me to scratch out that name and write his real one. Perhaps the moment that was most touching was when Nancy Webb came by and told me that this project really helped pick her up after the passing of her husband, Denny “the psychedelic cabdriver” Webb.
The second one at the Halo Bar was just as busy. It was remarkable who came to sign the books with Ron Elz, Gary Bennett, Gary Kolander, Ron Stevens, Joy Grdnic, Jim Singer, Mark Klose, Rich Dalton, Ken Suitter, and David Grafman all made their way to the bar in front of the Pageant. For the second signing I was to give a speech that included snippets of audio that I had recorded. After the line ebbed, the microphone was brought up on the small stage. I talked a bit which was a strange situation. In the back were the fans that stuck around while directly in front of me were the DJs who attended. A number of them were talking through my short speech, which became a bit of a distraction. The people in back could hear me fine as the speakers were closer to them, however the time came for the first track to play and the guy behind the bar in charge of the stereo was apparently from the mp3 generation. He just couldn’t press play on the right track. He had no clue on how to play a CD. He rewound it multiple times rather than push the back button, and started it in the wrong place. After several minutes, more people began to talk and David Grafman whispers to me, “You’re losing them.” I felt I had already lost them. Yet I finally got him to play the track and by then the meaning of what I was doing to anyone in the room was lost. And so I skipped through most of the speech to thank my partner Toby in this before playing the track that I felt would get everyone’s attention.
The track was from a guy who left a message on my answer machine at home. For years I felt that my wife never understood why the book would have meaning to anyone but me. After this guy received the book he called and my wife picked up the phone. You can hear it in this blog. And so the part of the speech I skipped through was the remarkable coincidences I have run across after I started this journey years ago. It didn’t take long for another one to occur that day.
After the crowd thinned, I saw a guy who was formerly a B & D Security guard. He was Ken Moeckel and I had met up with him a couple of years before at his house to get his take on the Guns n’ Roses riot at Riverport as well as his 20 years as a concert security guard. At his house he brought out a box full of vintage items and gave it to me. One of the items was a license plate he confiscated from a kid at a Van Halen show in 1988. The kid had snuck on the main floor and was going to throw it upon the stage. Ken asked him what he was doing with it and he said he always wanted to get Sammy’s autograph. On the license plate was his name and address. A while after I took the license plate, I hunted down the original owner. Twenty-one years after the show, I called David Stosberg in O’Fallon, Illinois and told him I had his license plate. I mailed it to him and he explained how he was a huge Sammy Hagar fan to this day and had seen him every time he came to town. I got his story and put both stories in the book.
After a few minutes of talking about David and the license plate with Ken at the Halo Bar, he congratulated me and left. He was halfway through the room when a guy with short red hair walked up and said. ”Hi, I’m David Stosberg.” I called Ken to come back and so twenty-one years after the two met on the floor of the Arena, they were reunited. Ken apologized for confiscating the plate and it was indeed a strange reunion and one of those weird coincidences. They talked for a moment about that day years ago before both of them walked out. Incidentally. David was the last person who showed up at that two-hour plus event.
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