Some kids grow up dreaming of being rock stars. Peter Jesperson was not one of them. “From the moment I first connected with Vic Chesnutt’s music, I had dreamed of being his A&R man,” the Minnesota native writes in his new memoir, Euphoric Recall: A Half Century as a Music Fan, Producer, DJ, Record Executive, and Tastemaker, published by Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Jesperson’s dream eventually was realized. By the time he and the Athens, Georgia, singer-songwriter Chesnutt began working together, Jesperson had been an A&R man for a couple of decades. Much of what surrounds this admission points straight at its home truth: Jesperson became a music lifer young, and remains one — a voluble one.

The book’s enthusiasm helps a lot of familiar information go down easier. (It’s partly Jesperson’s own doing — he’s been a reliable and sharp source for many accounts of Twin Cities rock history, including The Current’s own.) Euphoric Recall echoes a term of approbation in rehab culture, though you’re not supposed to savor the memory of addiction during a 12-step meeting, as Jesperson recalls having done. Here, Jesperson offers plenty of enlightening specifics — not only on Minneapolis rock of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but also regarding the record biz that followed.

Jesperson’s trajectory is a familiar one: a suburban kid (Minnetonka in his case) who makes his way to the city. He spent his teen years ushering at the Guthrie Theater. In perhaps the most poignantly Sisyphean tale here, the high schooler also attempted to become the Twin Cities distributor of the U.K. rock weekly New Musical Express, failing to unload a thousand copies of the May 1972 “test” issue: “It came with a free flexi-disc containing snippets of songs from the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main Street, two weeks before the album came out,” Jesperson recalls. “I was sure stores and customers would be champing at the bit to get their hands on this magazine.” At least he wasn’t alone: “Apparently, the other cities didn’t do blockbuster numbers either.”

Jesperson spent so many hours browsing the racks of records at Oar Folkjokeopus, on 26th and Lyndale, that he was offered a job when he was 19. He began working there in April of 1973, two months after the store was purchased by another regular customer, Vern Sanden. Jesperson had wanted to be a radio DJ, and studied broadcasting and electronics at Brown Institute before applying to work at KQRS. “They didn’t even invite me in for an interview,” he writes. “I was crushed.” He wound up working Monday-Friday graveyard shifts, plus 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sundays, at an AM-FM station, which refused to give him a raise after his first year. After Jesperson complained to Sanden, he was invited to manage Oar Folk instead, the author’s favorite-ever job.

Soon enough, Jesperson would have another night gig. Opening in June of 1977, the Longhorn Bar had an “official capacity to be 300, but the actual number of attendees could more than double that, as happened when Elvis Costello and the Attractions played on Valentine’s Day ’78 in the thick of their rising fame,” Jesperson writes. When the Suicide Commandos played a trio of farewell shows at the Longhorn in September of 1978, Jesperson reports, “The crowd size, especially on the third night, far exceeded what the fire marshal had deemed ‘capacity’ — it was a miracle the authorities didn’t shut it down.”

Jesperson’s treatment of his DJ life is of particular interest to this DJ historian. Jesperson is a rock guy all the way, but there’s evident pride when he mentions that Oar Folk “built up a good selection of more than just rock. We were well stocked with blues, R&B, jazz, folk, country, world music, and classical. Disco was huge at the time, and we sold lots of that too. Several dance-music DJs shopped regularly at our place.”

Similarly, he writes that at the Longhorn, “We’d heard about a few adventurous venues in New York that borrowed the idea from the dance clubs and brought DJs into underground rock joints. Jay Berine decided to give it a go at the Longhorn.” Jesperson quickly sussed that he was happier being this sort of DJ than the radio kind: “Spinning records for a roomful of music fanatics suited me much better.”

The evidence of this is reproduced on page 44 — a photo of a half-dozen of Jesperson’s handwritten setlists from the Longhorn days. None are completely legible; all are mouthwatering. I could read most of the one in the middle, so I put together a Spotify playlist (see below). It plays terrifically, maintaining a variable but strong energy that’s suggestive of what a night dancing at the Longhorn might have been like.

(Incidentally, Jesperson did end up doing a radio show in the Twin Cities: Shakin’ Street, which he hosted Monday nights during the mid-’90s on the short-lived and well-loved Rev 105. It gets a quick look in Jesperson’s epilogue, one of several “stories I hoped to include in this book [that] didn’t make it.” A Billboard feature about the show from 1995 included a set list from its first hour, and I made a Spotify playlist of that one, too (see below). It’s missing a couple of songs, including, per the write-up, “unreleased material, such as a recording Jesperson made of Vic Chesnutt playing Jack Logan’s ‘Town Crier.’” Yep, that’s our author.

Repeatedly, Twin/Tone marked its own growth by scheduling important releases to come out simultaneously, giving the press an easy hook for group coverage and allowing new acts a leg up. This was the case when the debut by two heretofore little-known local bands, the Pistons and the Replacements, were scheduled for release on August 25, 1981, the same day as the Suburbs’ ambitious double LP, Credit in Heaven. “It’s also important to remember that the Suburbs were the most popular group in town at the time, and being in their slipstream would greatly benefit the Replacements,” Jesperson writes. “The Suburbs’ coattails were well worn.”

Twin/Tone would do the same thing three years later, almost to the day: August 24, 1984. It saw the simultaneous issue of Soul Asylum’s Say What You Will . . . Everything Can Happen, the Phones’ Blind Impulse, and the Replacements’ 12-inch, “I Will Dare.” The latter band had become Twin/Tone’s brightest hope — when Let It Be came out the following October, it would sell “nearly 50,000 copies ... within two years,” Jesperson writes, on its way to becoming “the best-selling album in Twin/Tone history.”

A well-known Jesperson tale is him hearing the Replacements’ demo and flipping. Less so, but just as sharply etched, is his seeing them shortly afterward at the Bataclan, “a sober club at a church in south Minneapolis . . . about 20 blocks east of Oar Folk.” He showed up to an already canceled show: “Apparently, the bass player couldn’t make it. He’d been climbing a tree earlier that day, fell, and tore a muscle in his arm.” (Of course he was climbing a tree — the bass player, Tommy Stinson, was 13.) Also, “the guys had been caught with pills and booze … The band was worried they’d blown an opportunity with me as well, but I assured them it wasn’t an issue, and that I’d get back to them soon about a date at the Longhorn.” 

Immediately after the Replacements’ first Longhorn gig, a local weekly, Trax Magazine, requested an interview. Local scenesters sneered that “they’d paid their dues and the Replacements hadn’t,” Jesperson writes. “The Replacements didn’t give a s**t about paying dues, of course. But I was taken aback by the resistance from the other musicians. Had these people really listened to the Replacements’ songs? How could they not think the band was enthralling onstage? I remember wagging my finger at one of the more caustic protestors and saying, ‘Just you wait — someday, people are gonna be writing books about these guys!’” (Exclamation mark in original; Jesperson uses these freely.) 

His interest quickly turned professional as well as musical. “I had never aspired to become the Replacements’ manager,” Jesperson writes. He merely “fell into it. I had little choice … I fended off bad guys and handled logistics so they could focus on the music: writing it, rehearsing it, recording it, performing it.” After taking the band around the country, Jesperson took a side gig road-managing R.E.M. during a crucial stretch — the Georgians were about to open for the Police at a couple of East Coast arenas, which are shows R.E.M. famously count among their worst ever. Westerberg and company were fine with it but secretly resented it, letting it fester for years. “Thinking back on it, I’ve often wondered how I ever thought that me working with R.E.M. was going to go smoothly with the ever-volatile Replacements,” Jesperson writes. 

The author’s disarming straightforwardness makes even the hard stuff go down easy. He was fired at a band meeting in May of 1986 at the Uptown Bar, with Westerberg telling him “that he wanted to start swinging when he was mad, and he didn’t want me in the way catching any punches.” Jesperson was “blindsided”: “What hurt the most, though, was suddenly being cut off from the four guys I had practically lived with for the past six years.”

Nonetheless, Jesperson was aware of his own role in things: “I had made myself dismissible with my excessive alcohol consumption.” That came to a head in March of 1991, when he blacked out, having apparently “bitten my tongue. My doctor later speculated that I’d probably had a seizure and done a freefall on my face.” After more than a week in the hospital, a doctor told him he had acute pancreatitis: “It’s a complete miracle that you’re alive.” Jesperson had little trouble staying sober after that.

Soon after completing rehab, Jesperson started a new Twin/Tone imprint, Medium Cool Records. A year later, the L.A. label Restless Records began leasing the Twin/Tone back catalog for reissue, smoothing Jesperson’s move to Los Angeles in 1995. Among Medium Cool’s signings were Jack Logan, whose massive backlog of some 600 songs yielded a double CD debut, Bulk, in 1994; and Perfect, the new group led by Tommy Stinson. But by 1998, the record business had had enough of indie rock upstarts who might or might not yield a profit this year, or next, or ever: Restless refused to release either Logan or Perfect’s CDs that year. An angry Stinson became Guns N’ Roses’ bass player: “Tommy would keep that job for the next 16 years.” 

Remarkably, Jesperson kept his next job a similar amount of time. He and Paul Stark had “repositioned Twin/Tone Records to a strictly back-catalog company,” and 1999 he came on board at New West Records, where he “share[d] A&R responsibilities” with its founder, Cameron Strang, and worked on film and television licensing — an increasingly lucrative prospect right then. (Think of Moby’s Play, from 1999, and its 300-plus ad placements.) “We talked extensively about what kind of artists we’d like to bring into the fold,” Jesperson writes. “He asked me to make a wish list. It makes me laugh to think about it now, but I put Vic Chesnutt at the top of that list — there I go again, picking a surefire chart-topper.”

By the mid-2000s, Jesperson writes, “It wasn’t stated out loud, but the message was clear: We had to find artists that would sell. That’s when things got problematic for me.” It applied across the board, in the record biz and the journalism biz alike. Reading it was so familiar I almost lurched. “As if to hammer the point home,” Jesperson adds, “around this time I read a quote in an industry trade magazine: ‘These days A&R is 80 percent marketing.’ I started looking for another job.”

Then he stopped: His wife had lost her job and he had a son to raise. Jesperson calls it, “only half-jokingly . . . the first adult decision of my life.” His timing was good: New West kept adding commercially sound names: Steve Earle, a posthumous Warren Zevon demos comp, the Mark Olson-Gary Louris duo album Ready for the Flood, and the Crazy Heart soundtrack – which sold 600,000 copies, the label’s bestseller. In 2011, Strang left his label to run Warner Chappell Publishing, and Jesperson’s title changed — from A&R to vice-president of production and catalog. He held on five more years, until he was let go in April of 2016. 

Jesperson absorbed the shock: “I’d already had one foot out the door on a number of occasions, and deep down I was ready to go.” He’s freelanced ever since, and has retained a remarkable amount of equilibrium. “I still receive music from young musicians who like the work I’ve done and are looking for advice,” He writes in the epilogue. “Helping out in the early stages of an artist’s development is one of the most rewarding aspects of the work I do.” That level of care and generosity is manifest throughout Euphoric Recall.

Euphoric Recall: A Half Century as a Music Fan, Producer, DJ, Record Executive, and Tastemaker by Peter Jesperson is out now.