SELECTED FOOTNOTES (I)

1) Which I am sure happens to you all the time.

4) This was a bar in Moorhead where all the local punk bands performed, but it also hosted some surprising national acts, most notably a very early performance by the White Stripes. When the city decided to destroy Ralph's in 2004, someone tried to make a documentary film about the bar that would somehow save it from destruction. I was drunkenly interviewed for this documentary, and I think I may have claimed I saw this aforementioned White Stripes show. I did not.

5) Trenchant!

7) Jesus Christ.

9) Despite the fact I just called it thriving.

12) Arcwelder was never particularly beloved by anyone except bookish dudes working at college radio stations, but they were still "established," somehow. They also had cross-demographic name recognition, since most of the farm kids in North Dakota know how to arc weld.

14) This guy was really blond and snarky.

21) Fuck. I was a really, really wretched person.

22) What made Orange 17 awesome was how so many people in Fargo hated them for their success. This is a band who never made an album, never went on tour, and never made any money. However, they once opened for Ted Nugent at the Fargodome (they were the replacement for a national band that got sick). In a way, Orange 17 truly were a little ahead of their time; they loved hair metal ironically when absolutely nobody else did, and -- had they emerged ten years later -- I suppose they could have been a second-tier version of the Darkness. The band was also hurt by the fact that vocalist Karl Qualey -- as mentioned above--looked too much like Kurt Cobain, and everybody thought he was doing it on purpose. In truth, it was just a weird coincidence. He really just needed a different barber.

26) Inspired by Tiger Trap!

30) As opposed to an Adult-Oriented Skater band (AOS).

(Selected from To Be Seen, Or Not To Be Seen, Underground Rock is Alive and Well in Fargo-Moorhead...But Who's Listening, by Chuck Klosterman. The original article was published by the author at the age of 23 in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. Footnotes was added when the article was anthologized in Chuck Klosterman IV, 2006.)