Friday, July 28, 2000. The Quest, Minneapolis. B.T. : Nettwerk headlining. On the support bill, listed dead last in the mixed-case flyer font : TyphOOn — www.mnrave.com.

This was going to be the first time I opened for a headlining act that big.

Let it Be Records

Every Thursday afternoon the new vinyl would come in to Let it Be Records on Nicollet in downtown Minneapolis. DJ Jack Trash — JT — worked the counter and he knew the regular DJs by genre. When the new crates arrived he'd sort through and dole out the arrivals accordingly. If you were in his rotation and you showed up on Thursday, you left with records.

I worked at Citilink Internet, a small ISP just a few blocks down on 6th Street. Easy enough to duck into Let it Be before my shift. One Thursday, JT asked me if I wanted to play the BT show. I said yeah.

When the flyers were printed and ready I grabbed a stack from him. I had my Future Retro 777 in my backpack — I was going to mess around with it at work — and I was crossing the street when I tripped. The flyers went everywhere. My bag hit the pavement and the 777 got a small ding on the corner. I wish I still had that unit, but it made one appearance on Move You.

Two Years Earlier

What JT didn't know was that I already had some history with BT.

In February 1998 I picked up the Jackal soundtrack. Track 11 was BT's "Shineaway" — Discogs · YouTube — and I couldn't stop playing it. I found an AOL address for him somewhere and sent a fan email — mentioned that The Crystal Method were playing First Avenue that week. He wrote back.

From ???@??? Thu Feb 26 23:43:40 1998
Received: from imo21.mail.aol.com (imo21.mx.aol.com [198.81.19.148]) by homebase.citilink.com (8.8.6/8.7.5) with ESMTP id TAA08828 for <akarels@citilink.com>; Thu, 26 Feb 1998 19:17:39 -0600 (CST)
Received: from BT011010@aol.com
	by imo21.mx.aol.com (IMOv13.ems) id XRMa001471
	for <akarels@citilink.com>; Thu, 26 Feb 1998 20:18:50 -0500 (EST)
Posted-Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 19:17:39 -0600 (CST)
Received-Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 19:17:39 -0600 (CST)
From: B T 011010 <BT011010@aol.com>
Message-ID: <68ac2c43.34f6147c@aol.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 20:18:50 EST
To: akarels@citilink.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Subject: H E Y!!
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 for Mac sub 78
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Status: RO
X-Status:

Tony>>>>>

        Thanks for the note......the show with Method will kick ass.....come and say
hey when your there........and glad you enjoyed Shineaway on the Jackal
Soundtrack

                        Peace and Respect>>>>>>    B    T

The email landed in my Citilink inbox. akarels@citilink.com — same ISP, same building on 6th Street, two years before JT would put me on a show with him.

I knew I had sent that email but I never expected to see the reply again. In the summer of 2024 I was going through a box of old SyQuest EZ135 disks and found one with an archived email inbox on it. I opened it up and there it was — BT011010@aol.com, February 26, 1998, still intact.

Crystal Method with BT and DJ Taylor at First Avenue, Minneapolis — March 1, 1998.

The Night Of

Word came the day before — or maybe the day of, I don't remember exactly — that BT wasn't going to make it. Rollerblading accident. He'd hurt his ankle and couldn't do it. But the show was still on and I was still playing.

That night I was double-booked. I had a set at Inertia Nightclub first — just a few blocks from The Quest — so I played that and then walked over. The Quest was the biggest system I had been on up to that point.

At some point during the set I dropped Bamboo Forest – Own Way from the Sixth Flight Nightvision compilation — Discogs · YouTube. The bass was so powerful through that system that it was physically lifting the needle out of the groove. The record kept jumping. I'd never experienced that before — a room big enough to make a record lose its mind. I can still hear exactly where in the track it happened.

BT never made it to Minneapolis that night. But I was on that bill, and I played that room, and somewhere I still have a stack of those flyers with a ding in the corner from crossing Nicollet.

Reverse side of the flyer - TyphOOn on the bill representing www.mnrave.com.