After our first show 1982, we continued playing live dates every month or so and building a largish following, much to the consternation of the local guitar bands. We played anyplace we could, including the renowned Walker Art Center, local colleges, fashion shows, the gay pride block party, and the infamous stomping ground for hard-core punk bands, Goofy's Upper Deck, where we once played to an audience of eight. We began to get a reputation as a band that would play almost anywhere and do almost anything to get an audience worked up.

We also started manufacturing and covering the city with a vast series of self-promoting posters, with pseudo-advertising slogans like: "Insoc makes life better�For You!" and "Alive with Pleasure: Insoc!" and "Insoc & You: a Great Combination!"

After our second show at First Avenue, the manager of the club, a legendary figure in the local music scene, and a notorious cokehead and drunk, called us upstairs to his office for a meeting. He proceeded to ramble on at length about our potential, and how to "work" the music business, in a completely incoherent way. "I'm a man who likes confrontation," he said, "whether it's in the back room at Moby's or here in my office." Moby Dick's was a serious drinker's bar wedged between two strip joints on Hennepin Avenue that none of us ever would have gone near for fear of being killed. We really had no clue what he was trying to say. It seemed that he was excited by our new sound, and by the fact that we were drawing a new crowd into the club. I only realized this in retrospect though, because at the time none of us had any idea what he was talking about. It felt good to be noticed, though.

The remainder of the already-famous Minneapolis music scene was also noticing us, though in a not-so-charitable light. Already known as clumsy geeks and pretentious nerds, we were also being revealed as tee totaling know-it-alls, who seemed to despise almost everything about the then-ascendant beer-swilling, guitar-slinging punk scene, which was true.

To them, we were Art Twats. We never hung around before or after our shows to drink and socialize with the other bands; we were usually too worried about transporting and setting up our giant rickety piles of synthesizers and drum machines. We also didn't wear the requisite jeans-and-flannel uniform that was already de rigeur among bands; instead, we wore custom-made two-tone fluorescent-colored jumpsuits! Just the thing that punk bands with names like Ground Zero and Final Conflict and the Warheads were rebelling against.

We often found ourselves in radio interviews and local articles talking about how much better synthesizers were than guitars. And worst of all, as far as the other local bands were concerned, was the fact that we played disco. In the early ‘80's, the whole disco-sucks thing was still a big issue, and any band that used drum machines and synthesizers was immediately considered the Enemy. It didn't help matters when we started performing huge multi-part opuses with titles like Disco's Not Dead (It's Only Sleeping), and when Kurt started spicing his monologues with rhetorical questions like: "Who dares to say that Insoc doesn't rawk?"

We did have a few champions in the local scene, however. Tim Holmes, the Director of Performing Arts at the Walker Art Center was one of early supporters, and arranged several concerts under the highly credible auspices of the Walker. He was obviously a man with very refined tastes, because he later went on to write a groundbreaking biography of John Cougar Mellencamp.

Roy Freedom, the head DJ at First Avenue was also a big fan of ours, and helped see to it that we got some choice slots on the stages at the club. He also attempted to keep me informed of new trends in the dance music scene. Once he came back from a trip to New York, and excitedly told me about "a new kind of rap music."

"They call it Hip Hop," he said. "It's much faster than old rap music, and it uses a lot of live instrumentation." I'm not sure about the live instrumentation part, but it's true that new producers were starting to appear like Afrika Bambaata and Arthur Baker, who made rap music fast enough to be played in the white dance clubs. Even in clubs in Minneapolis. In my opinion, this was an important early step in the mainstreaming of rap music which took place long before groups like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys had their big crossover hits. Roy Freedom later quit the music business to become a mailman.

In the meantime I had taken a job at First Avenue working as a stagehand and VJ (video jockey). I often arrived at the club at 11:00 AM, and didn't leave until 2:00 or 2:30 AM the next day, but since the headline acts rarely arrived before 5:00, I spent many hours sitting around the club fantasizing about someday playing on the big stage. And since as the club manager helpfully pointed out, "we pay for hours worked not hours in attendance," most of these hours were unremunerated, except in the currency of dreams. And yes it was the same guy who had been so effusively, if incoherently, praising us a few months before.

Since I didn't have a car at this point, I would usually walk across the Mississippi River bridge after work and crash at the apartment Kurt shared with his dad. I often found myself sleeping in the same bed with Kurt.

First Avenue was somewhat unique (at that time) in incorporating live video of concerts which they would project on the large screens throughout the club. (Just the thing us TV generation kids reveled in: pay big bucks to go see a live show, then watch it on TV!) During concert nights I usually got to be the guy who sat on top of the speaker stacks with the video camera, which allowed me to study all the rock stars of the era in close-up. On one occasion I was chewed out by Grant Hart of Husker Du for not using the video system during their show (his bandmate Bob Mould had told us not to). And this was the same guy who had gotten us our first show at First Avenue a couple of years earlier. He didn't realize that I was so low on the totem pole that no amount of browbeating would have changed anything.

The video thing was cool, and sometimes I got lucky enough to hang out in the DJ booth and run the lights, but mostly I just carried road cases.

My budding career as a professional case-carrier was, alas, cut short when I injured my back helping lug the Ramones' archaic and massive sound system into the club. The one good thing to come out of working at the club was the exposure to all the new records that the DJ's played, and I often found myself worming my way into the DJ booth, even on my off-nights, to catch the names of the records as they spun on the turntables. I abandoned and restarted my college education several times during this period, each time vowing this would be the final decision.

We also acquired a fifth member, James Cassidy, who started out as our volunteer lighting man, graduated to playing banjo solos during our infamous mangling of James Brown's "Get Up Offa That Thing," and eventually was invited to join the band as a full member, mostly because he was so eager and fun to be around. He also usually took my side in arguments with Kurt, which was reason enough in itself as far as I was concerned. We announced his joining the band with a full-scale press release, billing him as "the well-known conceptual artist and rabble-rouser James Richter," which brought our histrionic pretentiousness to such a delightfully crass level that even some of the local music papers started to write good things about us.

During this period we rehearsed in a rented room on the second floor of an antique hall, a sort of permanent flea-market. The second floor also contained, incongruously enough, a large auditorium, and as we rehearsed in our little room, we could hear echoing from the auditorium across the hall the alarming shrieks and sobs of the all-woman primal scream therapy class that invariably seemed to be scheduled at the same time as our rehearsals.