I feel like taking a break from the cosmic today. No mystic visions. No musing on transcendence. However, I’m going to go someplace different just the same.

For a little over twenty years I worked for a radio network that had a booth at the Minnesota State Fair. Midwestern US State Fairs are odd events. Tens of thousands of people attend each day for a ten-day run, yet what compels them is somewhat vague and mysterious. There’s a ton of food-truck style food, some of it comfort food—often sold in gallon buckets, which is more comfort than is comfortable—along with other fare that sometimes tries a little too hard for uniqueness. There are musical acts, but not anything that wouldn’t be on offer any weekend in Minnesota. There are exhibits, but in the Internet Age, one probably doesn’t need to go yearly to a few acres on the border of Saint Paul to find out anything.

In this piece I choose to highlight two other of the Fair’s most venerable traditions. The event serves as essentially the state championship round for livestock and animal breeding. Many of those animals are raised by rural kids. And the Fair is a prime stop for office holders and political candidates to speak, debate, discuss, and campaign.

Vague and mysterious compulsion: vegans and pubic cynics would be repelled at best by those two things. I am neither, but I also doubt that the average modern metropolitan resident gets up a month before or after now, and says to themselves: “I wonder what well-raised livestock looks like and I sure would like to hear a politician talk.”

The former is an understandable consequence of the modern age. The latter is more problematic, as the modern American republic expects the political business to be carried out by a largely disliked and disrespected crew. This modest little piece won’t change that.

Because I worked for a radio network, I was usually at our Fair booth on Judson Avenue before it opened. Judson is a reasonably wide but otherwise ordinary two lane city street. By the afternoon is will be filled shoulder to shoulder with people up and down its length, as far as one can see. But before 7 A.M. it’s just the folks who have Fair work to do. People compelled by very ordinary and understandable things, which is what this audio piece is about.

During most of the time I worked for the radio network, one of those folks with a job to do who’d arrive in the early morning would be Gary Eichten and his show’s producer. By midmorning, Eichten would interview office holders or office seekers, and take questions from the gathering crowd, fulfilling that second State Fair tradition. He was always the friendly professional, yet even working with him behind the scenes it wasn’t clear where his own political opinions were. One thing that did come though: he respected the job those office holders had or were seeking.

So this audio piece is my short Minnesota State Fair story: part that early Fair morning that few see, and part a tip of that hat to those folks who do their jobs every day. Musically we have the LYL Band in folk-rock guise again, with Dave Moore handling the organ. I played the bass line, and then the guitar part largely shadows the bass part an octave higher. My dad once asked me why lead guitarists always concentrate on the higher strings. Seemed like a good question then, and this time I didn’t.

Click the gadget below to hear the audio piece “Minnesota State Fair 7 A.M.”