Kevin
Kevin Wojcik
Synthesizers, programming · 1984–1989
It was his closet. He made the machines talk to each other.
Now. Lives in the western suburbs. Still repairs televisions, by appointment. The closet is a closet again.
Open the file →
The story, as filed
Six notebook pages
Compiled from the station logs, the clippings, the J-cards and the people who were there. Where they disagree, the logs win.
Page 1 of 6 · 1984
The closet
In July 1984 Kevin emptied the walk-in closet in his bedroom. The clothes went into a dresser. The closet became a studio.
His mother gave him an egg-crate mattress pad. He cut it into squares and stapled them to the walls. The cassette four-track stood on three phone books. The overhead bulb hummed into every recording, so it was replaced with a string of Christmas lights.
Two keyboards went on the shelf where the shoes had been. A home computer sat on the floor and kept time for both. Tracy brought the drum machine in September. Scott brought a guitar and stood in the doorway. Dawn arrived in October and asked what was on the headphones.
The four of them were sixteen and seventeen. The closet held them all if Scott stayed in the doorway. He stayed in the doorway.
Page 2 of 6 · 1985
The talent show
On Friday, April 19, 1985, the band played the spring talent show in the high school gym. The program listed the act as "Kevin and friends (music)."
They played two songs. Tracy set the drum machine on a folding table. Kevin stood behind two keyboards on a stand. Dawn sang the first verse with her arms folded and the second without.
The audience did not clap between songs. They had not been told there would be two. At the side of the stage, two teachers exchanged a look. One of them later asked Tracy how the drum machine knew when to stop.
First place went to a baton routine. The band did not place. It did sell nine tapes in the parking lot.
Page 3 of 6 · 1986
The basement
The band graduated in June 1986. Dawn rode the Burlington line into the city for college. Tracy enrolled at Kettering Hill College. Scott went to work. Kevin repaired televisions on Ogden Avenue. They met on weekends in the closet.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Scott's parents allowed a small gathering in the basement. Twenty people were invited. About seventy came. The band played on milk crates. There was no table, so the drum machine went on an ironing board.
There was punch, a bowl of pretzels and a lava lamp. At 11:40 Mr. Haverkamp appeared at the top of the stairs in his bathrobe. He said, "Last song." The band played it. Then everyone found their coats.
The following week Mr. Haverkamp asked Scott for a copy of the tape. The band recorded five songs about the evening. They became the second release.
Page 4 of 6 · 1986–1988
88.7 FM, overnight
In September 1986 Tracy handed a dubbed copy of the first tape to the overnight disc jockey at the Kettering Hill College station, 88.7 FM. He played it on the first Friday in October, at 1:12 in the morning.
He logged the band's name and the title on the station sheet. The next Friday someone called and requested the same song. The Friday after that, a caller asked who it was. The disc jockey said he did not know either.
The station played the band on Friday overnights for three years. The signal reached Downers Grove clearly and Naperville on a good night. The band listened in the closet with the lights off.
The log sheets were kept by the station and later by the archive. They are the most complete record of the band that exists.
Page 5 of 6 · 1987–1988
Weekends
The EP came out in the spring of 1987. Three hundred copies were pressed. Kevin paid for it with the television-repair money and did not ask to be paid back.
The closet by then held three keyboards stacked on a stand, the computer and a speaker cabinet. It held no clothes. Kevin worked out the parts during the week on the bedroom floor, in headphones, with the television on a dead channel for the light.
Dawn recorded her vocals in the cedar closet in the basement, two floors down, among the family's winter coats. A moving blanket hung behind her. Nobody remembers whose idea that was.
The band played when someone asked. Someone usually asked.
Page 6 of 6 · 1989
Sign-off
Nothing went wrong. In the spring of 1989 Dawn was offered a teaching job in Minneapolis. Tracy was finishing school. Scott was getting married in the fall. Kevin said the third tape should be finished first, and it was.
The last show was on Saturday, May 13, 1989, in the Kettering Hill student union. They played every song on the first tape, in order.
On Saturday, August 26, 1989, they recorded the last track in the closet. It ends with Kevin switching the machines off one at a time, in the order he had switched them on. Then the tape runs out.
The station played it on October 14, 1989, at 2:02 in the morning. The masters stayed in a shoebox on the closet shelf until the house was sold. The first J-card in the archive arrived folded inside a sock.
