In 1985, I started playing rugby for the University of Minnesota and met Brad Beetsch. Brad was a couple years older and a great flanker. He was also a Studio Arts major who lived in a warehouse in downtown Minneapolis. By 1989, Brad had dropped out of college and started a band and I was finishing my undergrad degree in Journalism and wrote and photographed freelance articles for the Minnesota Daily. Brad had found some abandoned railroad cars near campus. In one of the cars was former Replacements’ guitarist Bob Stinson’s band, Static Taxi, and Beetsch set up his band, At This Hour, in one of the other cars. I wrote and photographed an article about this for the Minnesota Daily.
In 2015, I returned to Minneapolis for a rugby reunion and spent a day hanging out with Brad. He had left the Twin Cities in the early 1990s and spent a decade riding the rails and living in Alaska. He returned to Minneapolis in the early 2000s and landed a position as caretaker for a compound of buildings not far from the old boxcars.