Thanks for spending your "Saturday Night with Cities 97"! And, now, for me, your Sunday with Cities! Well, Noon to 5 PM, anyway. Otherwise, we're listening to Shelly Miller and "Acoustic Sunrise" and "Acoustic Sunset" and, of course, Brian Oake's "Freedom Rock." And, that's a good thing, too!

So, some stuff about me:

Years with Cities 97:
May marks the start of my fifth year at Cities! That makes me one of the "newer" members of the staff! In fact, I was the "neophyte" around here until we hired Shelley Miller and Thorn in the past few years!

Favorite Artists
That’s a hard question for any Cities 97 listener: We love music!
But, they would include: U2, Collective Soul, The Cure, Dido, Nickel Creek, Sonia Dada, REM, Moby, Steely Dan, Oasis, and it sounds cliché, but true, the Beatles (When I flipped from vinyl to digital, my first CD was “Sgt. Pepper.”)

Favorite local band?
When I was in high school (the late great Marshall-University High in southeast Minneapolis), a buddy played a tune for me called “Cows.” It cracked me up. I thought any guys with that sense of humor rocked. Those “guys” were the Suburbs. I’ve been a Suburbs fan ever since!

Honorable mention has to go to Soul Asylum. Dan Murphy, the late Karl Mueller, and former member Grant Young were at M-U.H.S. the same time I attended Marshall-U; of course, they were a lot cooler than me!

Describe your best (or worst) brush with fame:
Interviewing Dido. I was working at another station and she was doing a show at the Fine Line that night. She came in for the interview and I felt so sorry for her, because she had a cold. Despite that, she was very gracious and very accommodating and even sang a tune!

What was the best concert you ever attended?
U2, Northrop Auditorium, May 22, 1983. That was the War Tour. A school buddy and I were in the 12^th row and Bono wades into the crowd right up to us. It rocked! Little did the world know what U2 would become—but we in the crowd knew! When U2 came through the Cities on the Vertigo Tour, I went to the show with the same buddy who was with me in ’83. We figured out I spent as much for a t-shirt in 2005 as we did in ’83 for tickets and t-shirts combined—for both of us!

Hobbies
I like to read. I like everything from history to Stephen King novels, to Mad Magazine. I also dig a genre of Sci-Fi know as “alternate history”—what would happen if the timeline of history took a different direction. I also like to bike, play the keyboards (very poorly), screw around on the computer—some of those games can really hook ya—and Brian Oake has turned me on to paintball!

Final question, just “Marshall”?
Well, it’s my middle name, and I prefer it over my first name, Robert. But, when your name is Robert, most folks end up calling you "Bob"-- whether you want it or not! When I did talk radio and news, I used the radio name "Bob Marshall," and some folks still call me that.  At one point, I worked at a place with a couple of Bobs, so someone just started calling me "Marshall." I really liked the sound of it--and grabbed on to it with all my tentacles!