Remember That Time I Showed Up On A Terrible Reality TV Show About Rolling Stone?

It sounds apocryphal now, but when I was a teenager I fantasized about working for Spin, the alternative music magazine that very much helped define my personality before I had any experiences to do it myself. To the 14-year-old version of Kyle, it seemed like the ideal gig: I could live in New York, go to a bunch of cool concerts, meet some of my personal heroes, and most importantly get sent a metric ton of free CDs. Since most of my disposable income was spent on albums and tickets to shows, it felt like the profession that most fit my lifestyle.

But I never made any real overtures toward that dream, because in my mind it seemed so insane and unlikely. This was particularly ironic considering I had committed myself to becoming an actor, an equally deranged professional plan. I wasn’t entirely off-base, though: Thousands of people counted themselves as working actors, while only about two dozen names were on the masthead of Spin. To add (self) insult to (self) injury, I never perceived myself as cool enough to work at Spin. I liked a lot of the bands featured in the pages of the magazine, but I was a suburban Connecticut dork. Nobody would take me seriously. I’d have to work at Rolling Stone instead.

In the Spring of 2004, after I had been out of college nearly a year, I took a flyer on an unpaid internship at Spin (which I supported via a moderately busy slate of freelance gigs). I did my best to ingratiate myself to the rest of the staff, particularly to the editor-in-chief and the managing editor. I mostly did research for some of the writers, worked on building out an archive, and helped out the research department with fact checking, but I made my biggest splash every morning when I would scour the Internet for news items and send them out in an e-mail blast to the rest of the office. I had been told just to send the links with headlines, but I went the extra mile and wrote jokes to go along with each entry. They didn’t always land, but they hit hard enough where one of the editors asked if he could use one of those lines in a piece he was working on (it was making fun of Pete Doherty’s drug problem). When the internship was up, the coordinator helped get me a gig as a fact checker at Entertainment Weekly, and a few months after that I returned to Spin as the editorial assistant after she got promoted.

I’ve been in a lot of offices and worked with some truly incredible people, but even though I worked for very little money at the bottom of the editorial ladder, that Spin job still may be the best I ever had. Since it was a print monthly that didn’t take the Internet seriously yet, the pace was relatively laid back, and I got to hang out with some truly brilliant people. I got to go to shows and listen to records before any of my friends could, but mostly I looked forward to having conversations about the best Pavement b-sides and whether Courtney Love was brilliant or bonkers and what’s really going on in the narrative of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

I also got to travel a little bit, and that included a big trip to Chicago in 2006 to cover Lollapalooza. I spent a lot of time interviewing people backstage in between photo shoots, but I did get to see some awesome music: a particularly manic mid-afternoon set by the still-ascendant Hold Steady, a loud and intense show from Sleater-Kinney (who were three shows away from a nearly eight year hiatus), a hallucinatory victory lap for Panic! At the Disco, a scene-stealing performance from a new band called Gnarls Barkley.

But the true highlight of that weekend came from the Flaming Lips, who brought their particular brand of big tent psychedelia to a sunset time slot. They were promoting 2006’s At War With the Mystics, probably the last great moment of their imperial period that started in earnest with 1993’s Transmissions From the Satellite Heart. They had long been experimenting with different bits of stagecraft, and the Lollapalooza set just brought everything: they had four people in the back dressed up in giant inflatable robot costumes, kept a cadre of women dressed as aliens to their right, and to their left lived a group of men dressed as Santa Claus (all in reference to the then-unreleased film Christmas On Mars).

I was one of those Santas. I had interviewed Coyne earlier in the day, and had a great conversation with him (he’s one of the elite rock and roll talkers). I was pretty friendly with his publicist, who suggested I check out the set later in the day and to come see him backstage beforehand. When I showed up a few hours later, I was handed a full Santa outfit, complete with hat and beard. I was told to stand in a taped off area next to the band and my only charge was to never stop dancing for the full hour they were on stage. Since it was Chicago in August, I must have sweat 17 pounds off my body over the course of that sixty minutes.

But the dehydration was well worth it. In those days, Coyne would open Flaming Lips concerts by climbing into a giant inflatable hamster ball and walking across the outstretched hands of the crowd. It was a wonderfully awkward bit of interaction that always felt special. When Coyne made his way back to the stage while his bandmates vamped their candyfloss psych-skronk, he emerged from his plastic prison just as drummer Kliph Scurlock unleashed the opening snare hits of “Race For the Prize,” the triumphant opener from 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. That is one of the most powerful musical moments of my life, and every time I heard that song (and that particular percussive blast) I feel the rush of adrenaline that can only come when you’ve forgotten you’re enjoying music in front of a crowd of 50,000 people.

Among my Clausal cohorts was a dude named Colin who was competing for a magazine job on a show called I’m From Rolling Stone, which would later air on MTV. It was not particularly well received, largely because getting a magazine job isn’t really going to change anyone’s life (financially speaking, at least) and the entire audience for that show already worked in music criticism, making most everything boring and redundant. But when the trailer for the first (and only) season of the show arrived online near the holidays in ‘06, my ugly mug was front and center (you can see me at around the 3:20 mark, dancing like a damn fool). When the trailer dropped, a few of my rock crit friends thought it was deeply hilarious that a Spin staffer made a prominent appearance in a show about Rolling Stone (it turns out nobody cared, though I looked into legal action because I specifically did not sign a waiver).

When I got off stage I was given a special t-shirt commemorating the day (which was good, because I sweat through my own tee so much I had to just throw it away) and returned to my life of not being a rock star. But for a brief moment, I managed to feel the power. It felt amazing.