Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73, Part 1 (S8E22)

Todd Kurnat is everywhere. In this episode, meet and get to know Todd. These days, he's also known as Ink Letterman for his art and DJ Circuit 73 for his musical stylings. We begin in Michigan. Both sets of Todd's grandparents grew up in Greenville, Michigan, about an hour outside Grand Rapids. His parents met in high school in that small town. They eventually moved to Grand Rapids, the big city in that part of the world. His dad worked at a transportation company and his mom was a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital. It was the early Seventies—around 1972 or so. Todd was born in 1973. His mom had done some college, and his dad had joined the US military to teach about weapons-grade rockets. He was never deployed to Vietnam. Todd says that engineering DNA in his dad runs through him, although Todd uses it for less destructive ends. Sometime after Todd came around, the family moved to Johnston Street, still in the inner-city part of Grand Rapids. The neighborhood had access to downtown. Todd spent a lot of time riding his BMX bike around the area with friends. Eventually, bikes gave way to skateboards, which he took all over his city. But we'll get to that. His earliest memories on Johnston Street involve playing in the front yard—baseball and football with kids from the hood. In the backyard, they had a basketball hoop. Eventually, Todd was joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother. He remembers spending a lot of time with his sisters before his brother was born when Todd was 13. Another of Todd 's earliest memories involve listening to music. His dad had an 8-track player that Todd used a lot. Those tapes made him so happy that he'd run around the house doing laps. The radio was also on a lot in Todd's house. Todd went to Catholic school until his early high school years. One day, his mom showed up at his private school, got him out, and said, "we're leaving." Both his parents worked to support themselves and their (at the time) three kids. But changes had to happen, and so they put their oldest kid in public high school. It proved to be a life-changing move for Todd. Right away, he made new friends, a few of which have proved to be life-long buddies. The common thread for them was music and movies. Bikes and skateboards, too. Speaking of bikes … Around age 12, Todd had a newspaper route. Because he already had a bike when the BMX craze really took off, around the mid-Eighties, he followed that. He and his friends eventually started riding their bikes on street ramps. They also built and rode on dirt tracks. BMX gave way to skateboarding when Todd was 13 or 14. For a minute, he did both, but then someone stole his bike. Like me, skate videos got him hooked—videos from Powell Peralta featuring pro skaters like San Francisco's own Tommy Guerrero. And it wasn't just the skating in the videos that impressed Todd—he also dug the music enough to record it from VHS to cassette tape. Toward the end of his high school days, Todd taught himself to play guitar. He bought a four-track Tascam recorder and started experimenting with it. He did stuff on his own, but also joined with some friends to form a band called Landis. They played for most of the rest of the Nineties. Relevant to who Todd would become years later, a lot of the existence of Landis involved him screwing around with different configurations and recording locations. Think: experimental, but not necessarily falling into the so-called experimental genre.<