Klondike Karl Nelson is from the valley in California, and he has been working for the city of Beverly Hills since 2002. Nelson works in the mailroom, where he is tasked with sorting and sending the city mail. Once weekly, he delivers council packets and agendas to Beverly Hills’ mayor, commissioners, and council members. He likes what he does for a living, and feels satisfied by his occupation.
Andrew Beeker is from Ludington, Michigan, and he is Klondike Air Conditioning and Heating’s President. Beeker’s independent business has long been offering Orange County natives exceptional customer service as part of its professional HVAC projects. As with Nelson, Beeker likes what he does.
Thus starts a fascinating story of fate connecting the two in a manner that changed their life for good. Radio and music are like a common thread that connects them, which is where Jim Trenton from the show ‘Poorman’s Morning Rush’ comes in. Let us rewind the clock to 1983, the starting year of this story. That is when Trenton met Nelson for the first time. As for Trenton, Nelson is quite a character. He is burly, loud, jolly, and large.
Nelson is also someone who achieved mainstream popularity for a single piece of work on KROQ-FM. Trenton was at KROQ-FM for around 18 months when he got a VHS cassette with The Klondike Karl TV Show’s recording as a mail package from Nelson. Trenton remembers it as a 30-minute TV program largely about Nelson having big bong hits. The show had a track entitled ‘Time is a Ticky Talk’. The track was 1980’s new wave style, says Trenton, with nods to rock bands Talking Heads and King Crimson.
The recording featured Nelson as the Casio player and singer, whereas his friend Danny Schneider worked with the guitar. Trenton and radio personality Scott Mason loved that song, and they started to play it on KROQ-FM as a late Sunday-night special. The other staff at the radio station also paid particular attention to it. Nelson became popular just for that song on KROQ-FM.
Then, Mason and Trenton went to Nelson’s place, the upper floor of an old video store in The Valley. They became friends over regular bong sessions, with the above-mentioned song playing on Nelson’s speakers. Soon, they discovered that Nelson slept amid a decompression chamber, just like the ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson. The two found it fun and freaky.
Without their knowledge, Andrew’s elder brother Chris moved from Michigan to the Southern California area in 1975. Chris got used to living in California’s Costa Mesa city. In the year 1984, Chris’s younger sibling Adam paid him a visit for 7 days around Christmas. Adam was a massive fan of KROQ-FM, and he became smitten with Trenton and Mason’s Sunday night program. He recorded Trenton’s show on a cassette tape and took it to his brother Andrew Beeker in Michigan. The same Nelson song was recorded on it as Trenton and Mason played it on the radio show.
Andrew Beeker also grew up playing the guitar and singing in Ludington-based bands. Ludington was his hometown with 10,000 inhabitants back then.
He was a Grand Rapids resident when received the tape and was a big Klondike Karl Nelson fan. Andrew and Adam had nothing quite like it on their Michigan radio. Andrew even renamed his punk rock band back then with the word Klondike in it. The rock band changed to the surf-punk style to honor the vibe of Southern California.
They started to host beach parties when the temperature dropped to 10°F and there was a lot of snow. Indoors, they operated the thermostat at the maximum heat to simulate the summertime conditions. Everyone arrived at their place in swimsuits, ready for the tanning booths. Their ‘Klondike Surfers’ band added the Nelson song to those gigs in the Midwest’s cold winter night hours.
Andrew Beeker moved to Costa Mesa in 1985 with his elder brother. Starting a heating and air conditioning business was his dream. He decided that he would name the company after Klondike. In the year 1989, he realized his dream of starting the business and named it Klondike Air Heating and Cooling Experts. The company and the two brothers have been serving the county natives for over 3 decades.
The story is only going to get better, more astonishing from there onwards. Trenton stopped seeing Klondike Karl, speaking to and writing to him from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The two then became Facebook friends in 2016, a year after Nelson sent Trenton a friend request. So, the former feels that the latter probably had been angry back then. Fortunately, Trenton accepted Nelson’s friend request, since around the time Klondike Air and Andrew Beeker sponsored his 101.5 KOCI radio program, entitled ‘Poorman’s Morning Rush’.
They were in a Newport Beach fundraiser for KOCI where Andrew Beeker’s tribute band to Tom Petty, Running Down a Dream, was doing a live performance. He played the Petty role of a rhythm guitarist and singer. When they reached the breakdown part of the song, Trenton entered the stage for a few announcements. Andrew Beeker approached Trenton and told him about the 1980’s tape featuring him and Nelson. Beeker told Trenton the story behind the tape, and Trenton told him that he knew Nelson.
They met some days afterward, and then Beeker decided to sponsor Trenton’s show. Trenton then messaged Nelson and conveyed that story to him. On October 24, 2019, Nelson called into Trenton’s show, and the latter then texted Andrew Beeker to join their conversation. The duo then had their first live conversation on air, about 35 years after the month the KROQ-FM recordings were produced.
Andrew told during the program that he would do a live performance at Costa Mesa’s Harp Inn on November 22, his birthday. He asked Nelson to perform that KROQ song with his band, and the latter accepted his request. It had been over 10 years since Nelson’s last live performance.
Nelson said he was excited to know that his song inspired a person from Michigan and was excited to be playing with Beeker. Trenton said the whole shebang impressed him.
Andrew Beeker was just as excited as them. He found the whole event surreal since he was meeting Trenton and Nelson who impacted his business and affection for music from the West Coast. Nelson was extremely surprised to know that another band from someplace in the globe even covered his track, not to mention one from western Michigan.
It is a story that shares happiness. After the duo’s reunion on air, Trenton said that he perhaps played the song on it at least 5 times and that Nelson was reenergized to start performing again. Trenton even had his reunion with Nelson after 30 years on November 16, 2019, when working at a Burbank estate sale. Nelson turned up there on a motorbike, and he was that same old person, only slightly grayer and bigger. The fact that they did no bong rips was the lone change in their life after all those years.
