Power of music a constant through life’s challenges

Music has always been a constant in Adam Welle’s life, through the ups and the downs. He might even go as far as saying music saved him on more than one occasion.

Now the Down in the Valley store manager for the record store’s Golden Valley location, the St. Cloud State University alumnus became an active musician in middle school. He was in concert band throughout middle and high school, but said it was the “outsider music” that really got to him.

“For a lot of folks my age, kind of the gateway drug to that was Nirvana, and it was for me as well. Still to this day they're my favorite band. My whole desire of becoming a musician and wanting to be involved in music and all the things came from that. I would say, especially in the early ’90s, it wasn't necessarily cool to be a kid that was into weird music and skateboarding and that kind of stuff,” Welle said. “But I got into playing guitar when I was 13 years old and it was sort of the first time in my life where I felt things were right. It gave me a sense of purpose that I didn't feel like I had before.”

From there the Sartell native started “numerous horribly named bands that were all terrible” before forming a band Welle thought could be good enough to play different shows in the area. After attending quite a few concerts at St. Cloud’s former all-ages venue the Java Joint, Welle played his first show there when he was 15 years old.

“It was a life-changing experience, enough so that I was like, ‘This is what I want to do,’” he said. “How could you do anything cooler than this?”

Despite his passion for music, Welle was adamant about going to college after high school and majoring in a different area.

“Music has been and remains such a deeply personal thing to me, that by the end of high school I was tired of band directors and folks being like, ‘This is the right way to do it.’ And I'm going, ‘But that doesn't sound cool to me,’” he said. “So I made the decision coming out of high school that maybe I would get something business-related for a degree, and I was pretty determined to still get a degree because I had enough sense to know that the music thing might not work out, so I needed some sort of backup plan.”

Welle decided to attend SCSU because he knew he could live at home to start off and pay for school as he went. He already knew the campus well.

“I was a pesky little kid who skateboarded on campus a lot and got chased off campus a lot when I was younger, so I was very familiar with it all, and I had friends going to school there already,” he said.

SCSU’s KVSC radio station was also a major draw for Welle, partly in thanks to DJ and fellow alumnus XAkk Asphodel, who also booked shows at the Java Joint when Welle was active in the local music scene.

“I listened to XAkk’s radio show every week for most of high school, and back then it was on Thursday nights at 1 a.m. — so technically Friday morning. I would set an alarm to wake me up at like 12:58 a.m. I would put a blank cassette into a tape deck that was a 120-minute cassette because his show was an hour long, so I had 60 minutes a side, and I would hit record right when I heard the theme song come on,” Welle said. “And then I would turn the volume down and go back to sleep, and then for the next week I would listen to that tape obsessively and just discover new favorites. There's still artists I listen to that I was exposed to because of that radio show.”

Welle started at SCSU in the fall of 1999 and majored in mass communications, with an emphasis in advertising and a minor in business management. He worked a number of jobs locally while in school and actively playing in bands that toured the Midwest. Eventually he moved into a house on West St. Germain Street that he lovingly referred to as the “punk rock house” that “should have been condemned.” Nevertheless, the house quickly became a stop for a number of bands passing through the area.

“We had shows in our basement, so we would have touring bands from all over the country come through and play in our basement and we would do donation-based things where if you came, you could donate $5 to the band and we gave them a place to stay and sometimes food,” he said. “Our neighbors hated us, but we were really vigilant about following noise ordinance laws.”

John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, a member of My Chemical Romance, future Grammy winners and all kinds of musicians ended up performing at the house, either in the living room or the basement. At the time Welle lived with two former KVSC DJs, and between their connections and his through the local music scene, the house become a hub for live music.

“Ownership changed at the Java Joint and the new owners stopped booking shows that we wanted to go to, so we took it in our hands to do it ourselves. And that's kind of like the whole thing with the sort of ‘scene’ that I come from; it was always do it yourself. If you're not happy with what you're hearing, make something that you want to hear. If you didn't like the shows that were going on, book your own shows. So that's what we did,” he said. “I’ve maintained an acquaintanceship with (John) from The Mountain Goats over the years and he still will bring up to me when I chat with him, ‘That St. Cloud show is the stuff of legend. People would kill to have been there for that.’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, I know. It was in my living room.’ It's still wild to think about.”

Welle graduated from SCSU in 2003, and decided to focus full-time on a career in music.

“I wanted to give myself the chance to try to do the music thing and do it – you know, go as hard as I could,” he said. “I wanted to give myself 10 years because I figured I could always get a desk job, but I wouldn't always be able to be in a position where I could go on tour and have my whole life revolve around this thing. So that's what I did.”

He moved down to the Twin Cities area, playing in a number of bands before eventually touring the country. A band Welle was a part of even had a brush with a major record label.

“We were signed to Sony Records for one day and got dropped the following day because our management did some sketchy things. The band broke up and there were drugs and all sorts of things. It was a really low-rent VH1 ‘Behind the Music’ episode. When that happened, it took a few years to sort of recover from it,” Welle said. “Most people don't even get an opportunity to do something at that level. We had done record label showcases for Sony and Atlantic Records and Universal. We played for Universal in downtown Manhattan and did all this stuff and you know, getting offered a contract — we quite literally had the brass ring in our hands, and then it was taken away from us. So to think you'd get a second chance at that was insanity.”

Welle returned home to Minnesota and worked a number of different retail jobs, and in the meantime bought a house and got married. As his mental health continued to struggle along with his personal life, he decided to take a desk job, hoping that making more money would take some of the edge off.

“That actually exacerbated the depression and everything, and I found myself becoming less and less myself as time went on,” he said. “My professional life was terrible. My home life was terrible. Music wasn't happening.”

That, combined with repressed experiences throughout his life that Welle had never properly dealt with, as well as a “reckless doctor” who Welle said prescribed him medication he never should have taken, all came to a head in 2019.

“It was all just stuff that had been weighing me down, and we were finally at the point where it was pulling me underwater and I couldn't breathe anymore,” he said.

Welle started seeing a therapist that he said really understood him, and felt he was finally working on himself. Then 2020 happened.

Welle’s marriage fell apart going into 2020, right before he ended up dealing with medical as well as familial issues. He was then let go from his desk job right before he was due for major surgery — all of this taking place within a six-week span and just before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a grinding halt.

“I had nothing left in the tank. I had no prospects of what else I could do,” he said. “I remember applying for hundreds of jobs willing to take anything, and places are starting to shut down. It was going nowhere.”

In what he called a moment of desperation, Welle reached back out to Asphodel, knowing that he worked with SCSU alumni as part of his role as a development director with the University. Welle sent him his resume in case he met someone in his work that was hiring, and Asphodel shared it with Michelle Schmitz, who at that time was the executive director of SCSU’s Career Center.

“I get this email from Michelle who introduces herself by saying, ‘Hi, Adam. You don't know me, but I know who you are.’ She got my resume and just sort of felt this calling to reach out,” Welle said. “It was the first ray of light in a very dark period and long dark period of my life. We had a number of different phone conversations, she overnighted me some resume-writing books and offered to — if I was going to apply for a job, she wanted me to write up my resume and send it to her before I sent it off to make sure everything was in there. She really went above and beyond.”

Having what felt like a new coach in his corner was a game-changer for Welle as well as his mental health.

“It's not that I never had a coach before that; my family has always been amazing. My parents are incredible, my sister's incredible, I’m surrounded by amazing friends — some friends that I've had for 30 years,” he said. “But when you're someone — and it's different for everybody — but when you're struggling with depression and anxiety, not everybody sees it or gets it. You can't explain why you are the way you are. It was a very silent struggle for me for a long time and most people had no idea it was as bad as it was. I did a good job of hiding it and faking it. People were there, they were trying to support me, but things were just so dire that I couldn't see it.”

Eventually, friends Welle knew from previously working at Down in the Valley reached out and asked him if he’d be interested in managing the store. Welle took the job two weeks before the pandemic shut down businesses deemed non-essential. Welle was furloughed, but ultimately was able to come back to work shortly thereafter thanks to the store’s robust online presence coming through. Online sales jumped, providing enough work for Welle to come back on salary to help ship the continuous orders.

Eventually Welle started to help with online events on social media where Down in the Valley staff would showcase used records and original pressings and encourage followers to comment if they wanted to purchase the albums. What started out small quickly grew to something big, and different musical acts such as Soul Asylum and other groups wanted to come on the show. Down in the Valley staff and owners were interviewed by National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio and on different podcasts as an example of how businesses could continue to not only survive but thrive during the pandemic.

“It picked up so much and things were going so well that it it really started to dawn on me: Everything that I had gone through — literally my whole life up until that point was like a trial that I needed to pass to get to that point. Because all of a sudden, I was in a position that I'm still in, where I go, ‘I don't have to go to work today; I get to go to work today.’ Because I get so much joy out of doing what I do,” Welle said. “It’s still a job and there’s hard days once in a while, but the basic point of what I do is to introduce people to music, or get them the music they like, and that's something I've spent my whole life doing.

“It blows my mind every day that that's what I get to do now. I went through all this terrible stuff, and at the other end of it somehow, here's where I ended up, and it's unbelievable. St. Cloud State played a part in that — Michelle coming along when she did, XAkk, KVSC — all of this stuff added up to giving a guy a second chance at life, and now it’s the best time of my life.”

Welle considers himself retired from playing in bands — many of which got a fair amount of airtime on KVSC. In addition to managing Down in the Valley, he puts out his own solo music. He’s enjoyed hosting a number of different artists at the store and putting on different events as the business continues to grow. While he understands some might not see how what is technically a retail job could be so enjoyable, he said it’s more than that.

“Music is such a deeply personal thing. Yes, if you're looking at it, basically I work in retail. Retail is not a glamorous thing. It's really hard work for very little payoff. But doing it with music is different. You're doing something important. You're doing something that's putting good out into the world. I had my life changed numerous times over the years from some guy at a record store that recommended a record to me, and then that record became a new favorite artist,” Welle said. “I grew up when the Electric Fetus was in St. Cloud still, and that was my record store. I still know most of the people that were working there — I know who they are. I know their faces, I know their names. I might have gone in there on some awful, terrible day and walked in and someone handed me a record and changed everything. And if I hadn't been handed that, I might not have made it through that day. And so I find myself now in this position to be that guy for somebody else. It is such an incredible privilege to not only get to do something that you love, but be around something you're so passionate about.”