<\/a><\/p>\nIn ’84 and ’85, Minneapolis’ musical output was peaking. For white-boy punks like me, the likes of the Replacements and H\u00fcsker D\u00fc were breaking out of the regional ghetto, even getting on the national charts.<\/p>\n
And then, there was Purple Rain<\/em>. To a guy who was used to playing in high school gyms and divey bars, the “First Avenue” in Purple Rain<\/em> – Prince’s one good movie, and it was a great one – was irresistable; a kaleidoscope of colors, styles, attitudes; people break dancing in the balconies<\/em>!; a stage with actual lights and a sound system that sounded like it worked; Apollonia running out of a cab and straight into your gig!. Even the seamy, seedy underbelly of Minneapolis music looked good. Jeebus, I was so looking forward to being in a music scene with a seamy underbelly! At gigs in North Dakota, the seamy underbelly was someone selling angel dust in the parking lot.<\/p>\nI went downtown that night; I had to make it an early one, because I had a 9AM job interview the next morning. but I had<\/em> to get to the First Avenue and see what the fuss was all about!<\/p>\nEyes darting between the road and the map, I found my way downtown. I took the first parking spot I could find – it was on Eighth Street over by the Normandie Inn, probably a mile from the First Avenue, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I parked, plugged the meter (it was at the end of the evening that I read the meter and noticed that they were not enforced on Sundays, to a dollar’s worth of chagrin), and started walking.<\/p>\n
First stop – Northern Lights records, on Hennepin and Seventh. I walked inside and took my first deep drag of the gloriously skanky, funky miasma of a big-city underground record store. Heaven!<\/em><\/p>\nI browsed the aisles, seeing vinyl wonders that never made it west of Saint Cloud; Throbbing Gristle! Black Flag! Pigbag!<\/em> Pure farging heaven!<\/p>\nThere was a bulletin board in the back, crammed with posters for bands looking for people, people looking for bands, bands looking for gigs; I tore off a couple of phone numbers, carefully put them in my wallet, and killed a couple of hours in dank, skeezy style.<\/p>\n
Finally, it was closing time. I bought a copy of the new Replacements album (Tim<\/em>, still one of my favorites, partly because of its association with this whole time, mostly because it’s just a freaking great record), walked out and turned down Seventh.<\/p>\nAnd then I saw the sign – the same big, black edifice from the movie, the “First Avenue and Seventh Street Entry”.<\/p>\n
It was a Sunday night; I don’t think any bands were playing in the Entry; the Main Room had a DJ playing music and vids (I remember some Sonic Youth song, although not the name – not that it makes a lot of difference – and the vid for the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young”). Nobody was on the floor. The balcony had a couple of tables full of people, drinking and smoking and talking. Not a break dancer to be seen.<\/p>\n
I walked through the door, around the edge of the huge dance floor, past a couple of pinball machines, and the little pizza bar that used to be just off stage left, on the ratty, dark carpet, past innumerable sparsely-populated stools. I looked around the joint – at the dingy rafters, the large but oppressively flat-black stage, the tile floor and the ratty risers. And I thought…<\/p>\n
…”It’s just a bar<\/em>“.<\/p>\nJust a big, dark, dirty, smoky bar<\/em>!<\/p>\nI laughed. What did I expect, Graceland? I certainly should<\/em> have known better than to expect Apollonia, break dancers; I was less crestfallen than mentally kicking myself for falling for a movie image.<\/p>\nI kicked myself a few more times, ordered a beer, and plotted my band’s first gig on the mainroom stage. And how I was going to put that band together.<\/p>\n
After I got a job, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unspoken – to most people – among my motivations for moving to the Twin Cities was a craving to get into the Twin Cities music scene. Whatever it was. Sunday, October 20, I drove downtown to try to find it. In ’84 and ’85, Minneapolis’ musical output was peaking. For white-boy punks like me, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48465"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48514,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48465\/revisions\/48514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}