Back during my long-dead, unlamented career as a rock-and-roller, there were a slew of bars that everyone played.<\/p>\n
Your band played innumerable gigs at the Seventh Street Entry for $20 and ten spots on the guest list and two drink tickets apiece to keep the hope of someday playing the stage at the First Avenue main room, opening for some kind of national act or another,\u00a0alive.\u00a0 You knew that not only had the Replacements and H\u00fcsker D\u00fc and teh Suicide Commandos played on that very stage, but that the sticky residue on the “dressing room” benches had probably started as Tommy Stinson’s vomit, years before.<\/p>\n
The Cabooze?\u00a0 You played there, if you could, because it was a little taste of the good life; a huge stage, a clean dressing room (that always started out the evening stocked with a cooler full of beer for the bands), a sound system that not only worked but made you sound like a rock star – the Cabooze kept the dream alive.<\/p>\n
Mr B’s?\u00a0 Fernandos?\u00a0 MacReady’s?\u00a0 The Union?\u00a0 You played there to play.\u00a0 Usually to a bar full of four or five career alcoholics who would have polished their bar stools to anything from Sonic Youth to Lawrence Welk in the background.<\/p>\n
But the Uptown?\u00a0 You played there – and hung out there – to see and be seen.\u00a0 The Uptown was where The Scene was.\u00a0 It was also the only live music joint in the city (other than the bars that booked only cover bands, like the Iron Horse or the Burnsville Bowl, which we just didn’t do) that the girls would ever go to on their own; Wednesday was “Ladies Night”, with $.50 drinks for the girls, which drew, mirabile\u00a0dictu, <\/em>guys, to hit on the girls and, failing that (and didn’t we all fail at that?), cadge cheap drinks off them.\u00a0 I plead guilty and <\/em>the Fifth.<\/p>\n Getting booked was a sisyphean ordeal; booking agent Maggie MacPherson (known to at least a few of my frustrated, band-leading friends as “the Maggot”) was brusque, curt, uncompromising, and impossible to reach, ever.\u00a0 Fortunately for me, her boyfriend was a huge Don Vogel fan; it was worth a couple fairly choice bookings for my bands, back in the day.<\/p>\n The stage was as narrow and shallow as the hipsters that clogged the place.\u00a0“Loading In” involved hoisting your gear through the back door directly to the stage –\u00a0a miserable slog in mid-winter, which was inevitably when I played there.\u00a0The sound system had a perpetual short-circuit that made everyone <\/em>sound tinny and crackly.\u00a0 The bartenders were arrogant and played peevish favorites with all the grace of Nick Coleman reciting Percy Shelley.\u00a0 And it – at the corner of Hennepin and Lake, the epicenter of the “Uptown” neighborhood, the core of the Minneapolis hipster universe – was where everyone<\/em> went (when they weren’t shooting pool at the CC or doing three-for-ones at Lyle’s).<\/p>\n