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| From | "Christopher" <plattc@optonline.net> |
| Subject | First Avenue Is Dead (Long Live First Avenue!) |
| Date | Mon, 15 Nov 2004 17:48:34 -0500 |
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Apropos of the news mentioned here a few weeks ago, it appears that First
Avenue is not quite gone....
From today's New York Times.
First Avenue Is Dead (Long Live First Avenue!)
November 15, 2004
By DAVID CARR
MINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 12 - The notice posted in front of the
United States Bankruptcy Court here on Friday seemed to
promise a particularly dreary proceeding.
"Expedited hearing on motion of trustee for approval of settlement and
authorizing trustee to sell certain property free and clear of liens," it
read.
But on the other side of the swinging courtroom doors, it
was apparent that the "certain property" was not dreary at
all, but part of the bedrock of pop-music history: First Avenue, a legendary
club, where both Prince and the Replacements first roared into view. Housed
in a former bus depot, the club was shuttered this month after years of
squabbling between its principal owners, Allen Fingerhut, an art gallery
owner, and his childhood friend and former business manager, Byron Frank.
The conflicts that led to this moment were banal, if complicated. Mr. Frank
bought the building with some business associates four years ago. During
that time, First Avenue struggled against larger trends in the music
business and increased local competition, losing hundreds of thousands of
dollars along the way.
At the beginning of the summer, Mr. Fingerhut, the owner of
the club and of its liquor license - the building and the
club were owned by different entities - removed the two men
who were widely believed to have made it the most important rock venue in
town: Stephen McClellan, who booked the bands, and Jack Meyers, who managed
the business. The move did not go over well with longtime First Avenue fans.
Business continued to deteriorate, and Mr. Fingerhut began
to bicker with Mr. Frank. "It became like the Arafat story:
was it dead or not?" said Martin Keller, a local scenester.
Mr. Fingerhut ran into money problems and after a series of failed
negotiations was served with an eviction notice by Mr. Frank. There were
several lawsuits and on Nov. 2, First Avenue closed.
The tug-of-war was as much about the club's legacy as it
was about its future. Who would "own" the memories: The
first time U2 came to the bar and confronted a show-me
crowd with a performance that knocked them down hard? Or
the night that Prince and a few buddies sauntered into the Seventh Street
Entry, a smaller bar within the club, and played straight-up blues for an
hour? Or when, during a Replacements concert, the Scandinavian-inflected
crowd changed a chorus, "We are the sons of nowhere," to a shouted, "We are
the sons of Norway"?
Who would take credit - or blame - for all the bad coke,
bloody noses, vomit and bliss, not to mention the ghosts,
like the girl who committed suicide in stall five in the women's room?
"There were so many shows with so many transcendental
memories, both the good and horrible stuff that happened,"
said Slim Dunlap, who worked at First Avenue as a janitor
and later as a member of the Replacements. "I'd be there cleaning the place
eight hours a day and then get plastered all night. I always worried about
the place because you knew it hung by a thread, but they did hang in
somehow."
When it closed, though, the diehards had little to comfort
them but a morose tick-tock of what had been lost, from
opening night with Joe Cocker in 1970 with dozens of people onstage to the
club's lionization in Prince's 1984 movie "Purple Rain." Mayor R. T. Rybak,
who once stage dived at First Avenue during a "Rock the Vote" event,
compared its importance to that of the Guthrie Theater or the Minneapolis
Institute of Art. "Like those other institutions, it shows that Minneapolis
is at its best when it doesn't try to imitate anybody else," Mayor Rybak
said, sitting at the Grand Bakery in south Minneapolis.
There are a few rock clubs in the country with the cultural weight and
history of First Avenue: CBGB in Manhattan, Maxwell's in Hoboken, N.J., the
Metro in Chicago and the 9:30 Club in Washington come to mind. But there are
very few that can lay claim to launching such a diverse wave of indigenous
music. It wasn't just Prince who broke in here, but also the Time featuring
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, not just the Replacements, but Hüsker Dü and Soul
Asylum. There was a time in the 1980's when First Avenue made a noise big
enough to shake the whole country.
But as radio conglomerated and curdled, and live music
became a dicey, increasingly competitive business, people stopped going to
clubs three or four times a week.
Empty nights at First Avenue became desperate ones, and Mr. Fingerhut was
behind on insurance, taxes and the rent. Mr. Frank said he had offered to
lend Mr. Fingerhut money, but was turned down. But by Mr. Fingerhut's
account and according to a document sent by his lawyer, Mr. Frank's final
offer was instead a push for complete capitulation that would have left Mr.
Fingerhut out of the club and saddled with debts.
Mr. Fingerhut took the club into bankruptcy on Nov. 2.
"I
got beat out of my bar fair and square, but I don't want to
be attacked anymore," he said. "How can I be the bad guy in
all of this? I lost $800,000 and half my hearing keeping
this place going as long as I did."
Regardless of who did what to whom - bar fights are rarely pretty - 130
employees ended up out of work and bands with scheduled gigs had to
scramble. Music fans in the Twin Cities area and across the nation began to
worry that First Avenue would never return. Even when word circulated that
Mr. Frank had approached Mr. McClellan and Mr. Meyers about running the club
again, some here worried that he would sell the building.
"I was born here and raised here," Mr. Frank said, sitting
in the office of his lawyer. "I raised my kids here as
well, and they would kill me if that place doesn't stay a
music room. This has been a music room for 30 years. What
Steve McClellan has accomplished is mind-boggling and
deserves to continue."
And it seems it will. In that courtroom high above the city
on Friday, a simple agreement was reached: Mr. Frank, along with Mr.
McClellan, Mr. Meyers and a trust made up of members of the Fingerhut family
- but not Mr. Fingerhut - would be allowed to buy the First Avenue business,
lock, stock and punk rock, for $100,220. Judge Robert J. Kressel was
presiding, and he not only approved the offer, with a few minor tweaks, but
waived the traditional stay of 10 days, because, as he noted, "I gather
there is some urgency to the situation."
For Minneapolis rock fans, there certainly is. Mr.
McClellan arrived at the court after the proceedings were completed and
seemed anxious to get to work. But he remained concerned about the prospects
for a business that has had its share of trouble no matter who was running
it.
"Did we get the keys?" he asked his lawyer. Not quite. But later that day,
the group headed by Mr. Frank, which called itself F-Troop, received the
keys, the history and the challenge of making the club work in a complicated
age.
The Ave., as it is locally known, will very likely be open
on Friday night, featuring Gwar, a band whose bloody mayhem could serve as a
neat metaphor for the contretemps that closed the club.
For some, like Dan Murphy, a guitarist for Soul Asylum, the reopening cannot
come soon enough. "When I was 19 and our band was still called Loud Fast
Rules, they let us open for the Ramones in the main room," he said. "I
figured whatever happened after that was going to be cake."
But Billy Batson, the singer in the Mighty Mofos and the fearless sound man
for the Seventh Street Entry, said it will not be a cakewalk.
"It ain't punk rockers anymore," he said of the audience.
"It's a finicky little bunch of sheep that will go to any
club they think is hot."
Mayor Rybak has promised to reprise his stage dive on
opening night. The club, he said, still has some advantages over other,
shinier places in town, although he stressed that the people who wept when
it closed needed to show up and spend some money.
"There is something that happens in that room," he said.
"At a certain time in the night, it hits a tipping point,
like a kind of gravity, that makes people do insane
things."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/arts/music/15firs.html?ex=1101558787&ei=1&
en=12d3d8853fa93533
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