The Current Rewind

Before we wrap up our First Avenue season, we have to pay homage to its famous painted stars.

The day Prince passed away, thousands of Minnesotans congregated outside First Avenue to dance and cry. Although the street party might've seemed like magic, of course real people made it happen - and we talked to a few of them for this episode. It's the last full installment of our season, and it celebrates Prince, parties, and Minnesota music. [Songs sampled: Prince - "Sometimes It Snows In April," Cameron Kinghorn - "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore," Lizzo - "The Beautiful Ones"]

A piece of First Avenue's ceiling fell to the ground during a concert in August 2015. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. But throughout the music industry, concert safety has been a huge issue during the last decade. How can we keep each other safe? [Songs sampled: Icetep - "Hive Sound," Stereo Confession - "Tonight," Theory of a Deadman - "Angel"]

Description: When First Avenue entered bankruptcy on Election Day 2004, some saw it as the end of an era. But others – including devoted employees, local music fans, and a certain stage-diving ally in City Hall – would not rest until they'd saved the club.

This is the seventh episode of The Current Rewind's "10 Pivotal Days at First Avenue" season. If you missed the first six episodes, catch up below.

• April 3, 1970 (The day it all began)
• Nov. 28-29, 1979 (The days that told the future)
• Sept. 27, 1982 (Bad Brains/Sweet Taste of Afrika/Hüsker Dü)
• Aug. 3, 1983 (The birth of "Purple Rain")
• Oct. 22, 1990 (Sonic Youth/Cows/Babes in Toyland)
• March 4, 1991 (Ice Cube/WC and the MAAD Circle)

Cecilia Johnson VO: Hey, it's Cecilia, host and producer of The Current Rewind. If you're listening to this the day it drops, it's Election Day in the U.S. You may be wondering what a First Ave podcast is doing in your feed, today of all days.

Well, first, we wanted to encourage you to vote, if you haven't already. On the flip side, if you're seeking a few moments of respite, we got you. Third, a while back, I noticed a really weird coincidence: This episode takes place on Election Day itself. In fact, some First Ave employees remember frantically working to save their club and having to take a break to vote. It's funny how history rhymes.

[🎵 A few stock music selections slide from song to song, separated by brief bursts of static. After several seconds, the music drops out, and we hear the following interview clips in quick succession 🎵]

Dan Corrigan: But we thought that it was not going to be open anymore. We thought it was done.

DJ Smitty: Nathan was like, "Yeah, I think this is it." And we're like, "Really?" Like, "Yeah."

[🎵 contemplative guitar fades up 🎵]

Randy Hawkins: It was heartbreaking.

Dan Corrigan: It was crazy, because when we closed the door for the – what we thought was the last time, all the lights in the whole place were off, but we turned on all the trouble lights.

[As Dan mentions the trouble lights, a "twinkly" sound effect fades up. Then, the guitar song resumes]

Cecilia Johnson VO: I'm Cecilia Johnson. This is The Current Rewind, the show putting music's unsung stories on the map. This season, we're looking back at 50 years of First Avenue, one of the Twin Cities' and the country's greatest live venues.

So far this season, we've welcomed a series of guest hosts, but this episode, I'll be your guide through the story of First Avenue's bankruptcy. In this episode, we'll visit First Ave on one of its darkest days, which some folks took to be the end. But others – including devoted employees, local music fans, and a certain stage-diving ally in City Hall – would not rest until they'd saved the club.

[guitar song fades out; rewind sound effect]

Cecilia Johnson VO: Although it shocked a lot of music fans, First Avenue's 2004 bankruptcy was a long time coming. If you've been following this season of our show, you've probably got a general understanding of First Avenue's finances, from its genesis as the Depot up until 2004.

Craig Finn: ...these carpetbaggers weren't bagging much cash.

Joe Shalita: But First Avenue is First Avenue. A dingy little place – at first, it was real dingy – you know –

Steve McClellan: We were, like, $60,000 in debt with no backup revenue source.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And the whole way through, Allan Fingerhut had owned or co-owned the business. We introduced him in the first episode of our season, but just for a little recap: Fingerhut had grown up in a suburb of Minneapolis, and his family ran a profitable mail-order company. He was one of the founding members of "The Committee," the small group who opened the Depot at First Avenue and Seventh Street in 1970. The Depot entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1971, and Cincinnati disco chain American Avents took over the club's operations in 1972, rebranding the Depot as Uncle Sam's. But the chain dissolved that partnership in about 1979. Soon afterward, Steve McClellan, the club's general manager, brought his old friend and roommate Jack Meyers aboard, to help manage money.

Steve McClellan: We were a very good, in my mind, a good yin and yang, that when the club was doing well, I was in charge, but when we weren't doing well, Jack was in charge.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And according to Jack Meyers, the fourth member of their quartet was Byron Frank.

Jack Meyers: Allan Fingerhut grew up with a buddy named Byron Frank. They were inseparable for years. And Byron is a real accountant CPA – a very good businessman. And he ran all of Allan's concerns, and so we had a meeting in 1979 – Byron, Allan, Steve and Jack – and put together our plans for First Avenue, shook hands, and off we went. Our main rule from Allan was "never ask me for money," which we never did, thankfully, otherwise we wouldn't have been there so long. At any rate, that was the big meeting, and those were the four of us, and we always reported to Byron, just like all of or most of Allan's concerns reported to Byron. So Byron was what we'd call "boss." Allan was what we'd call "owner." And this was even better, because the owner lived in California, so he kept most of his good ideas away.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Our producer Jesse Wiza spoke with Jack this summer.

Jesse Wiza: So when you were assistant manager, what did you do on a typical day?

Jack Meyers: Everything Steve didn't. It started out, Steve did the promotion and I did everything else, which means open the doors, hire and fire, run operations, and do the accounting when I had time, and count the money – you know. It was a real shoestring [operation], and I'm kinda proud of that.

Steve McClellan: I knew not to go to him to ask for any special requests if we just had a terrible week or month. But if I just had like three sellout shows and we had – oh, I don't know, I think 30 grand would've been a lot of money at the time in the bank account. I'd go, "Whoa, we can fix the floors, we can fix everything." And then Jack would remind me that the $8,000 insurance bill is due at the end of the month, and he would line up $20,000-30,000 of payments due just to stay open. You know, ridiculous things like insurance.

Jack Meyers: But Jack always made sure Allan got his check. Oh yeah, not only didn't he give us any money, but he got his check every month, which he was used to because Uncle Sam's sent him that check. So I sent him the same amount every month, and that was copacetic, and that's how it worked. That was, as we shall see, years later became very important.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Jack, Steve, and a few others ran the office upstairs at First Avenue.

Rob Milanov: But they were all day guys.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And Rob Milanov, who worked at First Avenue from 1999 until the 2004 bankruptcy, was a night staffer.

Rob Milanov: I started out as roaming security. You know, just the guy who wanders around the club trying to keep an eye on things. I eventually worked my way in barbacking and bartending and bussing and cashiering and – never worked stage but did a little bit of everything else.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Like Richard Luka from earlier this season, Rob got a job at First Avenue while attending a show.

Rob Milanov: We're standing in line, and they came down the line like, "We're short on people; anybody need a job?" [laughs]

Cecilia Johnson VO: And unlike many of the people who jumped at that opportunity, Rob ended up staying for years.

Rob Milanov: Everybody thought they wanted to work there, but once they started, the vast majority of people are gone within a couple days. Because, at the time, you didn't get paid anything, and you're risking your life, and it was a hassle.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Like lots of restaurant and entertainment jobs, First Avenue was a "sink or swim" kind of gig.

Rob Milanov: I mean, you'd be friendly with people right away, but to be honest, we were not the nicest to new employees. We threw you to the wolves and – and saw if you could survive, and – you'd get help in some ways, but at the same time, like I said – you had to prove yourself or you were just gonna be another person that lasted three days.

Cecilia Johnson VO: While interviewing former employees, I heard about a particularly hilarious tradition. Only at First Avenue does "throw you to the wolves" translate to "involuntary karaoke." But that was part of being a new person.

Rob Milanov: So if you're looking at the stage, there's that sitting rail along the left side of the room, and basically, at the employee meeting at the end of the night, you'd have to stand up on the sitting rail and sing a song. You didn't know this; occasionally, somebody would hear it through the grapevine, "This is what they did," or whatnot. But for the most part, most of us were completely surprised by this.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And what did Rob sing?

[🎵 "Are You Drinkin' With Me Jesus" by Mojo Nixon fades up 🎵]

Rob Milanov: [laughs] Well, I stood up, thought for a few seconds, and I started singing the chorus to "Are You Drinkin' With Me Jesus" by Mojo Nixon, which was a popular choice. By the end of the chorus, most of the staff were singing along.

[🎵 "Are You Drinkin' With Me Jesus" by Mojo Nixon plays for several seconds, fades down 🎵]

Cecilia Johnson VO: But Rob's First Avenue was pretty different from that of the higher-ups. He says most of the office workers would go home by the time the concerts actually started.

Rob Milanov: The night staff didn't really see the upper-upper management too much. The one we'd see the most was Steve, because he would at least stick around long enough to say hello to the bands as they were loading in. The office was kinda this foreign world. [laughs] We knew the office as far as like – getting change and them putting the money away at the end of the night. That's where you pick up your walkie-talkie and your keys and whatnot and drop them off at the end of the night. But other than that, you know...

Cecilia Johnson VO: Like almost any job, there was some tension between those who set the wages and those who earned them. In 1998, one employee filed a Department of Labor complaint that attested to a couple different types of wage theft at First Avenue. No one wanted to go on the record with me to talk about it, mostly out of love for the club, but every First Avenue veteran we interviewed agreed that it was not a place to get rich. Even Steve tried to steer potential employees away from seeing First Ave as a career.

Steve McClellan: One of my interview questions in those days was, "You really need work, don't you?" My suggestion, and I was serious when I told people this: "Go get that full-time job that's gonna pay your rent, then come back and talk to me about some supplementary income."

Cecilia Johnson VO: I asked Rob Milanov if he felt management had any way to pay people more.

Rob Milanov: I honestly don't know if there was, because – you look at the bartenders just piling money into their registers, and you think, "This place is making money hand over fist." But if you think of the logistics of it, like, on any given night, a lot of times, we have like 40 staff members on, and you got the expense of the bands and the DJs and – you know – the stage people – and I do think they probably paid us what they could.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Despite the low wages, many First Ave employees truly cared about their jobs and each other.

Rob Milanov: Sometimes, we were bonded by fire, literally. [laughs] Or putting our lives on the line for eight bucks an hour. That kinda makes you family.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And although it was a tough job, Rob remembers those days fondly.

Rob Milanov: Saw a lot of good shows for free, man. That's what it was about. That's why you literally risk your life for eight dollars an hour, is because you get to be a part of the music scene. I feel like I was part of the shows.

Cecilia Johnson VO: In 2003, tension was mounting amid the owner and manager quartet: Allan, Byron, Jack, and Steve. Jack remembers it like this.

Jack Meyers: Sometime in '03, Byron and Allan had a falling out over the stupidest reason I ever heard of. Allan claims he didn't sign something that Byron had, and there's no way Byron would've done that. So he up and fired Byron, after, what, 50 years of Byron running everything for him? So at any rate, remember the four people at the table: Allan, Byron, Steve and Jack. He fired Byron, our boss. And that's complicated, because in 2000 when we bought the building, Allan didn't wanna spend any money. Remember the rule? "Don't ask me for money."

Cecilia Johnson VO: The team behind First Avenue hadn't owned their building until 2000, when the building's then-owner presented an ultimatum: buy the real estate or face a huge rent hike.

Jack Meyers: And Allan got – we were able to get enough for 20% of the property, and then Allan's kids, through his brother who was trustee, each bought 10%, so that's 40%. So then Jack and Steve had to step up, and we each bought 10%. That was a lot of money to us. And then Byron filled in the other 40%. So now you have a situation where Byron's running the club as a manager who owns 40%, more than Allan. And Allan fires him. Well, obviously, there's gonna be disputes over the property. So of course, Allan doesn't have enough shares to, uh, replace Byron. He's a minority shareholder, so of course he calls Jack and Steve. This started the downturn for us. And he said, "Vote with me. We're gonna do something to Byron." He wanted to buy him out, force him out; I don't remember.

So at any rate, Joe Finley, our lawyer, said, "You don't wanna get in the middle of that. You don't vote in any of these things." Well, Allan knew that a "no" vote made him impotent, and he couldn't get rid of Byron, and so he got mad at Jack and Steve. So all we did was no vote, which, when you think about it, makes a heck of a lot of sense, because why in the world would we pick sides between Byron and Allan? Ok. So that's a big thing.

So then months later, we had to stop sending Allan his monthly check. Allan didn't like that; oh, I knew he wouldn't. And then – Joe said I had to do it. I had to send Allan a letter saying, things are bad, and we need money, or they're gonna get worse. I didn't wanna send it, because I knew where it was gonna go, but I did, because that's what managements do. We weren't the only club losing money in '04. It was just a bad year for bands. Who knows why? I used to call them "the bad band gods." There were good some years; they were bad other years, and that's the best I could ever figure.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Jack and Steve's back-up plan was to entice Jam Productions or another big company into buying First Avenue.

Jack Meyers: Well, Allan wasn't interested in selling. But we did – we tried to buy the club, knowing full well that Allan would take that letter he received saying, "Not only aren't I getting my check, but now you want money, and that's the one – first rule I told you, back in 1979. I got a better idea. You and Steve are fired." So now, of the four people at the meeting that put it all together in '79, three are fired. And this is important to us. Since we've been terminated, we no longer owe any loyalty to Allan.

Cecilia Johnson VO: The club limped along for five more months. But according to longtime First Avenue stage manager Randy Hawkins, its operations were not pretty.

Randy Hawkins: It was [sighs] heartbreaking. I think, without pointing any fingers, the place was not being run the best by the owners at the time. The money wasn't going back into the club. The money was going somewhere else. And they lost some good booking people. Steve and Jack were gone. It was being run by a team that – I don't know how to say it. They just weren't quite on top of it. They didn't have the luster that the people do now.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Bankruptcy rumors had been swirling around First Avenue for a long time, often enough that First Avenue DJ John Smith, aka DJ Smitty, had become desensitized.

DJ Smitty: Because it seems those murmurings happen like every five years.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Nate Kranz, who'd play a crucial role in First Avenue's reopening, was so used to the chaos that even he didn't expect the club to actually close.

Nate Kranz: It didn't seem like it was all hunky-dory, but it didn't seem odd. It just seemed like the normal environment with which First Avenue operated. You were always one foot on the banana peel, the other in the grave. Right? And that was just the whole attitude.

Cecilia Johnson VO: But near the end of 2004, it all came crashing to a halt.

DJ Smitty: Halloween of 2004.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Smitty was set to DJ that night.

DJ Smitty: I got to the club, and I saw Fingerhut, and this was the first time – let's see, 2004 – in 11 years of working at the club, that was the first time I saw Allan Fingerhut.

Cecilia Johnson VO: But he recognized Allan anyway.

DJ Smitty: It was like literally, the minute I looked at him, I was just like, "That's Allan Fingerhut," even though he was a disheveled man with a satchel. Who else could it be? [laughs] It was either the ghost of Christmas past or it was Allan Fingerhut.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And that didn't seem to bode well for the club.

DJ Smitty: I was like, ok, the odds of this talk have just gone up significantly, and whoever was in the office was like, "Eh, don't worry about it; nothing to see here." I was like, "Ok." I did my first couple of sets, no problem, and then during my last set I was closing, 1:30 a.m. to 2. Um, and I was in there with employee Nathan Anderson and now-general-manager Nate Kranz. We were in the booth, and he looked at me and Nathan and was like, "Yeah, I think this is it." And we're like, "Really?" Like, "Yeah." And we thought about the closing of First Avenue for a minute, and then we had to figure out what songs we were gonna play, so we pulled some Lifter Puller and some Mighty Mofos and closed out the night.

[🎵 "Lifter Puller Vs. The End Of The Evening" by Lifter Puller 🎵]

DJ Smitty: And the next day, I got a phone call at my day job, telling me to come grab my records, because the feds were coming to padlock the doors.

Rob Milanov: We got a call at like 9 a.m., like, "All your bikes, records, and everything you got stored at the club, go get it right now because the doors are locked at noon and it's done."

Cecilia Johnson VO: Rob Milanov could not believe it.

Rob Milanov: It was just such a spur of the moment thing, um, like the entire story was, we're working Halloween night, which is one of the busiest nights of the year, and Allan Fingerhut comes around and says, "Don't worry; you guys all have a job for as long as you want it – I love you guys, blah-blah-blah." He shook each of our hands throughout the night, and we got off work at 4 a.m.; five hours later, we get a call – come get your stuff out.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Dan Corrigan, First Avenue's longtime staff photographer, got to the club as fast as he could.

Dan Corrigan: There were people basically taking stuff and walking away with stuff. I went into the office and got hold of three binders of my photographs that I just didn't want to disappear into whatever happened. And I think we all walked down the street to a bar on Hennepin and started commiserating that it's done. You know, all my friends are in shock – literally in shock, like, what the hell.

Cecilia Johnson VO: But here's where the future of the club gets a little brighter. Nate Kranz and Sonia Grover, who are now First Avenue's general manager and booking manager, respectively, had both worked there since 1998. Research assistant Taylor Seaberg interviewed them together for Rewind last winter.

Sonia Grover: We met each other in '98 working at Cheapo. So we worked at a record store together, became friends, we'd hang out or work together, or go to see shows with each other, or run into each other at shows. And we lived just a few blocks apart, so I'd go over to his house for parties. And then he started at First Avenue in July of '98, and then I started in October. Sat right next to each other every day until 2009 or '10. When did you move offices?

Nate Kranz: 2009 or '10. [laughs]

Sonia Grover: 2009 or '10, and then a couple years ago, put me right back next to him [both laugh] with our poor assistant in between us. But I mean, I was his maid of honor when he got married. We are very tight, for sure.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And the minute they heard about the bankruptcy, they hurried down to First Avenue, grabbed their desk calendars, and started trying to rebook their shows at different venues. They couldn't control First Avenue's fate, but they could try to make sure that the bands who'd been scheduled there could still play shows somewhere.

Sonia Grover: There was no inactivity with me and Nate. That is for sure.

Taylor Seaberg: You were still going.

Sonia Grover: We were going nonstop every day, because Nate had internet, and I don't think I did at my house at the time. So we'd go over to Nate's house, and email, call, making sure we didn't cancel all the shows, but just try and keep track of the shows we had, shows that were coming up, letting the agents know what was going on, letting the local media know what was going on with shows. My phone bill was like $300 after that, because I made the mistake of not upping my plan. But yeah, we were working nonstop for those few weeks in between.

Nate Kranz: We were locked out of First Avenue. We started – the first day, we went to the Fine Line and worked. They were nice enough to let us use their offices. And then after that, like Sonia was saying, we worked out of my house. While my girlfriend was moving out. [laughs]

Cecilia Johnson VO: Sonia and Nate had to deal with the immediate questions – where could they send the bands who were supposed to play First Avenue? – and some bigger questions.

Nate Kranz: The first stage was moving the shows that were supposed to happen on those days, like the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. So we were moving shows into the Cedar or the Turf Club or the Fine Line or whatever – just trying to do whatever we could to find homes for the shows that we had booked that were displaced. Once we got through that period, which was obviously super hectic – and it was [only] us. And Steve was helping us, but it was, you know, nobody was getting paid. We didn't have jobs. We were just basically being like, ok, we have nothing else to do; let's save these shows, and then we'll figure out what's next. But we know saving the shows was what had to happen first.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Journalists from the Star Tribune, New York Times, City Pages, and beyond reported on First Avenue's closure. But Nate and Sonia were mostly getting calls from the agents of the bands whose gigs were in danger.

Nate Kranz: Had to do interviews, yeah, but get yelled at a lot. Like, I'd really emphasize that. We got to make a lot of phone calls on the day that we lost our job, to people that just yelled at us but ultimately came around. [laughs]

Sonia Grover: One of the agents threatened to call the police and get me put in jail. He's a friend now, and I bring it up every now and then.

Taylor Seaberg: Whoa. But I'm confused. Why?

Nate Kranz: Us too. We were low.

Sonia Grover: Yeah. You have contracts, you have bands booked, contracts signed, and –

Nate Kranz: They were fighting for their artist.

Sonia Grover: Yes.

Nate Kranz: But then, for 90% of those shows, things calmed down, and we were able to accommodate those bands. I mean, I think there was one or two bands that ended up actually canceling, and at least one of 'em, they weren't going to let the situation be fixed. They just weren't. We gave them plenty of options, and they turned every single one of them down.

Sonia Grover: The community was so amazing, still going to all these shows, and I think we probably sold tickets that we may not have otherwise sold, because people sort of wanted to show their support for First Avenue.

Taylor Seaberg: Like, in the era when it was closed?

Sonia Grover: Yup. And I don't think – Nate, I don't think you and I paid for our own drinks for like two or three weeks.

Nate Kranz: Most of the deals were able to stay intact, and reputations were saved. And after a couple weeks, we started looking toward the future again.

Cecilia Johnson VO: The future was a company called F-Troop. Whereas "The Committee, Inc." was Allan's business, F-Troop was led by Byron Frank.

Nate Kranz: We were in communication with Steve and Byron Frank, and so I knew the process that they were going through to try and expedite the bankruptcy. And so, because of that line of communication, we were trying to take care of business in the moment, but we also kind of knew that, all right, there is gonna be First Avenue. We don't know if we have jobs there. We don't know what that's gonna look like, how they're gonna wanna operate it. But we did know that it was coming back online, or very likely to come back online, after a short amount of time.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Writing for the New York Times, David Carr described the Nov. 12 Bankruptcy Court hearing in Minneapolis where the business changed hands: Quote, "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." Enquote. And the Honorable Judge Kressel wasn't the only official who helped usher First Avenue into its future.

Nate Kranz: I mean, shout out to R.T. Rybak, right?

Sonia Grover: Hell yeah, for sure. For sure.

Nate Kranz: He was the mayor at the time, and he went above and beyond to make sure that anything that he could do in his power as mayor, he was not gonna let First Avenue go away.

R.T. Rybak: Over the years, I've spent a lot of time at First Avenue. Right when I got out of college –

Cecilia Johnson VO: This is R.T. Rybak, who served as mayor of Minneapolis from 2002-2014.

R.T. Rybak: For the five years first out of college, I spent three, four, five nights a week at First Avenue: dancing, music, all that. So I got to see some pretty great shows.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Before becoming mayor, he was a journalist covering the local arts and culture scene.

R.T. Rybak: So First Avenue was a huge cultural icon to me, and way before the bankruptcy at First Avenue, I was having lunch with the late and wonderful Brian Coyle, who was a city council member in Minneapolis, and I was a reporter at the time, and we got in this weird conversation, like, Minneapolis has torn down too many of its great buildings. What building would we most stand in front of the bulldozer to prevent being bulldozed? And we almost at the same time blurted out, "First Avenue!" Ironically, Brian, who was at City Hall when we had that conversation, sadly died. But I was at City Hall when there was that moment when First Avenue could close, and I don't think I waited for their call. I called them and just said, "I wanna do whatever I can do to help."

Cecilia Johnson VO: Byron, Steve, and Jack needed First Ave's liquor license to be transferred to them before they could reopen.

Jack Meyers: And we were in R.T. Rybak's – the mayor at the time – his office when R.T. called the head of the liquor license, and he said, "Do you have that application for the First Avenue liquor license?" They go, "Well, as a matter of fact, I do." He said, "Do you see anything wrong with it?" No. He said, "Well, can they have it by Monday?" They go, "Oh yeah, no problem." You know, and you don't get that. Also, unbeknownst to us, bankruptcies, take years to go through the courts. What'd we take? A week? Somebody said, "I don't wanna get this tied up in court," and I can only guess it's good old R.T. Rybak again. He was a real sport. He really loved the club.

Cecilia Johnson VO: And so it was that on Nov. 19, 2004, First Avenue reopened with a show by costume metal legends GWAR. Steve and Jack returned to work, and Jack would stay on until 2010. But Steve was gone within months.

Steve McClellan: I think Byron just kept me on for as long as he needed to. Larry Johnson actually explained it best to me. He said, "Byron's playing a big Risk board, and he's gotta get rid of Allan and Allan's brother, Ronny Fingerhut," [who] were both on the license some way, or the business. He had to get rid of them before he'd come at me, but I remember Larry Johnson looking at me and saying, "Steve, you're gone the moment Allan and Ronny were gone." And of course within three months after, I could see the sights were on me, then. And I guess everybody warned me. I just didn't see it coming kinda thing. But it was already, you know, the damage had been done, in my mind. The club was becoming something I no longer had control [over]. And I am a control freak, just like everybody I couldn't get along with. When two control freaks meet, somewhere in the middle, it –

Cecilia Johnson VO: Byron wasn't able to speak with us for this show, so he can't weigh in on Steve's second departure. But Nate's description of Byron does seem to align with Steve's.

Nate Kranz: Yeah, when Byron bought it, all of a sudden, for the time in the history of the club, you had one person. You had a person in control of the real estate and the business. Anybody that's leasing a space will tell you, how much money do you wanna put into improving that building so that your landlord has a more valuable property to market or whatever? So if First Avenue the club ever made money, it went to Allan. And if it didn't make money, well, it just didn't make money, but it certainly never got reinvested into the actual physical space. And so, by the late '90s, when we got in there, it was pretty rough. And so, when Byron came in, he was like, how are we gonna do this business? And we met and kinda came up with a plan. And the plan was, all right, we're gonna try it this way, and if it works, then we got a business. If it doesn't, then I gotta find somebody else that's gonna make it work. And so as a team, us as bookers and the operations staff and everybody, we kinda came up with a plan, started booking shows, started putting in more – I'd say, kinda professional approaches to the behind-the-scenes. Not that it's not fun, but it's gotta be less chaotic. It's gotta be run a little bit more professionally.

Cecilia Johnson VO: First Avenue ended up hiring back about two-thirds of the approximately 120 staff who'd lost their jobs. But Rob Milanov said his loyalty to Steve and Allan kept him away.

Rob Milanov: I retired. And at the time, the Triple Rock [Social Club] was the First Avenue retirement home. That's what we called it. [laughs] Because the entire staff there had worked at First Avenue at one point or another, and they were moving on to quieter pastures, so to speak.

Cecilia Johnson VO: After the change of ownership, First Avenue upgraded the air conditioning and fire sprinklers, and even during the Great Recession, they had some profitable years. You know that enormous billboard on top of First Avenue's roof? That revenue source was installed shortly after Byron took over, with another assist from R.T. Rybak. In 2009, Byron had a health scare and considered selling First Avenue. But his daughter Dayna Frank, who'd grown up seeing shows at First Avenue, volunteered to learn the business and take care of the club. For almost a decade, she's been commuting from Los Angeles, where she lives with her wife, to First Avenue in Minneapolis. But Nate and Sonia say she's much more hands-on than Allan Fingerhut was.

Nate Kranz: He was completely off, like he did not come to the venue, he did not have meetings, he did not have anything to do with the day-to-day operations. Steve and Jack managed it, and they had a contract to manage it. Literally, their relationship was, Allan's not gonna manage it. He's gonna hire this other company. That was Steve and Jack's company, and that was what was managing the business from my perspective.

Sonia Grover: Then whereas for Dayna, it's super rare to go a few days without seeing her at First Ave, and I talk to her, email her several times a week. I know Nate's in contact with her way more.

Nate Kranz: Every day.

Sonia Grover: But she is an "every day, every hour" presence at First Ave.

Cecilia Johnson VO: Allan Fingerhut didn't respond to our interview requests last winter, and sadly, he passed on Oct. 12, 2020. But he did give a final word on First Avenue to David Carr in the New York Times in 2004. Quote, "I got beat out of my bar fair and square, but I don't want to be attacked anymore. 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."

After Byron Frank took over, First Avenue instituted health and retirement plans for its employees. But even now, it's hard to make a living wage at a rock club. Of course, the pandemic has brought new focus to the overall sustainability of the entertainment industries. But even before the pandemic, the live music industry as a whole was facing huge challenges, even if First Avenue is a much healthier business now than it was in 2004.

[🎵 "Hive Sound" by Icetep 🎵]

This episode of The Current Rewind was hosted by me, Cecilia Johnson. I produced this episode with the help of Jesse Wiza, and Taylor Seaberg contributed research and consulting. Marisa Morseth is our research assistant, and Jay Gabler is our editor. Our theme music is the song "Hive Sound" by Icetep. This episode was mixed by Johnny Vince Evans. And I want to say "thank you" to Jeanne Andersen, Rick Carlson, David Safar, and Shelby Sachs for additional support.

If you're enjoying this podcast, the number-one thing you can do to support us is to tell a fellow music fan that it's out there. To find a transcript of this episode (or any other one), go to TheCurrent.org/Rewind.

The Current Rewind is made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. It is a production of Minnesota Public Radio's The Current.

[🎵 "Hive Sound" by Icetep fades out 🎵]

Stock media provided by RealmSoundDesign, bigroomsound, and SplashStudio via Pond5.

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  The Current Rewind goes to First Avenue
  
  


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  Listen to Looch: digging into First Avenue history with The Current Rewind
  
  

When First Avenue entered bankruptcy on Election Day 2004, some saw it as the end of an era. But others - including devoted employees, local music fans, and a certain stage-diving ally in City Hall - would not rest until they'd saved the club. [Songs sampled: Icetep - "Hive Sound," Mojo Nixon - "Are You Drinkin' With Me Jesus," Lifter Puller - "Lifter Puller Vs. The End Of The Evening"]

Description: One day after the LAPD beat up Rodney King, an Ice Cube concert went down in history as one of the most violent shows ever held at First Avenue. Hosted by Jay Smooth, we ask rap experts and former First Ave staffers about gangsta rap, security, and the uneasy relationship between the Minnesota music industry and Black hip-hop artists.

This is the sixth episode of The Current Rewind's "10 Pivotal Days at First Avenue" season. If you missed the first five episodes, catch up below.

• April 3, 1970 (The day it all began)
• Nov. 28-29, 1979 (The days that told the future)
• Sept. 27, 1982 (Bad Brains/Sweet Taste of Afrika/Hüsker Dü)
• Aug. 3, 1983 (The birth of "Purple Rain")
• Oct. 22, 1990 (Sonic Youth/Cows/Babes in Toyland)

Anne O'Connor: We're talking about almost 30 years ago, but my memory of this was like, you opened up the gate at the horse races, and everybody was off to it.

[Ice Cube, "The Bomb," with the lyrics:

"With the L, the E, the N, the C, the H
The M, the O, the B, the great
Lyrics that make the beat swing and I gotcha
It's the hip-hopper that don't like coppers." Hard cut.]

Anne O'Connor: And it was just like an explosion, and it was non-stop all night long.

["The Bomb" picks up where it left off, running through these lyrics:

"And if you try to upset the pot, son
You get kicked in the chest like a shotgun
I make the beats, I make the breaks
I make the rhymes that make you shake
Make you find
Ice Cube never caught in the middle
I make stuff that kick you in the a** a little." Hard cut.]

Anne O'Connor: We just went from one fight to the next fight to the next fight. There was no breathing time. There was no downtime. It was just, "What emergency is there to go and deal with next?"

[Ice Cube's "The Bomb" returns with a sample of spoken audio and several voices singing, "The bomb"]

Cecilia Johnson VO: Gangsta rap was the most controversial music of the '90s – praised as an expression of Black America's righteous anger, reviled for its misogyny and depictions of violence. Taking cues from Schooly D and Ice-T, Los Angeles group N.W.A popularized the genre with their album Straight Outta Compton. Their most talented rhymer, Ice Cube, left the group to go solo in 1990. In early 1991, he brought his show to Minneapolis's First Avenue, for one of its most memorable nights ever.

["Hive Sound" by Icetep]

Cecilia Johnson VO: [over theme] I'm Cecilia Johnson. This is The Current Rewind, the show putting music's unsung stories on the map. For our second season, we're looking back at one of the Twin Cities' – and the country's – greatest live venues through a series of pivotal nights. We're bringing on guest hosts for several episodes. In this one, Jay Smooth – the New York hip-hop radio legend and cultural commentator – joins us to tell the story of one of the most infamous shows in First Avenue's history. I do want to warn you: This episode contains explicit accounts of racism and violence.

[rewind sound effect]

Jay Smooth VO: Way back in 1991, I founded New York's longest-running hip-hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad. It was a pivotal time for hip-hop music, when it was still just beginning to cross all sorts of cultural boundaries. And the other love of my musical life back then was the Black Minneapolis Sound, as defined by Prince and his many collaborators – who, in their own way, were on a similar path of bringing Black music into spaces where it hadn't necessarily been all that welcome.

So, as a devoted student of Prince and hip-hop who came of age in that era, the First Avenue club and its relationship with Black music, and hip-hop, specifically, has always been an object of fascination for me. And though it was primarily defined as a rock club, First Avenue did host a number of high-profile hip-hop shows in the '80s and early '90s, according to someone who saw a lot of them.

Tim Wilson: Timothy Wilson, Urban Lights Music owner.

Jay Smooth VO: Tim's record store, Urban Lights, is a community hub in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul.

Tim Wilson: I remember seeing Run-D.M.C. I remember they had Jam Master Jay kind of suspended in the air, swinging back and forth, and they couldn't jump around on the stage, because the records were skipping and stuff like that, but they still made it through. I remember going to KRS-One; the sound crashed and he literally had one of his people beat box, and he continued to perform. [Tim laughs]

Jay Smooth VO: On top of the big names from out of state, Minnesotan hip-hop acts the Micranots and the I.R.M. Crew sometimes performed in First Ave's smaller room, the 7th Street Entry. Still, it would take a while for the club's overall attitude to change, from what sound engineer Randy Hawkins, in Chris Riemenschneider's book First Avenue: Minnesota's Mainroom, called, quote, "anti-rap." The non-white population of Minneapolis grew nearly 70 percent during the '80s. But hip-hop took longer to bloom in the Twin Cities than on the coasts, partly because the success of Prince, the Time, and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis made funk the sound du jour there in the '80s. One of First Avenue's most successful dance nights was More Funk, every Thursday with the club's longtime DJ Roy Freedom. Prince and Jimmy Jam would sometimes bring test pressings for the occasion. Tim Wilson also DJ'ed there.

Tim Wilson: You know, it was disco, funk, rap, kind of all mixed up into one hodgepodge. It was just a little bit of hip-hop at the time, because rap just hadn't really – hadn't really captured the imagination of the world, let's say it like that. It wasn't the Wall Street darling that it is today. So it was a record here, a record there, but it was just a lot of Minneapolis Sound stuff. Of course you would get a lot of Prince and people like André Cymone, the Girls, Ta Mara & the Seen, Alexander O'Neal.

Dan Corrigan: More Funk with Roy Freedom? We used to call it More Fights with Roy Freedom – ha!

Jay Smooth VO: Dan Corrigan has been First Avenue's official photographer since 1995. These clips are from a 2003 interview he did with Pete Scholtes of City Pages.

Dan Corrigan: There was one night, there was the biggest fight I've ever seen down there. It was just crazy. It started on the dance floor and kind of went around the right and spilled all the way out to the entryway.

Jay Smooth VO: That brawl took place in 1990, during More Funk's fifth anniversary. Randy Hawkins told our writer Michaelangelo Matos about that night.

Randy Hawkins: The fifth anniversary of [More] Funk night it was a similar situation of losing control of the club. There was a few times where it was like, "We've lost control of this."

Jay Smooth VO: Now, this kind of thing didn't happen very often. One reason for that is First Avenue's security system.

Sabrina Keith: There's, like, a light switch at various locations throughout the club, like emergency buttons you press if something goes wrong.

Jay Smooth VO: Sabrina Keith was a bartender, stagehand, and superglue employee of First Ave, working on and off from 1988 to 2004.

Sabrina Keith: And you flip the switch, and let's see, upstairs, a central light goes on. It's, like, a siren light – a red siren light. And then, I think, at the front door there might be one, as well. And then, you look over to the side of the stage, and there's many lights of many different colors, and hopefully just one of them will be spinning, and that would be – that gives you an idea of where the trouble is. And actually, just the other day, me and another old employee were talking and can remember pretty much where all the trouble lights are. It's really disturbing. [laughs] I shouldn't know that green means pool tables, which means it's by where the current coat check is and no more pool tables.

Jay Smooth VO: The origin of the so-called "trouble lights" is still fresh in Richard Luka's mind. He had been recruited to work security in 1975, when the club was still called Uncle Sam's. You may remember him from the Ramones and Pat Benatar episode earlier this season. Richard spoke with our producer, Cecilia, and First Ave's longtime general manager Steve McClellan.

Richard Luka: The reason for that light was that in March of 1977, I was working alone. We'd purged a lot of people out of there at that time. Uh, there was all this new staff. They really didn't know anything, and I was all alone at the front door with the cashier, and a bike gang came to the door. The Iron Cross from northern Minnesota. And I had to card these guys, and I thought, "Oh my god, I can't – what am I gonna do here?" And I just – there was, like, six of them. I just said well, I guess I'm letting them in. And it turns out a few more came in, so we had like nine bikers in there who took their coats off. They were flying their colors in there.

Steve McClellan: What show was it?

Richard Luka: No, this was like a Saturday night in 1977, and I remember one of our regular customers, a guy named Tiger. He was Black, and he had a shaved head and these guys surrounded him. They were rubbing his head, saying, "I wish I had a watermelon," and I was like, "Oh my god, this is gonna get out of hand." And at the end of the night, they were just rude and belligerent to people. And [Tiger] came up and he said, "What on earth did you let them in here for?" I go like, "I was gonna get the s*** beat out of me. It's like I'm up here all alone." And they said, "Okay, we're putting a light in." So they installed this light, and a year later, the bike gang came back, but we had hired all new staff. [Steve and Richard laugh] We had some bigger people there, and I hit that light and people were right there, and these guys, they threw their jackets off and they were ready to go, and the police showed up. So that is what can happen at the front door. You never knew what was gonna show up there.

Steve McClellan: Oh, the first light that he's talking about, my brother Kevin installed. When did we put in the different colors? So if it was the game room, it would go off green, and when it was –

Richard Luka: It was, like, 1983, I'm gonna say.

Steve McClellan: Yeah, that much later. The first one was '77, '78. And that was sufficient, and then we had to do a system that people wouldn't go to the front door. They would go to the game area, the upstairs, or bar five. So we had like a six-light sequence that would go off.

Jay Smooth VO: Along with the trouble lights, the seriousness of First Ave's security earned it a reputation in town, according to Tim Wilson.

Tim Wilson: People go through the usual First Avenue bulls*** when you go to First Avenue. You know, they look at your license and turn it upside down and flip it and flop it, pat you down, and you walk in. It was always one of those things like, oh man, don't go to First Avenue with a fake ID. Don't try to sneak in First Avenue. Their security doesn't play. And it's still the same thing. People get turned away.

Sabrina Keith: One point that as always made kind of clear at First Avenue was, we're not bouncers. And we don't ever want to be called bouncers. We are security. We're just trying to make things better. We don't want to bounce you. We don't want to be mean to you. We don't want to beat you up. We just want you to have fun, and I've never understood why people go out and don't have fun. It's like, "Why are you starting stuff? You paid however much money to get in here, so have fun."

Whether you kick them out or whether you put them back, it's up to how they act. I mean, I had one kid come up to me five years after the fact saying, "Oh my god, it's you," and I'm like, what are you talking about. "You kicked me out of Nine Inch Nails." I'm like, "OK." [laughs] I'm glad that was a great memory for you. [Sabrina and Michaelangelo laugh]

Jay Smooth VO: The club's security staff have long been trained to de-escalate situations, according to a longtime staffer.

Anne O'Connor: My name is Anne O'Connor. I worked at First Avenue for two different time periods in the 1990s. [pause] I mean, de-escalation can work in any setting. It really can. You have to keep your head. My strategy was always to get in between the people who were really upset, because they almost would never go after me. And so that would at least create some space. When people are hot-headed, a lot of times all they really need is to step back for a second and say, "Wait a minute, do I really want to do this?" And that's the kind of thing that we would say.

[Ice-T's "Body Count" starts fading up]

Anne O'Connor: And sometimes that didn't work at all. [Anne laughs]

[Ice-T's "Body Count" plays for about 20 seconds]

Jay Smooth VO: In February of 1991, First Avenue hosted one of its occasional rap shows: Ice-T, the revolutionary Los Angeles MC with sharp storytelling and a steely voice. That show was one of two he'd perform in Minnesota that year; he also came through St. Paul's Harriet Island on the Lollapalooza tour. And each time, Ice-T didn't just rap – he sang with an all-Black metal band called Body Count. Sabrina Keith told Michaelangelo about hanging out with that group.

Sabrina Keith: It was just fun, because it was Ice-T, and he was doing metal, which, like, with Body Count, there's just not a lot of Black artists doing that. And we had Blake working at the club, who's basically the exact same thing, just not, you know, Ice-T. And so it's fun, it's novel and just a bunch of big guys, and they had really cool merch, and they wanted like our First Avenue jackets because we were all wearing them and I think it was cold then too.

Michaelangelo Matos: February.

Sabrina Keith: Yup, that's cold. [laughs]

Jay Smooth VO: Ice-T and Body Count would see more than their share of controversy a year later, in 1992, when they released the song "Cop Killer." But in 1991, there was no more controversial figure in rap, or in music, than Ice Cube. He'd been the primary lyricist for N.W.A, who had debuted in 1989 with the iconic album Straight Outta Compton. Soon afterward, the FBI sent a letter to N.W.A's record label to complain about the lyrics of songs such as "Eff Tha Police" – lyrics that had mostly been written by Ice Cube, who was only 20 years old.

But Cube felt like he wasn't getting his fair share of royalties, so in 1990, he and his friend and producer Sir Jinx went to New York to collaborate with the hottest producers of the time, The Bomb Squad. The Bomb Squad, featuring Hank Shocklee, Chuck D, and Eric Sadler, were Public Enemy's sample-heavy production team. With their help, Ice Cube finished his first solo album, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, and released it in May of 1990. He followed it with the Kill at Will EP in December. No rapper was hotter right then, as Tim Wilson recalls.

Tim Wilson: That was good Ice Cube: AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, one of my top five albums of all time. He left N.W.A, got politically conscious, and then there was just the whole thing with the group and the break-up, and then he went out east and hung out with Chuck D and Public Enemy, and they produced that album, and it was just – it was the hot album at that particular time. That particular album bridged gangsta rap and politically conscious material all into one project. You know, he was gassed up and ready to go.

Jay Smooth VO: Ice Cube didn't lead a lifestyle as violent as his lyrics would suggest – like a lot of rappers, he'd rhyme in character. But some of his fans did carry the things he rapped about carrying, as John Smith, who would join the First Avenue staff in 1993 and is still a DJ and bartender at the club, would discover.

DJ Smitty: First Avenue started using metal detectors. When you saw the metal detectors, it wasn't, "Oh, this is a new thing they're doing." It's like, "Oh, Ice Cube is coming." And then earlier that week, before the show, I was at Northern Lights Records, and I overheard some clerks talking about how they had overheard some kids talking about trying to stash some guns in First Avenue before the Ice Cube show, so that they would circumvent the metal detectors. Those were the people who first made it apparent to me that this was not gonna be business as usual.

The record stores, I guess, were getting phone calls and whatnot – because we weren't a Ticketmaster club, [so] if you wanted to buy tickets for a First Avenue show, you had to go someplace and buy them. I think the Ice Cube crowd was a crowd that didn't necessarily know where to buy our tickets. So it was kind of that, where we realized, "This isn't just gonna be shiny happy hipsters going to a rap show. This is gonna be real."

Jay Smooth VO: Anne O'Connor worked roaming security that night.

Anne O'Connor: As the staff, we would get together and talk about what we were gonna do. And then what ended up happening is we hired in a bunch of extra additional security people. For about a week before the shows, we had metal detectors at the door so that people couldn't bring guns of knives or anything in and stash them in the club, so that they could use them during the shows themselves.

You know, these were guys who, their show was about raising people's anger about some really unfair situations, about calling out some things that were really wrong, and so people had a tendency to get pissed. So we knew that, and we had to be ready for that. And the Ice-T show, I feel like we managed to do that without huge problems. We didn't have huge problems that night.

When you put together people with loud music, lots of drinking and lots of young people dancing – body contact – you're really just setting a stage for some conflict. There's gonna be some conflict sometime.

Jay Smooth VO: Ice Cube's March 4 appearance was, in fact, two shows – an all-ages in the late afternoon and an ID-only show at night. This was a regular occurrence at the club throughout the '90s.

Sabrina Keith: I know for the first show, I did coat-check, so it was pretty mellow. Everybody thought the kids' show was gonna be bad, and it just was not.

Jay Smooth VO: There was one issue during the all-ages show: Somebody threw a bottle over the upstairs balcony, where alcohol was allowed. When Ice Cube finished the first show, the club took two hours to change over.

Sabrina Keith: You have to clean up and kind of reset everything to start the night fresh. I think they bought us pizza, and we just kind of hung out and waited.

Jay Smooth VO: Rod Smith was bar-backing that night – running liquor from storage to the bars.

Rod Smith: The attendance at the all-ages show was healthy, but nowhere near sold out. At the ID show, attendance was sold out-plus. I believe you've encountered the phenomenon where somebody in the office would panic about ticket sales and just start slamming comps out indiscriminately. A ton of comps had gone out, and then a ton of people paid, so attendance [laughs] was way over the top.

DJ Smitty: We got there for the ID show. We walk in. First thing we figured out pretty quick was, we weren't gonna get any help, because anything with a counter, whether it was a bar or whether it was coat-check – they were busy. It was packed. It was full, and there were people yelling. There were people who were not happy with the order that they were being helped. There were people who were not happy with the prices. There were just a lot of not happy people. It was wet outside, and it was hot in there, which made it hot and wet – like a cave. The walls were sweating. The men's room had an inch of water going on, on the floor. There was a bad vibe.

Jay Smooth VO: Our sources couldn't pick out one specific point where the fights started. But according to Anne, once they started, they didn't stop.

Anne O'Connor: It was just bam-bam-bam. It was just non-stop, so you didn't really have time to stop and think, "Wow, this is really overwhelming; I don't know if I can do it." You just did it. The place was packed. There were so many people there. So if you were – if you couldn't get to the trouble light, that's one thing, but also if the trouble light was already going, you'd have a fight five feet away from you. Well, five feet in a packed room could be – it's a lot of feet to get to, sometimes – [laughs] you know – to get through the bodies and get to the actual fight, you're not always gonna make it.

Rod Smith: These melees would just randomly break out. The outside security people that First Avenue hired did an outstanding job, because they were really aware of what was going on mood-wise in the club, and as soon as something broke out, they would start heading toward it. But, again, the problem being there was a certain amount of distance in the Mainroom, and when the club is that packed, you can't move that quickly. They were moving pretty quickly, though. So these fights were being stopped, for the most part, like, pretty quickly after they started. But they didn't really stop. I'd say they continued pretty much through the night.

DJ Smitty: As a customer, I knew about the trouble lights, and I'd seen them go off in the past. I had never seen all of them go off at the same time.

Rod Smith: I believe there were 27 all told, and there were incidents that didn't even prompt the trouble light, because nobody could get to a trouble light, because the club was that packed.

Jay Smooth VO: Randy Hawkins worked the barricade in front of the stage for both shows.

Randy Hawkins: There was three of us – four of us all in the barricade, and we had to stay there. Unless the situation was right in front of you on the floor, of which there were many, we did what we could from inside the barricade, but mostly the roaming security of people on the dance floor dealt with that stuff. And so it was like, it turned into a pretty serious us-against-them scenario, and like as far as security vs. the audience, which, you never want to get in that situation. But every time a door got opened, there'd be three people trying to bum-rush the show. But every time like a side door or anything got opened to let someone in, you had to have security at each one, basically just to defend the castle. It was kind of the same way with the barricade and every bar – just people trying to take everything they could take. Yeah. There was all sorts of, just grab whatever booze you could grab.

Rod Smith: I encountered bartenders and bar backs crying back by the coolers, and that happened multiple times. The bar backs, because they'd been sucker-punched, and the bartender, because people kept I mean, there was some real ballers there, and they tipped really well, but then these wannabes would come along and steal the big tips that somebody else had just left. And it was so busy that it was impossible for the bartenders to really keep track of what was happening with their tips.

Anne O'Connor: You know, we called the cops several times. We carted several people out to the cops. When you are in a fight at First Avenue, what ends up happening is you get surrounded by staff.

Michaelangelo Matos: Quickly.

Anne O'Connor: Quickly. And so, you know like, there's nowhere to go.

Jay Smooth VO: But the cops weren't particularly soothing that night, or any other. In fact, just the night before, on March 3, 1991, a Los Angeles motorist named Rodney King was pulled over and beaten mercilessly by the LAPD. A man with a camcorder filmed the incident and sent it to a local TV news show. The Rodney King video wasn't yet national news when Ice Cube played First Avenue – that would be in a few days still. But for most people at the show, police brutality wasn't just something they heard about in rap songs – chances were, many of Ice Cube's fans knew someone it had happened to, if they hadn't experienced it personally.

Anne O'Connor: What I would say is that there were a lot of valid reasons for being upset, and this was a place for them to have that upset, and sometimes that upset meant that they wanted to hurt someone. And so I'm not justifying the behavior or excusing it, but I'm just saying it was not a big surprise. When I say nobody got seriously hurt, I mean like broken bones or injuries that . . .

Michaelangelo Matos: Hospital injuries.

Anne O'Connor: Hospital injuries. It was a rough night. It was a rough scene. It was a very violent show, so I don't want to underplay that.

Jay Smooth VO: Urban Lights owner Tim Wilson was in the audience that night – and he remembers seeing an opening group that included a rapper who would top the pop charts four years later.

Tim Wilson: I remember a group called WC and the MAAD Circle, which was one of Ice Cube's groups – Dub-C who still tours with Cube. And Coolio was actually part of the group at that time. Crazy Toones was the DJ, which was Dub-C's brother. I remember they kept having sound problems. And they kept telling the sound guy, like, "Man you better fix this or we're gonna have a problem." And they would keep rapping, keep doing their thing, and then they would warn him again, and then the sound never changed. I think they warned him a third time. And honestly, what I remember is them jumping off the stage, breezing past us, and I remember – I never understood why First Ave set their soundboard – they had those steps that go down, and then they set their soundboard where, unfortunately, the way he kind of got jumped on, he ended up down in the crevice at the bottom of the stairs and where the soundboard started. And they were kicking him and hitting him until they got pulled off and back onto the stage. They just kind of shot past us and jumped on him. Then they jumped back onstage, and they kept rapping, and the sound man wiped the blood off his face and he just kept going.

Jay Smooth VO: DJ Smitty, who couldn't get into the Sonic Youth concert last episode, did make it in the door for Ice Cube. He says the mood perked up when the headliner took the stage.

DJ Smitty: People never talk about the fact [that] that was a great show. Ice Cube – I'd go see him again in a heartbeat. One of the best hip-hop shows I've ever seen. But a friend of mine did get close enough to the stage to see the set list and came back and said, "We're going. We're two songs away from the encore. Let's get out of here." And as we left, I had to hold the door open because they were stretchering someone out.

[Ice Cube ft. Chuck D, "Endangered Species (Tales From The Darkside) - Remix"]

Rod Smith: Management lost control of the club, too. Everybody lost control of the club.

Steve McClellan: All I know is it was hateful because you couldn't – you got 1,500 people in the room. You could have 50 security staff. You don't stand a chance. There was so many people ready to quit after some of these shows.

Jay Smooth VO: Anne O'Connor was one of them.

Anne O'Connor: I put my notice in shortly after the Ice Cube show. I remember thinking, that is the violence that I don't need to be a part of. And I love the club, I loved the people I worked with, it was a lot of fun, but that wasn't fun for me.

Rod Smith: A lot of people were really bummed out. I had quit smoking eight months earlier, and I started again that night. The mood overall was, "We got through it." A few people were traumatized.

Anne O'Connor: We were worn out. And it was hard. And I remember everyone feeling pretty rough at that point. It was pretty rough.

Jay Smooth VO: The show also got First Avenue in trouble with the city, not for the first time.

Steve McClellan: I had too many incidents where the police wouldn't respond when I would book gangsta rap. I used to go to monthly downtown – what do they call them? – downtown association meetings or something. Where I'd go and I'd sit, and when you went to these meetings, and if you were a nightclub, the fire department was there to tell you exactly what you do to keep your license. The police department would be there monthly and tell you exactly what you needed to do to keep your license. They were more like – "This meeting isn't to ask questions. We're the city and you're gonna do what we tell you."

Jay Smooth VO: Despite the complaints about gangsta rap, the next First Ave show that'd see similar violence was a 1995 appearance by a singer-songwriter whose politics could not have been further removed from Ice Cube's.

Randy Hawkins: There's a country singer – oh my god, what's his name? Outlaw country singer. David Allan Coe. At the time, that was show two that had as many problems as Ice Cube. That David Allan Coe show, I think it wasn't as well attended. I got probably there was probably 800 people there, and so I don't think we ever really lost control of it, but it was definitely getting there. I came in the next day and everybody was just, like, shell-shocked: "You will not believe what we were dealing with last night."

Jay Smooth VO: Chris Riemenschneider, author and longtime music reporter at the Star Tribune, suggests that the Ice Cube show is remembered as a turning point.

Chris Riemenschneider: The biggest myth about that show – well, I don't know if it's a myth, but I mean, supposedly that show was – hip-hop was not booked at the venue for many years after that show, because it got so ugly. And they generalized over, "Well, hip-hop audiences are bad news."

Jay Smooth VO: When we asked Steve McClellan and LeeAnn Weimar whether First Avenue avoided hip-hop after Ice Cube, Steve said that he still booked rappers through agents he trusted.

Steve McClellan: There was a lot of drug dealers that were trying to bring me shows, because they had connections with the agent, and they wanted to bring in a lot of these hip-hop acts.

LeeAnn Weimar: Or they had beepers. Remember, they had beepers.

Steve McClellan: I called them the beeper phone promoters. In the '90s, I stopped dealing with beeper phone promoters that had plenty of cash but no trust from me.

Jay Smooth VO: Steve returned to this point several times throughout the interview, insisting that if there was a lapse in hip-hop shows, it was only because he didn't want to work with so-called "beeper phone promoters." Whatever the case, First Avenue generally avoided hip-hop until the late '90s, according to Chris Riemenschneider.

Chris Riemenschneider: It really wasn't until Rhymesayers and Atmosphere came along and started packing the place that they started giving hip-hop a good chance there again.

Jay Smooth VO: Nationally, hip-hop had been ebbing into the mainstream for years. In Minnesota, indie rap label Rhymesayers capitalized on that shift. In the late '90s, they started throwing Soundset Wednesdays, a series of hip-hop dance nights at First Avenue, and their audiences trended whiter and whiter. At the same time, First Avenue opened the gates to touring acts such as OutKast, Eminem, Public Enemy, and the Black Eyed Peas.

["Hive Sound" by Icetep fades up and plays for a few seconds]

Cecilia Johnson VO: Ok, so this episode was a whopper. And I think the material of this episode is still so relevant today. At this point, I want to bring up an article that rocked Minnesota music in 2016. Like, I still remember, the day that it came out, reading it at my desk. It's the Twin Cities Daily Planet's piece "Whitest hip hop scene you've ever heard of," written by Kayla Steinberg, and it speaks directly to the aftershocks of the Ice Cube show. I'm just gonna read a few somewhat abridged sentences:

Quote, "When out-of-state and mainstream media and fans refer to Twin Cities hip hop, Rhymesayers Entertainment is often their point of reference. The common faces of Rhymesayers include Brother Ali, an albino Muslim rapper who identifies as white, and Atmosphere, a duo of racially ambiguous, arguably white-passing, hip hop artists.

However, to Toki Wright, a Black North Minneapolis rapper, these are just a couple faces of the Twin Cities hip hop scene. "I think the face of Twin Cities hip hop is a 14-year-old kid on the Northside of Minneapolis in his bedroom, making beats or writing rhymes," he said. "The face of Twin Cities hip hop is Lexii Alijai recording with Kehlani and the local press turning a blind eye to it. That's Twin Cities hip hop." Enquote.

Later in the article, Black rapper MaLLy talks about his experience at the Rhymesayers 20th anniversary show in 2015. The way he remembers it, many audience members went from supportive, when white artist Brother Ali rapped his song "Dear Black Son," to apathetic when Toki Wright and I Self Devine, both Black rappers, proclaimed messages such as "eff the police" and "kill white supremacy" on stage.

Some things haven't changed between '91 and now, but First Avenue [itself] has undergone a monumental shift, in the way they operate, what causes they stand for, and whose names are at the top. It's all covered in our next episode, which is about Election Day in 2004: the day First Avenue declared bankruptcy.

This episode of The Current Rewind was hosted by the one and only Jay Smooth and me, Cecilia Johnson. It was produced by me and Jesse Wiza and scripted by our head writer, Michaelangelo Matos. Marisa Morseth is our research assistant, and Jay Gabler is our editor. Our theme music is the song "Hive Sound" by Icetep. This episode was mixed by Johnny Vince Evans. And I wanna give a super special thank-you to Rick Carlson, Shelby Sachs, David Safar, Pete Scholtes, and Chris Wilbourn for additional support.

If you want to check out a transcript of this episode or any other one, you can go to TheCurrent.org/rewind. And if you feel so moved, you can go ahead and rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or tell a friend that it's out there. If you want to share any thoughts, feedback, or First Avenue stories, our inbox is open. You can just send an email to [email protected].

The Current Rewind is made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. It is a production of Minnesota Public Radio's The Current.

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  The Current Rewind goes to First Avenue
  
  

One day after the LAPD beat up Rodney King, an Ice Cube concert went down in history as one of the most violent shows ever held at First Avenue. Hosted by Jay Smooth, we ask rap experts and former First Ave staffers about gangsta rap, security, and the uneasy relationship between the Minnesota music industry and Black hip-hop artists.

Alternative rock stayed underground throughout the '80s, but in the early '90s, that distorted, furious sound burst into the mainstream. Experimental bands who'd been playing First Avenue were suddenly going global. In this episode, members of Cows and Babes in Toyland talk about sharing a bill with Sonic Youth at First Avenue. [Songs sampled: Sonic Youth - "Tunic (Song For Karen)," Kiss the Tiger - "Bad Boy," Sonic Youth - "Kool Thing," Babes in Toyland - "Swamp Pussy," Cows - "Memorial"]

Mark Wheat left The Current in May 2020, but not before recording an interview with Cecilia Johnson for The Current Rewind. In this conversation, Mark talks about how he got a star on First Avenue's wall, how music intertwines with his spirituality, and what he sees as his greatest impact on Minnesota music.