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Nov. 28-29, 1979: The days that told the futureDisco was the ticket at Uncle Sam's in the late '70s. But the club's destiny changed course in Nov. 1979, when the Ramones and Pat Benatar rocked the Mainroom on back-to-back nights. In this episode, hosted by Zoo Animal's Holly Hansen, we learn how First Ave became a rock 'n' roll sanctuary.This is the second episode of The Current Rewind's First Avenue season. If you missed the first one, catch up here.Transcript of The Current Rewindseason 2, episode 2: "Nov. 28-29, 1979"[Pat Benatar, "Heartbreaker"]Mark Wheat VO: [over Benatar] It's 1979, and Pat Benatar is on stage at Uncle Sam's, jumping up and down with a microphone in her hand. The crowd has been waiting for this one, the single from her new album, and as the guitar builds, so does the energy on the floor.["Heartbreaker" fades up for a few lines, fades down while Icetep's "Hive Sound" fades up]Mark Wheat VO: Like most emerging rock stars, Pat is wearing all black — and behind her, a guitar crunches through the chorus. From the dance floor to the balcony, people are cheering and nodding to the beat.For us, this is a glimpse of the past — but people at that '79 Benatar show were seeing the future. As Pat performed at the Uncle Sam's disco in downtown Minneapolis, the club's corporate management had their eye on an exit. Thanks to her and others, the venue's next chapter would turn out a lot less Saturday Night Fever and a lot more rock and roll.I'm Mark Wheat. This is The Current Rewind, the show putting music's unsung stories on the map. For our second season, we're exploring the history of First Avenue, the downtown Minneapolis venue that has become one of the Twin Cities' — and the country's — greatest clubs.In our first episode, we covered the beginning of First Ave's life as a music venue...which hit a few bumps right away. When the Depot filed for bankruptcy in the summer of '71, it stayed closed for a year — before an out-of-town company turned it into a disco. That scheme stayed alive until 1979, when two rock shows — the Ramones and Pat Benatar, playing back-to-back nights — set the table for First Avenue's future.For this second episode, we're excited to introduce Holly Hansen, the musician behind Zoo Animal. Holly will help us tell the story of First Ave's second incarnation — as a suburban disco in the middle of downtown Minneapolis — and the people who, in 1979, turned it into a, quote, "New Wave Experience."[rewind noise]Holly Hansen VO: The two most vivid memories I have of First Avenue both involve intimacy, but in very different ways.I was standing at the side of the stage during a Kevin Drew show, and a stagehand made eye contact with me and waved me over. Next thing I knew, I was slow-dancing with Kevin on stage, thinking, "Why me?" I seriously think there are many people in that room who would've loved to be on that stage holding his sweaty body, but here I was, simply being a good sport.[Zoo Animal's "Black and Charred" fades up, plays under VO]Holly Hansen VO: A few years later, I released the Zoo Animal album Departure, some of the most personal music I'd ever written, and the release show was at the 7th St Entry. I don't know how to explain what was going on that night, but it felt very different. It was so quiet and focused; it was like the audience took up part of the weight of the songs. I had never felt so connected with an audience before or since.I feel myself at First Avenue because it's ready for any experience, always centered on music. It's a place where no matter who you are or what you like, the audience and performer can be one. In the late 1970s, First Ave wasn't known as a venue for intimate performances. And then punk happened.Back in the summer of 1972, the Depot had been shut down for a year. Then, in July, it reopened under new management. Instead of a black exterior, the former Greyhound station was now painted red, white, and blue. The Depot's owners hadn't sold the company, but American Avents, a company based in Cincinnati, took over its operation, turning it into one of several Uncle Sam's franchises throughout the U.S.Chris Riemenschneider: I think they had like eight or nine by the time that Uncle Sam's opened here.Holly Hansen VO: Chris Riemenschneider is the author of First Avenue: Minnesota's Mainroom.Chris Riemenschneider: And in fact, the first year or two of the Uncle Sam's, they struggled a bit early on, apparently. But one of the things that really helped it was in maybe about '75 or '76, they changed the liquor law to — Minnesota went from 21 to 18 and up, drinking, and obviously, that was a big boost to the place.Andy Sturdevant: By the late '70s, you've got the heyday of kind of the seedy downtown Hennepin strip. Holly Hansen VO: Andy Sturdevant is the co-author of the book Closing Time, a history of Twin Cities bars.Andy Sturdevant: Like, that's the place that you're talking about when you're going to school and the taunt that you hear is, "Aw, your mom works on Hennepin!" This is that era. And so, you've got that whole strip, and there's still a couple of bars just barely hanging on from that older era. But you've mostly got strip clubs; you've got porno shops; you've got clubs. That's where the gay bathhouses are.Holly Hansen VO: And Uncle Sam's was one of the roughest bars near the Hennepin strip. The manager was a U of M dropout named Steve McClellan.Steve McClellan: My name's Steven McClellan, and I worked in a nightclub downtown from 1973 to 2004. [4:00]Holly Hansen VO: Steve met with The Current Rewind's producer, Cecilia Johnson, for two separate interviews. For the first, he brought LeeAnn Weimar, First Avenue's former director of marketing. For the second, he came with Richard Luka, who started as a doorperson and ended up designing First Ave's logo. Steve had a story about everyone.[supercut of Steve McClellan exclaiming names: "Dave Ahl. Tom Spiegel! Cara Lewis. Gary Rue! Pat Lyons. Kevin Sadowski [ph]. Mark Downey!"]Holly Hansen VO: And as you might hope, Steve McClellan is one of live music's biggest fans. One of his favorite quotes is from Frank Zappa: "Once you record it, you've sold out." He says he picked up this attitude as a college kid.Steve McClellan: I'm a West Bank guy. I remember when people would go to the West Bank when I was going to the U. I lived on the West Bank from '68, '69 to '73. And you had five, six venues doing live music.Holly Hansen VO: Steve was on the West Bank attending the University of Minnesota, but dropped out in the mid-'70s. Before that, though, he started working the bar at Uncle Sam's.Steve McClellan: My feeling is in '75 they put me in management training. I had been bartending probably since late 1973. And after they sent me to the management-training thing, I was ready to go back to school. I was fed up with the corporate nature of it. And then I came back, and I was pulled out of training early because Pat Lyons, who was managing Minneapolis at the time, got promoted. They pulled me out of training and gave me First Avenue.Holly Hansen VO: Even after Steve's promotion, he and his bosses didn't always get along.Steve McClellan: You wanna get me on a rant when I put the first black doorman at the door when American Avents hated it, and all the people involved couldn't believe I had a black doorman? Ah, women in management — I put a woman named Marsha Lear in the Uncle Sam's management program, and I wish I could find her again, because I owe her an apology. American Avents was totally not gonna have a female manager back in the '70s and I realized I sent her — I went through their management program. It's a good old boy network. I hated it.But looking back and seeing how their management meetings went and all that, it would be like you were being run by a — I never went to a fraternity, but back in college I always thought they were kind of a weird group — frat guys. Pretty elite group, they drink a lot of beer. And my image of that whole upper management at American Avents reminded me like they were all from Buffalo, New York. It was one big frat running the company.Holly Hansen VO: The music at Uncle Sam's was largely DJs playing safe pop hits, as dictated by the national office.Chris Riemenschneider: They had this deal where there would be DJs with a live drummer, and this was actually where Bobby Z, later of Prince and the Revolution, first played the club. He was like 18 or 19, on dance night, and, you know, just playing along to recorded music. They used to have another guy, Denny Craswell, who performed with a jungle theme. He had drums built like into, like, logs — it was like this jungle vibe. Pretty cheesy stuff, from what I can tell, but it was a big hit. They only had concerts once in a while — they would bring in some local and regional stuff. And then later on, after McClellan got a little more involved, in the late '70s they brought in stuff that was more Top 40 . . .[Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight": "Skyrockets in flight/Afternoon delight"]Chris Riemenschneider: . . . that stuff didn't do well.Holly Hansen VO: One feature at Uncle Sam's that brought repeat business was its Sunday-night teen dances. One of the regulars there was the future Time member and hit-making producer Jimmy Jam, as he told Pete Scholtes of City Pages in 2003.Jimmy Jam: Yeah, it was a disco, and it was packed, man. I know they had at least a thousand people every Sunday. There was a crowd, that was sort of a roller skating crowd that I used to hang out with at the Roller Gardens, and I think the Roller Gardens was like a big Friday night thing. So you'd go to the Gardens on Friday night, and Saturday there was a whole lot of different options, and then Sunday was always Uncle Sam's. But it was a lot of the same people you'd see, just kinda from my circle. I went to Washburn High, and so all sort of that crowd from there.But really, the crowd came to Uncle Sam's from everywhere. I mean, back when Hopkins was really a suburb and like seemed like it was on the other side of the world, kids from Hopkins and Minnetonka and Wayzata, and it was basically like a sort of a melting pot of races and ages, but mostly a lot of cute girls, and it was just a fun place to hang out.Holly Hansen VO: The history of disco is complicated, and although it has roots in black and queer culture, Uncle Sam's' version was decidedly mainstream.Chris Riemenschneider: At that point, it really wasn't city kids as much as a lot of the suburban kids were coming downtown to hit Uncle Sam's. It kind of was that kind of place, yeah, a little bit more of a shot bar kind of vibe, and that's when they had the Firecracker drinks, which apparently was just basically red food dye or red coloring and vodka. Nobody talks about those drinks fondly, but for some reason, they were ubiquitous there, and people still have the Firecracker glasses, which I guess goes with the patriotic Uncle Sam's idea.Holly Hansen VO: Most of the bands that played Uncle Sam's did covers. But there was the occasional local band playing originals. The Suicide Commandos, one of the Twin Cities' first punk groups, formed in 1974. Later, the Commandos would become regulars at a new club called Jay's Longhorn, where Peter Jesperson worked as house DJ.Peter Jesperson: It opened in June of '77, and I think the DJ booth - it was a Naugahyde disco unit that they rented until they built a booth for me in the corner. But at the time, yeah, we rented this Naugahyde disco thing with flashing lights that we never used, and it was on wheels so it wasn't very sturdy, and people would bump into it and records would skip and I'd be screaming at people.Holly Hansen VO: The Longhorn was where you went if you lived in the Twin Cities and identified in some way as "punk." Bands that played there included Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the Police, and the B-52's. The Longhorn was a world away from Uncle Sam's.Steve McClellan: I kind of really felt an outsider to that whole Longhorn scene. I was not part of it.Holly Hansen VO: But soon, Steve would hire someone who was.Kevin Cole: I'm Kevin Cole. I am chief content officer at KEXP in Seattle.Holly Hansen VO: Kevin was a Longhorn regular who worked at Hot Licks, a record shop downtown, where one of his coworkers was a young Jimmy Jam.Kevin Cole: I was hired in '78. I worked at First Ave/Uncle Sam's from '78 to '91. I was brought in to help usher in a change, and I was a total misfit for the club at that time. It was a pretty mainstream suburban Saturday Night Fever-type disco, and that era was starting to die. And I think also in part because Steve Egsgard, the DJ who had kind of reigned supreme during that '70s disco heyday, was leaving, so they needed a DJ. I remember going to the back door and meeting Steve. At that time I — Joey Ramone was my idol, so I looked like one of the Ramones — long hair, ripped jeans, tennis shoes. And Steve and I had a great conversation, but I didn't know, really, how it went. And then like a week later he called and he's like, "Hey, can you start in like two days?" So I think they had a need. [Kevin laughs]Holly Hansen VO: In fact, they did.Steve McClellan: I could tell American Avents, at the time, was already planning on dumping Minneapolis, but didn't tell anybody. That's my gut feeling when I look at paperwork and stuff. So that brings us through the turmoil in the transition from Uncle Sam's to Sam's. We were kind of just dumped. Allan was jilted.Holly Hansen VO: That's Allan Fingerhut, who still co-owned the club at that point. Steve's plan was to bring Jack Meyers, a lawyer who Steve knew from Catholic school, on board for damage control.Steve McClellan: When American Avents pulled out and Allan was deciding to have both Byron and Mel Orenstein, the attorney, telling him, "Close the club, we can't lose any more money," there was two of the big hoops I had to hurdle. I do remember I took a half cut, [of] whatever American Avents was paying me at the time, because I wanted to add Jack to the management team. And then of course, American Avents pulled out by sucking all the money out and putting no improvements in. So when we had taken over the club, we were like $60,000 in debt with no backup revenue source. That's a huge amount of money.Holly Hansen VO: Money was the big difference between Steve and Jack's management styles.Steve McClellan: I always wanted to spend money. Jack always wanted to save money. And that was our whole working relationship. I had just taken over as manager, and I started getting bills from people for stuff that happened in '70 and '71. And I couldn't — this is at the time American Avents had pulled out. If there's any reason for that club being open financially, it would be Jack. He went through years of stressful deposits and non-deposits and the financial end.LeeAnn Weimar: It went to, replacing light bulbs was an issue sometimes.Steve McClellan: Oh yeah, because we had the big fluorescent tubes that were expensive and just putting them up was a pain in the butt.Holly Hansen VO: The turning point for Uncle Sam's came on November 28, 1979. That night, Steve had booked the Ramones. It was the New York punk heroes' third show in the Twin Citi…
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