Prince at First Avenue in 1983; Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
This week’s feature story “Everybody Is a Star: How the Rock Club First Avenue Made Minneapolis the Center of Music in the ’80s” was based in part on three of the 24 boxes filled with the club’s band files housed at the Minnesota Historical Society, covering 1981 to 1984. (The rest of the archives go up to 2004.) Even a quick glance at the trove’s contents shows that Prince, the Time, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, U2, and R.E.M. merely scratch the surface of the club’s bookings during that era. The venue’s general manager Steve McClellan brought in numerous jazz, Latin, Jamaican, and African artists, not to mention the rock, post-punk, and R&B acts that made the club’s name. The MNHS archive is incomplete — many files are lost to time, with others residing in a grocery bag in the living room of Chrissie Dunlap, the club’s assistant booker during the ’80s — but it’s still quite the collection, overflowing with contracts, attendance records, guest lists, artist bios, press clippings and photos, incidental receipts, and other curiosities. Essentially it’s a detailed backstage view of rock history. Naturally, I found a lot more than the feature would fit — like these 10 additional goodies, in chronological order.
February 21, 1982: U2's Reasonable Rider
At U2’s First Avenue debut on April 9, 1981 (when the club was still called Sam’s), Bono finished “A Day Without Me” by telling the throng, “We’ll surely be back here.” And that’s exactly what happened 10 months later. The February 21, 1982 show was a sellout, with a total attendance of 1,372; U2’s guarantee was $2,500, with a bonus of around $1,200. The band’s rider is the picture of reason: beer and wine, coffee and tea, OJ and Coke, “light refreshment i.e. deli tray; [and] four clean towels.” The kicker is a proviso, undoubtedly written with fresh memories of three-hour sound checks such as the one the band had done the previous April: “There are four persons in our road crew and we would be grateful if provisions for a hot meal for them could be made, as it is unlikely that any of them will escape from the venue after get-in time.”
April 26, 1982: R.E.M.'s Plea for Correct Punctuation
Following their auspicious Minneapolis debut, R.E.M. had secured a devoted Twin Cities audience: “We played to 20 people on Thanksgiving 1981, and every one of them came up to us afterward and invited us to their house for a party,” guitarist Peter Buck said in 1990. (McClellan estimated the audience size at 88.) For their second show at the club, the rider made sure to note: “R.E.M. is three letters with periods. It does not serve as an abbreviation and is not pronounced as a word.” The band’s manager at the time, Jefferson Holt, recalls that several of their earliest shows advertised the group as Rapid Eye Movement. “Michael [Stipe] was really upset about that,” says Holt. “Everywhere you went people would turn it into something else.” The rider also requested “a substantial meal for the COMBO and crew (total seven) including one strict vegetarian meal” for Stipe. When asked if vegetarian meals were difficult to come by on the road, Holt pauses, then laughs: “Food was hard to come by.”
October 2-14, 1982: First Avenue Video Playlist
One of First Avenue’s defining features is the giant movie screen that scrolls down in front of the Mainroom stage — effective camouflage for a crew setting up equipment, as well as a canvas for the videos that were part of the club’s mix early on. By the fall of 1982, the club’s DJs (Paul Spangrud, Roy Freedom, and Kevin Cole) and VJs (Jeff Ferraro, Robin Beckwith, Gordon Braun, and Mike Bosley) were reporting biweekly video playlists to national charts, such as this one, embedded below in nearly its entirety as well:
1. Captain Sensible, "Wot"
2. The Psychedelic Furs, "Love My Way"
3. Tony Powers, "Don't Nobody Move"
4. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5, "The Message"
5. Romeo Void, "Never Say Never"
6. Public Image Ltd., "Public Image"
7. ABC, "Poison Arrow"
8. Men at Work, "Down Under"
9. Bauhaus, "Spirit"
10. Roxy Music, "Avalon"
11. The Suburbs, "Music for Boys"
12. Adam Ant, "Goody Two Shoes"
13. The Clash, "Rock the Casbah"
14. ABC, "The Look of Love"
15. Bow Wow Wow, "Baby, Oh No"
16. Modern English, "I'll Melt with You"
17. Heaven 17, "Penthouse & Pavement"
18. Duran Duran, "Rio"
19. Split Enz, "Dirty Creature"
20. Haysi Fantayzee, "John Wayne Is Big Leggy"
April 27, 1983: The Fall Needs Milk and 48 Beers
An excerpt from the rider for Manchester’s most cantankerous band reads — surprise! — like a Mark E. Smith lyric:
Food: Hot meal for 9 or a substantial cold buffet three hours before the onstage time. And sandwiches on arrival at the gig.
Drink: 3 litres lemonade
2 litres fresh milk
48 beers
1 bottle of scotch
1 litre wine
2 litres orange juice
2 litres Coca Cola
2 litres mineral water
Hot coffee and tea throughout the day...
Playing time: 60 minutes
Soundcheck: minimum two hours
Just add a surf-guitar riff and your granny on the bongos, and you’ve got a Fall song.
August 3, 1983: Guest List for the Minnesota Dance Theatre Benefit with Prince (a.k.a. the Purple Rain Show)
This concert yielded the basic tracks for the Purple Rain soundtrack’s three final songs, "I Would Die 4 U," "Baby I'm a Star," and the title track. First Avenue's VJ Spot recalls engineers from New York’s Record Plant, who recorded the show, “putting [pressure zone microphones] all over the windows.” The file for this historic show is one of the period’s most complete, including an extensive guest list with many of Prince’s friends and family — but the name that stands out (and is crossed off, meaning he showed up) is R.E.M.’s Peter Buck.
September 26, 1983: Tense Notes Ahead of Purple Rain's Shoot
In a MNHS file titled “Prince Promotion/83-84” are McClellan’s handwritten notes — large all-caps, in black Sharpie — taken during a prospective meeting with Cavallo, Ruffalo & Fargnoli, Prince’s management team, about using First Avenue as the shooting site for the star’s film. The phrases that stand out are “THE NEGATE [sic] ASPECT OF” and “THE MANNER IN WHICH THE CLUB IS PORTRAYED IN RESPECT TO INDIVIDUALS.” “That’s the point of contention,” recalls Dunlap. “Steve had slowly built up this club, then Prince and makes one movie [and] now is getting all the credit — he did not want Prince to take that away. He must have known what was going to come, because it did come.”
February 19, 1984: Meeting Announcement of First Avenue's Financial Struggles
Less than three months after the Purple Rainshoot, McClellan called an all-staff meeting to discuss “a basic outline of a marketing strategy for First Avenue in the immediate future.” While everyone in town knew Prince was a genius, no one had any illusions that he was a movie star, or that the movie he had just filmed there would wind up bringing in a new, touristy clientele. “We went through four or five years of nickel-and-diming, Band-Aids to fix stuff,” McClellan tells me, describing the tenuous state of the club at the time.
The memo makes it sound far worse. “Not only is it frustrating to hold back paychecks (as we did this week to allow the weekend deposits to get to the bank), it's frustrating to know how hard everyone is working to improve the ‘numbers’ at the club and insure the future success and well being of the club and staff and the results are still eluding us,” McClellan wrote. He lamented a “fragmented market (i.e., pop reggae vs. roots reggae/speed metal vs. thrash metal vs. hardcore vs. mainstream metal/psychedelic pop vs. roots pop vs. mainstream pop)” and a “softer demand for clubs in general (i.e., MADD, over-21-year-old law, VCRs and couch potatoes, etc.).” (That July, Congress raised the legal drinking age from 19 to 21.)
The solution, the management decided, was to emphasize the club’s “heritage, longevity, and tradition” going back all the way to the venue’s opening in 1970 as the Depot. “It has been the club strategy since its inception... to bring the unknown, but potentially strong acts,” wrote McClellan. “The concept basically is getting out to the wider market that they can see ‘tomorrow's stars today.’” Fortunately for the club’s bottom line, this soft-pedal approach would be swamped by the Purple Rain aftermath. “For a couple of years, there were people wearing purple trench coats with studs on them from Germany,” says longtime club DJ Kevin Cole, today the program director and afternoon DJ at Seattle’s KEXP. “They thought everybody at the club looked like that all the time.”
July 2, 1984: The Blasters, Los Lobos, and Del Fuegos' Cookie Demands
One way First Avenue kept costs down was to put strict limits on band requests. “We would go through the riders together and cross off the ridiculous demands,” says Chrissie Dunlap. “We had a cigarette machine. If they wanted a carton of Winstons, we'd just cross that out.” Dunlap once nixed a band’s request for pre-show massages: “We don't even have a bathroom in the dressing room. Hire your own masseuse.”
In the summer of 1984, a show by three of the era’s leading roots-rock bands offered another example of the club’s frugality. The Blasters/Los Lobos/Del Fuegos gig called for “dinner for ten” that included “eight roast beef sandwiches, four tuna sandwiches… two bags Lays potato chips, [and] five dozen fresh chocolate chip cookies,” among other things. A couple of pages later, McClellan wrote a note: “Hospitality budget not to exceed $175.” How, then, to feed three hungry bands? By throwing a barbecue in the bus garage next to the venue: “For certain bands, we would grill out there,” says Dunlap. “We'd make chicken and ribs.”
August 14, 1984: Prince and the Revolution, For Free
When Prince played First Avenue the first time, on March 9, 1981, the club got to pick the opening act and chose Curtiss A, the alias of local scene godfather Curt Almsted. “I have this great memory of thinking that it was nice of him to allow me to open for him, and then later realizing that he really did that just to crush me,” Almsted once told City Pages. Three-and-a-half years later, Prince played an impromptu set in the Mainroom just two weeks after Purple Rain hit theaters — and Curtiss A once again opened. The club didn’t exactly clean up financially: It was a Tuesday night, when, as the club’s paperwork notes, “Members plus three guests are allowed free," meaning nearly 600 people got to see the biggest rock star in the world perform his greatest hits for nothing. The upshot for the opener can be seen in the cost breakdown for that night: Prince made precisely zero dollars from the show, while Curtiss A walked away with $384.18.
December 7, 1984: Chris Stamey Needs His Cognac
A year after leaving the power-pop band the dB’s, Chapel Hill singer/songwriter Chris Stamey came to play the club’s 7th Street Entry side room, trailed by a rider as slyly put as his songs. Among his requirements: “A safe, sturdy stage which does not bounce” and “a round of cognac at the end of the evening.”