[jjoyce]

This is a tremendous oral history:

http://www.startribune.com/entertainmen ... page=3&c=y

I know some of you locals have played there over the years. I never saw anyone huge there, but several really good Minneapolis bands.

[charliedon'tsurf]

Fuck that place. There are better venues in the Twin Cities. And now a story:

So this summer Crustacean Records had our big series of 15 year anniversary showcases including one night at the Uptown Bar. We had a promotional deal arranged with PBR in the Twin Cities that they were going to provide four free cases of beer for all of us to get loaded on.

I get to the Uptown and ask the bar manager where he is going to set up our free cases of beer. Jerkface tells me that they can't give us our beer due to the fact it is "unsafe" to provide more than three free drinks to musicians.

So we get the choice of taking a headcount and giving us all our allotted three free beers out of the four cases provided to us by the kindly people of the Pabst beer corporation or everybody getting three drink tickets allowing us of the flexibility to choose beer or liquor for our meager allotment of drinks. Which ended up costing the bar more then just letting us drink the free beer that was provided.

They obviously were not that concerned about overserving as I paid for and consumed at least 16 tallboys of PBR over the course of the next five hours bolstered with shots.

In contrast the next night in St. Paul at the Turf Club all four cases of beer was in the green room on ice. Which is the sort of reason most musicians I know in town didn't like playing the Uptown and would much rather play the Turf, Big V's, Triple Rock, 7th St., etc.

Beside Sauce opened in Uptown so one venue went away and a better venue sprung up in the neighborhood. Sort of like when the King Club closed and then the Frequency opened which was a better version of the King Club on some levels.

[nevermore]

They obviously were not that concerned about overserving as I paid for and consumed at least 16 tallboys of PBR over the course of the next five hours bolstered with shots.

I don't want to sound like a total prig, but you're getting up there and the next time you see your doctor you might want to tell him/her this detail. I mean, if I'm noticing that that's a lot of alcohol...

[jjoyce]

First of all, did you read the story, CDS? Are you at all aware of the idea that thanks to what the Uptown was doing in the '80s, you're able to do what you do today, which includes your promo deal with California-based Pabst?

The story makes clear that the Uptown has gone through some undesirable changes and the brain trust that made it great moved on to the 400 (which you left off your list there).

Are there better venues? Of course. But few have been more influential, particularly in cultivating a style of music and presenting it in a way that has evolved to what you do now. The Uptown was beloved in its heyday by musicians, so much so that the biggest guys in the biggest bands in a city that was home to one of the best scenes in the country used to just show up there to play open mic or put together goofy cover bands or whatever.

On like page 4 of that story there's stuff about punk kids riding their bikes over there to watch the Afghan Wigs through the window. That's not going on at the Triple Rock.

[acereraser]

I never went to the Uptown all that much during my Twin Cities time, mostly because I lived in St. Paul. It would have been nice to stumble down to see some of the more impromptu/goofy shows, but it was across town, man, and Uptown (the neighborhood, not the bar) had that taint of hipster affectation which kind of unnerved me. The West Bank was always more to my tastes.

Threadjack: The Turf Club was our watering hole before it became the venue it is today. They had old style country bands on the weekends, and nothing but bar space during the week. I remember the conversation when the bartender told us they were going to have rock bands in on weeknights, and see how it goes. The country bands on the weekend thing held out for longer than I thought it would, but all those bands were getting old, as were their audiences. The Clown Lounge is nice and scary, too. /threadjack

I do fondly remember a Medeski Martin & Wood show there in 1995, when they were still feeling their way out of the alternative jazz band pigeonhole.

Lori Barbero is the biggest scenester I can imagine.