Procured! Also hitting up the Alabama Shakes show at the end of July. Times like this I wish I had a partner-in-crime.
This downtown Minneapolis club opened in 1937 as a Greyhound depot, but the history of First Avenue as we know it begins with Prince. Throughout the Eighties, he and the Revolution were sort of the house band here – you can see it in all the famous concert scenes in Purple Rain. The club was also a key staging ground for the city’s punk-and-hardcore scene, starring the Replacements, Husker Du and Soul Asylum. Today’s fans still love the no-frills vibe and killer acoustics, even if waiting in line during a Minnesota winter can be a bummer. “Plus,” says hip-hop star Talib Kweli, a regular headliner, “I saw [famous rapper’s name redacted] deck an undercover cop and hop in a cab and get away at the club.”
“Our wives and daughters are no longer safe on the streets of Minneapolis.” This old partizan political war cry that has done service in many a municipal campaign, can for once be truthful applied, for the execrable thoroughfare have for weeks imperiled both life and limb to pedestrians. When the heavy snows of January, February and March fell in high drifts the street car company with its scrapers pushed the snow as it fell from the tracks to either side. The sidewalks were cleared and the snow thrown upon the street, adding to the heighth of the ridges already formed. Thousands of teams have trampled it compactly, while successive thawing and freezing have formed an icy embankment to feet thick nearly, on the average, as hard as rock, running between the tracks and curbstones.
St. Paul Daily Globe. March 25, 1888.
(image and text via Library of Congress)
“Minneapolis Miller’s first baseman working out before an April 1937 game”
(image via MHS Visual Resources Database)
When Minneapolis politicians censored small time scandal sheet publisher, Jay Near, it sparked the country’s first debate on whether the government can control people’s speech and punish them for publishing unpopular ideas. Called the first great press case, the surprising 1931 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Near vs. Minnesota is a landmark of First Amendment law, and continues to guide our democracy today. KFAI producer Susan Gray talks to media and legal experts, who describe the characters that played a role in creating this important jurisprudence.
