General History
"You
could take First Avenue and transplant it whole to New
York City and clean up." "It's
the kind of club, as an agent, I have no fear of putting
a band in because I know they will be well treated and be
very impressed with the physical plant. The
production values at First Avenue are first rate. I've
seen a lot of clubs and it's the best. It's a great
room." |
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On April 3, 1970 Alan Fingerhut swung the club's doors open for the first time, featuring an aggressive two set evening with Joe Cocker. A few years later, as disco reigned over the land, the American Events Company created Uncle Sam's. Steve McClellan and Jack Meyers, the club's financial manager, took the driver's seat in 1978, shortening the club's name to Sam's for a brief time before finally renaming it as First Avenue. McClellan opened the 7th Street Entry in 1981. The unique combination of the First Avenue Mainroom and the 7th Street Entry is a cornerstone in Minneapolis music history. The 7th Street Entry has offered local bands, and some lesser known national acts, a 250 person room to really build themselves up in the Minneapolis scene. Local bands can start out playing new band night, continue to play the Entry, gain experience, build up their crowd and then get an opportunity to jump over to the Mainroom and open for a national act. Thanks to in-house booking, the club has been easily able to match up local bands as openers with larger touring bands. |
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King Of Clubsarticle retyped by eric roedel
Tucked in the backwates of a recent issue of Fortune Magazine that ranked this year's top 500 industrial corporations was a ranking of a lesser sort - of the nations top music clubs. You'll probably find the clubs in this article to be dumps at best, Fortune told its' readers, so don't wear a business suit. And make sure you call ahead, not only to check on the band playing, but also because the place might not be open; in fact, it might not even be there anymore. Heading this article was an establishment in, of all places, Fortune implied, downtown Minneapolis - the two stories of painted black cinderblock that rock musician Prince enshrined in the movie Purple Rain.
By now, the proprietors of First Avenue are used to such coverage, having achieved notice by Time, Newsweek, USA Today, Billboard, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. And while it seems a little far fetched, observersboth locally and nationally have argued that First Avenue may be the premier night spot in the country, primarily because it reflects the mood of the heartland and not the trendy coasts. Some would also argue that First Avenue is Minneapolis' top tourist attraction right now. No one keeps statistics, but more snapshots have probably been shot of its façade in the past year than all other Twin Cities institutions combined.
And if you follow that thread further, you could come to this conclusion: The Waker, The Guthrie, MIA, SPCO, et al., do a fine job catering to their particular constituencies, but they are heavily dependent on philanthropic support and often flog what might unkindly be called elitist, Europeanized art forms. As far as nurturing mass culture goes, First Avenue may lead the Minnesota pack. If numbers and press coverage are what matters, that becomes indisputable. Whether or not that translates into a going business proposition is another matter.
The music nightclub industry is an evanescent affair dominated by expensive fads and failures. Forget First Avenue for a minute and consider the latest incarnation of another monodrama of downtown Minneapolis nightlife. In the past five years, it has gone through three owners and three different identities. First it was The Fox Trap, a pick up assembly line. Then it was the Taste Showtime Lounge, an ultra-cool watering hole that appealed to a dressed up racially mixed crowd.
Now it is called Juke Box Saturday Night. The front end of a 1957 Chevy juts out of the wall above the entrance; inside, revelers soak up non-stop drink specials in a riot of 1950's and early to mid 60s artifacts, including life size posters of Anette Funicello. (Not confidentially, the owners of another new establishment two blocks away - one featuring high-tech décor and music videos wherever the eye happens to turn - have recently mounted the rear end of a Porsche above their entrance.) Another fanciful transformation took place last spring in South Minneapolis, where one establishment went almost overnight from a new wave showcase, appealing to the shaved-heads-and-leather-pants crowd to Norma Jeans, a dance club designed as a kind of shrine to Marilyn Monroe.
What those clubs will be next year is anybody's guess. Attracting patrons seems to be easy: Spend a couple hundred thousand dollars for a new and novel look, advertise heavily, and open the doors. But keeping patrons seems to require an alchemy few establishments have deciphered. Investing in such operations is a matter of hunches, not logic. Some would say that it requires a certain form of insanity.
But First Avenue seems to have discovered the right formula, or perhaps more accurately that there is no formula. The club loses money on some nights and makes it back on other nights. In some ways, it runs like clockwork. Catering to as many as 1,200 patrons a night requires a tight and rigorously enforced set of operating strategies, and First Avenue has systems in place that are largely invisible as well as ingenious. In other ways, it seems to be run on whims and a willingness to try just about anything.
That might just seem to be a prescription for disaster, but First Avenue's managers have shown in recent years near-faultless intuition about what its market wants and how much its customers are willing to pay for it. As a result, First Avenue has survived for five years in its present incarnation, in a business in which survival is an achievement in itself. Five years may not seem like an especially long time, but it's long enough to propel a music club into the ranks of middle age. And while running a club may not be an especially high margin business, First Avenue has shown that if you somehow do it correctly, it can be a very good business indeed. Not least of all, it can be a lot of fun.
The Mistakes of Alan Fingerhut
True to the pattern of the industry, First Avenue is only the latest in a series of metageneses that have occupied the old Greyhound Depot at the corner of First Avenue and Seventh Street in downtown Minneapolis. For the past 15 years, the two-story structure has housed one club than another, each with a separate identity and clientele. Through it all one thing has remained the same: the dogged persistence of Alan H. Fingerhut to won not only a club, but the best club on the Minneapolis scene. First Avenue's survival, prosperity, and prospects of becoming a platform for the launching of related enterprises are tributes to that persistence - and to the fact that after a decade in the business, Fingerhut came to the realization that maybe he didn't really know a whole lot about what makes a club run, and that survival meant turning over the operation to someone who did.
Today Fingerhut is the sole shareholder in The Comitee Inc., the entity that owns First Avenue. Management duties are performed by The Associates Inc., a corporation formed by three former employees of Uncle Sam's , a Fingerhut club that occupied the space before the official birth of First Avenue in 1980. Because First Avenue has assumed primary importance on the Minneapolis music scene - a scene grown more fractious with diversity - rumors of conflict between Fingerhut and managers are rife. Fingerhut, for example, is supposed to be unhappy with some of the risks his managers take on untried, untested bands. It is said that Fingerhut wants a safer product; that Fingerhut has abandoned his hands-off policy and is beginning to meddle; that his signature over the bar was installed because he wanted more attention. To some in the music community, the managers represent the forces of progressiveness and integrity, Fingerhut the pushy parvenu.
The sign behind the bar was put up by the club's managers as a birthday tribute to Fingerhut and wasn't removed fast enough to prevent stories from circulating. The other rumors appear to equally unfounded and many arise mainly because Fingerhut, the son of Fingerhut Company founder Manny Fingerhut is such an unlikely candidate for Minnesota's major music impressario. At age 41, he is best known for his thriving fine arts business, which includes a private and public gallery and a recently negotiated arrangement with New York's Christie's Gallery to market medium priced prints to corporate buyers. His relationship with First Avenue is so low key that many are unaware that he has any involvement with it at all, that he alone owns it. Sitting in the back room of the Alan H. Fingerhut Gallery in Edina's Galleria, he feigns unconcern about the stories, but then expresses a deep sense of personal injustice. "Since I'm a very private person, people normally don't know what's happening, but they like to think they do. When people are bored or ignorant or whatever, they like to feel important by talking about someone they've never met."
In truth, the relationship between Fingerhut and his managers, though hardly perfect, appears to be relatively harmonious. Fingerhut liberally salts the conversation with the word "genius" when he talks about the three men who run the operation, especially Stephan McClellan, the club's production manager and the guiding force behind many of the changes that have given First Avenue the identity it has today. "I don't think anybody knows as much about music in this country," Fingerhut says. "We've had some very loud discussions and arguments about where we want to go with particular styles and how close to the cutting edge we should get - and how far over we should go and still be able to return - but I have to rely on his judgment."
He is willing to admit that he does so because his own judgment has proved to be less than perfect in the past. After stints at the University of Minnesota, the Army, and at the Fingerhut Company, where he developed a collapsible motor scooter which the company tried unsuccessfully to market by mail, Fingerhut entered the nightclub business at age 25, in 1970. With a partner named Danny Stevens - with whom Fingerhut had a falling out a few years later - he leased the old Greyhound Depot from owner Ted Mann, sunk $150,000 from his share of the Fingerhut fortune into interior renovation, and launched The Depot, the first large scale rock-and-roll music club on the Minnepolis scene.
The opening act was expensive, but a potent draw: Joe Cocker' Mad Dogs and Englishmen. In the months and years to follow, the bands that Fingerhut booked into the Depot formed a fairly respectable pantheon of early 1970's rock-and-roll performers: B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Rod Stewart and Small Faces, Alice Cooper, the Kinks, the Allman Brothers, Country Joe and The Fish, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Flying Burrito Brothers. On the nights that a big name act wasn't performing, respected, if lesser, names performed as house bands, At the time, the Twin Cities were lacking such entertainment. Crowds were good right from the start
. "What I wanted to do," Fingerhut says, "was to bring into a small room top talent and give people a chance to see them immediately, before they became too big for auditoriums, and you' d have to sit three blocks away." Unfortunately, while it proved possible to book those kinds of bands and consistently fill the 1,200 capacity room for one or two weekly concerts, making money the rest of the time wasn't easy. For one thing, the crowds were different then. "Remember those days?" Fingerhut smiles. "Our generation, kids would smoke marijuana, come in, and then sit there with one glass of wine all night. I was making $20,000 a month on concerts and losing $20,000 a month on liquor overhead. Still, I was doing what I wanted to do and it was exciting."
But Fingerhut's initial investment had gone entirely into the renovation, and the club then began a year and a half period of what he calls "treading water." "It just wasn't well run enough for that kind of operation. There were one, two, three, four bars, and it was very difficult to keep control over them. And liquor was something I just wasn't concerned with. I was concerned with promotion and concerts. And I began to pay for that."
His health began to suffer as well. People would have to drive him home, he says, after 16 hour days. The initial excitement and idealism vanished, to be replaced by an endlessly grueling conundrum of trying to make a profit on liquor from audiences that preferred to get stoned on marijuana.
Disco and Disrepute
In 1973, says Fingerhut, he had just about had it. After borrowing from his family to keep the club going, and after being told by his doctors that sooner or later something was going to give, Fingerhut entered into a management agreement with the Cincinnati based American Events Company, whose owners had a notion that they could build a chain of dance clubs around the country in much the same way that Ray Kroc had built Mc Donalds: by treating all markets alike and standardizing everything, including the name. Fingerhut, who retained ownership of the facility and the liquor license and received a percentage of the profits, now had the time to devote to his growing fine-arts business, having been released from the burden of managing the facility. American Events got another Uncle Sam's to add to a collection that would eventually dot the East and Midwest. It also got a short lived boost in revenue when tastes began to change, and disco fever finally closed the lid on the remnants of 1960's style entertainment.
A press kit put out by First Avenue provides some hints at the trouble that then ensued. In the waning days of Uncle Sam's, it says, "the club had a reputation for attracting minors and overselling for entertainment events. Relations were strained with the Minneapolis Police and Fire Department as well as the creditors. Having been a principal since the inception of the facility as a nightclub, Mr. Fingerhut had both an image and a bank balance to recoup."
In other words, the place became a kind of sleazy, which is just how some observers have characterized it. "It was getting embarrassing," Fingerhut laments. "My name was on the line." The problem, he says, was a lack of commitment from American Events to keep the club in good shape and a readiness to overlook some of the protocols that must be observed when running such an operation - namely, keeping a tight control over the liquor and keeping out minors. That can be traced, Fingerhut feels, to the fact that American Events didn't own the club, but merely made maney from it.
American Events was also completely seduced by disco, which was even more of a transient phenomenon than most on the pop entertainment scene. Jack Meyers, who is one-third of the triumvirate that now manages First Avenue for Fingerhut - and who, like Stephan McClellan, worked at the club during the Uncle Sam's days - remembers American Events idea of ambience: "Young crowds, four speakers, dance. They brought the kids in, kept the selections low and the place full, and then they didn't do much of anything at all." They also failed to notice when the market for such a package stopped growing. Like Fingerhut, Myers shared a conviction in Stephan McClellan's marketing visions. "Steve knew what this club should be like for this market. He knew exactly what this club could do if only Uncle Sam's would leave."
Before that would happen, disco would die - apparently, without American Events ever having been apprised of its death. Crowds would dwindle, the club would continue to deteriorate physically and in its relations with public safety organizations, and the Minneapolis music scene would begin to change dramatically. Fingerhut would start thinking again of getting out of the business. Instead he asked American Events to leave.
The Associates and the Purple Downpour
While Fingerhut continued to lose money and Uncle Sam's continued to offer its patrons an outmoded disco format, things were changing quickly on the American music scene. For one thing, commercial Top 40 radio had by the end of the 1970's long adopted a format emphasizing endless repetitions of a small number of carefully screened selections form a handful of already successful and musically predictable artists. That may have protected the margins in pop radio's increasingly competitive battle for the hearts and minds of 13-to-15 year olds with a disposable income, but it also effectively eliminated American radio as a venue for new recording artists. Radio divorced itself from large segments of the recording industry, forcing listeners who wanted to hear new music to turn elsewhere.
Bands and recording companies were themselves forced to adopt new strategies. The most significant among them were the production of music videos to enhance the memorability of new releases and an increased emphasis on touring and playing smaller halls, often in towns where the performing artist had received little or no play time on the radio.
Where audiences, artists, and music videos came together was in the increasing number of music clubs that were springing up across the country to offer patrons the chance to hear - and see, either live or via music videos - the newest products of the recording industry, which was still vibrant and creative despite declining record sales and the attempt by Top 40 radio to convince audiences that the best music in existence was bring played by groups that had been recording for years.
Meanwhile, the alternatives faced by Alan Fingerhut at the end of the 1970's were to get out of the business entirely - which he seriously considered - or to find a way to rejuvenate the club, now that Amercan Events had sold its interest back to him, without making his financial situation worse than it already was.
It was at this point that Stephan McClellan began to see the handwriting on the wall. McClellan had started as a part time bartender at Uncle Sam's during a hiatus from the University of Minnesota ( where he had worked for MPIRG and done legislative research for the Minneapolis city coordinator's office) and had stayed long enough to be asked by American Events to move into management. In 1979, McClellan reaclls, Fingerhut's accountant and attorney were both recommending that Fingerhut end his chronically money losing affair with the ownership of the club and sell out in any way he could. Before that could happen, McClellan approached Fingerhut with a deal.
Together with Jack Meyers, McClellan proposed incorporating as a management company and running the club for Fingerhut for a percentage of the profits. Fingerhut would be relieved of paying salaries for the two, and McClellan and Myers would be free to build the kind of club the way the two saw fit, with as much autonomy as the two could convince Fingerhut to give them. Myers remembers that the precise percentage was not a sticky negotiating point, primarily because there hadn't been any profits. The arrangement seemed satisfactory enough to give it a try - at least on an informal basis. Iron-clad agreements would wait to be singed until all parties saw how things would turn out.
McClellan and Myers were soon joined by a third member, Dan Lessard, an American Events alumnus who had managed an Uncle Sam's in Detroit and who was then working in Fargo as the manager of a Brothers Restaurant and was rapidly, he said, being driven crazy by it. Eventually, the three, incorporated as The Associates, would create an informal operation that saw McClellan take charge of booking and promotion, Myers handle the liquor and hardware (which became increasingly important in the months ahead), and Lessard assume responsibility for the day-to-day business of seeing that the club ran smoothly.
At 33, McClellan may be the eminince grise of the Minneapolis pop music scene. He, not Fingerhut, is usually credited with turning the club around from the shabby, nondescript disco palace it had been at the end of the 70's (by the Uncle Sam's was often being called Auntie Sam's) to the trend setting establishment writers from Time, Newsweek, and Fortune now routinely call when they want to know what's happening in the pop music world. That may account in part for the stories of conflict between McClellan and Fingerhut. In truth, the two seemed to have evolved a working agreement that allows Fingerhut to retain control, but only at a dicreet distance. "When I was building the club, things were different," Fingerhut says. "Today I think the basic thoughts behind the operation are the same but the music has changed. And Steve is much closer to it then I am." Fingerhut says he has the final word, but that he makes a point to use it infrequently. That suits McClellan, who says that "As a manager, I just want the owner to sit back and watch the numbers. If the bottom line isn't there, the owner should get rid of the management. But they don't come in and tamper with ongoing personnel, operations, promotion. That's one of the biggest failure factors for a lot of clubs."
What McClellan and The Associates did when they received Figerhut's approval was begin a process of moving the club from the populist "let's get blitzed" atmosphere of Uncle Sam's toward something on the order of New York's Ritz Ballroom, or that cities danceteria. Those clubs emphasized both live and taped new-wave rock and roll, with a heavy dose of Bitish imports. They catered to the select audience of music fans who knew and appreciated the myriad bands that emerged from the splintered music scene of the 1970's - to the cognoscenti, in other words, who knew Bow Wow Wow from the Bongos, and that Mink DeVille was a band, not an option available in a new Cadillac.
"Eighty-five percent of Minneapolis is mainstream," McClellan says. "It's like Des Moines. But 15 percent is as culty as they can be." And given a metropolitan population of close to 2.3 million, McClellan adds, that 15 percent translates into a strong base of support.
The first thing to go was the "Uncle" in Uncle Sam's, a change designed not to threaten regular customers while alerting potential patrons that something was happening. But while video projectors and giant screens were installed, Sam's remained in many respects the same old club. In 1980, there were still such Uncle Sam's staples as female mud wrestling and coed splash parties facilitated by a giant wading pool installed on the dance floor. McClellan tried to put a gloss on the Sam's advertisements. He told a reporter of the Minneapolis Star, "A lot of people think this is just another attempt at a wet T-shirt contest. It's not really. It's no different than our male dancers on Tuesday - that's not meant to be a strip show either." The ensuing article characterized Sam's as an "anything that sells night club," which was in any event a step up from Uncle Sam's.
Soon, however, McClellan would not be defending splash parties to the press. A sub-establishment, The 7th Street Entry, was installed in a former storage area, adjacent to Sam's, as a self conscious attempt to create from scratch a new-wave club to appeal to McClellan's hip 15 percent. With its basic black bomb shelter motif, The Seventh Street Entry was quickly dubbed the "Avant Garage" by some and an out-and-out dive by others. It soon attracted a strong and enthusiastic audience of regulars.
Eventually, its influence began to spill over into the main room (patrons could wander freely between the two), where McClellan began a more adventurous booking and promotion policy - one that didn't necessarily attract huge audiences, but did create a core of loyal followers. It also began generating a fair amount of notice in the local music press and in such national publications as the now defunct New York Rocker. Soon the Associates had enough confidence that they put sufficient distance between Uncle Sam's and the newly fashioned "danceteria," as they began to call it, to cast off the old clientele entirely and change the name to First Avenue, in honor both of the street that fronts it and of the clubs brand new identity.
By 1983, Myers says, the place was actually making money - not during the week with live concerts, when a profit margin can vanish if 900 people instead of 1,000 show up, but on weekends, when DJ's spinning records and larger-than-life videos are featured. Diversity, meaning a mix of live music, recorded music, videos, and an astonishing series of special events - from poetry readings co-sponsored with the Walker Art Center to fashion shows, talent contests, and benefits from the likes of Loyce Houlton and Walter Mondale - has been instrumental to the club's success, McClellan feels. Some events make money and others don't, but single format clubs that myopically ride a single trend are doomed to failure, he says. When the novelty fades, the crowds do, too.
"It's hard to explain long range planning in a club like this," McClellan says. "The bottom line is not figured as an accountant would figure it. If we went for what was consistently profitable, we'd get stale. I'd give us a year. The way we do it now, everything balances out."
While that philosophy was evolving, 7th Street Entry and later the main room began booking a number of local performers who have since generated varying amounts of national recognition. Husker Du, The Replacements, and The Suburbs are three such groups that have made national splashes. (In all, First Avenue alumni won four of the top six spots for best singles in the Village Voice's most recent critics poll). To put it very mildly Prince is another. Last year he earned an income that may be rivaled only by the likes of T.Boone Pickens and Marvin Davis. One wild estimate floating around is $180 million. And although he had a strong following and recording contracts with major labels long before he ever appeared at First Avenue, Prince's legend has it that First Avenue is where he got his start. It was, in any event, where he decided to film the vanity production Purple Rain, which proved to be the most unlikely smash hit of 1984, earned on the order of $80 million, and planted Prince firmly on the top of pop music's cosmic throne.
Paradoxically, First Avenue is still trying to live down the effects of Purple Rain, which made its interior more widely known than perhaps any club in the country but New York's Studio 54 while generating a new clientele the club wasn't altogether equipped to handle, tourists.
"We are not a museum for Purple Rain, McClellan says emphatically. The hordes of primarily young patrons who descended on the club in the wake of the film to see the staircase on which Prince descended and the balcony from which he ogled Appolonia had the effect of alienating the clubs carefully cultivated regular clientele. Moreover, they were lousy customers, at least to managements way of thinking, because there was little possibility of repeat patronage. "It's like going to Niagara Falls," McClellan says. "You don't go there three times a week. You see it, take your photos of your friends and that's it. Masses of people who come in once or twice do not make for long range survival in this business."
To deal with the after effects of Purple Rain, one of which was to lower the average age of patrons by three or four years, the club has in the last eight months or so begun to change in obvious ways that are both imperceptible and obvious. A membership policy was instated to give an estimated 1,200 or so long standing preferred customers special priveleges, including a separate entrance and reduced cover charges, ticket discounts, and access to events staged just for their enjoyment. Members, who pay no fees for the distinction and who are recommended by key personnel, are the type of customer the club seems to prefer: regular, moderate drinkers, open to the increasingly diverse mix of music that McClellan has been programming lately - a mix that is beginning to appeal to an older crowd - and decidedly non-touristy.
"Our philosophy is to protect and than some of the people that stuck by us during the building years," says operations manager Dan Lessard. "It sounds snobby," he admits, but the size of the crowd is less important than its "quality." By inference, First Avenue now feels itself in a position to ask its patrons to measure up to it. Lessard says that the club asked the city last year if it could institute a policy of admitting only patrons age 21 and above, but was denied permission on the basis that it was discriminatory.
In other ways too, the club expects its patrons to meet its standards. From a basic operational sense, First Avenue is run quietly and efficiently. ID checks are as stringent as any in town, and despite First Avenue's size and its frequent sell-out crowds, trouble between patrons is especially rare. There are no drink specials, and drunks are escorted out and asked not to return. "We don't encourage people to drink," Lessard says. "They do anyway."
Security has been so fine tuned that it resembles an art form. The club has been divided into zones, and each zone is constantly scrutinized for brewing trouble. At a concert last spring, for example, country western singer David Allan Cole attracted a huge crowd of what one regular aptly characterized as "young, big, drunk, redneck" - an ostensible brawl waiting to happen. There were no scuffles. Despite hoots and hollers, the place was safe as your living room.
But what kind of business is it? Fingerhut is reluctant to reveal numbers and will only smile and say that it's more than $1 million and less than $5 million, It's not, he added, what everybody thinks. Some indication of the scope of operations is given by the size of the staff and payroll - 121 part time and full time at $40,000 a month, Lessard says - and the $175,000 in taxes the club poured into city coffers last year. The number of patrons averages out to more than 7,000 a week.
Still, Fingerhut says, it's not the club itself that he finds most exciting, but the potential for spinoffs - especially AVE Productions which was founded last year under Jack Meyers' guidance to tape and market music videos of performers appearing at the club. The search is on, Fingerhut says, for a studio production facility in the downtown area. If Minneapolis ever does hit the big time in music production (and it still has a long way to go), Fingerhut and First Avenue fully intend to be among the major players.
As for now, "we want everybody," Fingerhut says. "Black, white, straight, gay, everybody mixed together and having a good time." That might seem to be too much to ask for in today's fragmented markets, but First Avenue makes an honest and often successful attempt to get it. A thousand patrons a night will concur that Fingerhut, after all these years, has finally gotten his wish: He owns the best club in town.
