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It’s happening again!

About ten years ago, when I moved to the fine city of Minneapolis, MN, I couldn’t believe at how alive this city was with music. I walked through the downtown streets of Minneapolis with my backpack on, and Meshuggah’s “Chaosphere” blarring in my headphones. As I walked down Washington, I couldn’t help but smile as I was passing by all of the buildings that downtown has to offer. Me being a South Dakota boy, I had never really seen buildings like this before. As clichè as it sounds, this city really was living and breathing. It intrigued me.

I spent a good amount of my Friday nights going to (what was then) The Quest. At this point in time, they were in cohorts with 93x putting on “The Quest For Mayhem”. It was geared towards having all local bands play both the mainstage and the smaller stage located in the upstairs called “The Ascot Room”. Every Friday night was different….different bands, different crowd…all together different atmosphere at every turn. I can even remember nights that we had to wait for people to permanently leave so that the venue wasn’t over capacity. This event sold out almost every Friday night. Minneapolis was a music mogule…..was.

It took a couple of years…but somehow, the music scene started to lose steam. Bands that were loved and well respected in the scene started to disband…and the members weren’t creating new projects that their old fans could latch onto…they just sort of disappeared. As bands were breaking up, venues were also closing down. Places like The Quest were closing their doors. Things were getting so bad around the area, that even the infamous First Ave was closed down for a couple of weeks threatening for an eternity of disgruntled live music fans. We all lucked out a couple of weeks later when new management took over the nightclub and brought it back to the First Ave that we all knew and loved. It seemed like there still was people who really did care about music and didn’t want to see it die.

However, venues kept closing…and bands kept breaking up. The breath was slowly being taken out of the lungs of the Minneapolis music scene.

Which is what brings me to the point of this blog. I caught word yesterday, that yet another Minneapolis venue was closing down and being sold. When one of the employees came to work in the morning, he was surprised when he went to unlock the door and they were all chained shut, and there was a “For Sale” sign in the window. Talk about a rough way to find out that you were out of a job!

The venue I’m referring to was Trocadero’s. Although not a lot of people knew of the club (or even where it was), it was starting to caught steam and pick up some momentum….or so I thought. Yet another venue here in the cities that has shut its’ doors. It’s no wonder our Twin Cities music scene is dieing. Local bands don’t have a place to play anymore. Hell, that’s why I left South Dakota! There’s nothing there as far as music is concerned. Unless you were The Spill Canvas or Nodes of Ranvier, you weren’t worth anyones time of day. There may have been 2 venues (if you were lucky) that were willing to let a live band play…but you better bring in a shit-ton of people or you’ll never play again. Which is why I’m so saddened by all of these venues closing, and all of these bands breaking up and the musicians doing nothing after the demise of their intial band. It’s depressing. It’s South Dakota all over again.

I’ll end it with this: Even though we’re at a state between love and loss, something needs to breathe life into the lungs of this scene again. Who/what will it be?

~ by copyzac on June 25, 2009.