Category: Article

“Give me the child at seven and I will give you the man.” With that Jesuit maxim in mind, Michael Apted and his crew set out to interview fourteen seven-year-old British children from different class strata and return every seven years to gauge their progress. Throughout the resulting Up series—Seven Up, Seven Plus Seven, 21 Up, and so on through the recent 49 Up—the number of participants has shrunk, but the most fascinating remain, from Suzy—who can’t answer questions about a boyfriend at 14, at 21 loathes the thought of marriage, becomes by 28 a mother, and at 49 is the matriarch of an empty house—to Neil, the young astronaut wannabe who slowly descends into mental illness, becomes homeless at 28, and later finds moderate success as a local politician. “Every seven years, a little pill of poison is injected,” says one of these brave souls about Apted’s project, but the end result is a collection of some of the most powerful documentary films ever made.

Flags of Our Fathers could be a warmonger’s dream: the true story of the heroic men who posed for the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph that, it is claimed, helped end the war in the Pacific and made us all proud to be American. But director Clint Eastwood, though a known conservative, is not interested in drumbeating polemics. He chooses instead to show his characters as hardworking grunts who come home from the battle weary, frightened, and, at times, disgusted with the rah-rah of the home front. They are also quite obsessed with honoring their comrades who died—a subject that the press, then and now, often shies away from. Even more intriguing, Flags is only the first of Clint’s two films on that horrific battle; the other, Letters from Iwo Jima, to be released in December, will address the Japanese version of the same conflict. Will it take fifty years before a filmmaker of Eastwood’s stature takes such a bold approach with our current conflict?

Perfect for Jane Austenites eager to savor a Pemberly moment with their not-so-patient spouses, the 1940 Pride and Prejudice is easily the most charming—and approachable—of the many adaptations. While Greer Garson is a bit too old to play Elizabeth Bennet, her dandy sparring with Laurence Olivier’s ice-cold Mr. Darcy keeps this film light on its toes. Even better are the definitive Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, played by Melville Cooper and Edna Mae Oliver. The former is a sniveling rector with the personality of a clam; the latter, a towering fussbudget whose battles with Lizzy are a joy to behold. Journeyman director Robert Z. Leonard teamed with screenwriters Aldous Huxley, Jane Furman, and Helen Jerome to make a modest masterpiece, which, oddly enough, also served as subtle encouragement for the U.S. to enter World War II.

As the years ticked by without a follow-up to Charles Frazier’s surprising (and fantastic) National Book Award-winning 1997 novel, Cold Mountain, the obvious conclusion was that Frazier was feeling daunted by both the wild success of his debut and the expectations created by the whopping advance he received for a second manuscript. Thirteen Moons doesn’t read like the work of a man who was in the least daunted, but it does feel like a novel that took almost ten years to write. That’s not a criticism. If Cold Mountain was Frazier’s Odyssey, then its successor is his Iliad. And, improbable as it seems, it’s an even better book. Teeming with history, heartbreak, and a host of memorable characters, Thirteen Moons also acts as a scathing indictment of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans. Frazier is a master at narrative voice, and his elegant, careful descriptions of the natural world are as vivid as they are beautiful.

There may be no more telling harbinger of the onslaught of middle age than the stasis that settles over an individual’s music collection, signaling that shift in a passionate fan’s life when he throws in the towel and resigns himself to a soundtrack stalled at a particular point in time. The precise date can usually be determined with a cursory glance through the titles in the CD rack or by estimating the vintage of nearby wedding photos or children’s portraits.

For many, this ritual surrender is bittersweet; for others, it is a source of plain bitterness. Some folks, self-conscious about their retreat from a scene that once meant so much to them, move their music collections to an inconspicuous place so as to deter eyeballing by trendier, judgmental, pathetically stunted, middle-aged (and childless) friends on their increasingly rare visits.

Perhaps you are one of these people. Perhaps you still make occasional trips to Roadrunner, Treehouse, Cheapo, or the Electric Fetus, where you scan the new-arrivals section with a growing sense of cluelessness or desperation, looking for something recognizable or familiar—or, an even greater challenge, something local and worthwhile. Perhaps you leave with a CD from The White Stripes, New Pornographers, or Arcade Fire; you vaguely recall reading about them somewhere and will play the disc once or twice before displaying it prominently in your home or losing it under the passenger seat of your car. More likely, however, you leave with the new Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, or Lucinda Williams, or that Waterboys record you remember loving so much on vinyl back in the day. No shame in any of that.

Yet still, why do you feel something approaching shame? Why this nagging sense that there’s a better, more exciting world going on out there without you, that almost certainly you’re missing out on something?

Used to be you never missed out on something new. You saw Nirvana at the Uptown Bar, for crying out loud. You saw the Replacements in the Whole, and Prince at First Avenue, even before Purple Rain came out. You bought your first Suburbs record at Northern Lights and still own a severely distressed Twin/Tone T-shirt. Maybe you were one of those real geeks who lived for the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop music poll, who took pride in the fact that you’d heard, or at least heard of, pretty much everything in its top fifty. The last time you looked at the thing, you’d barely heard of most of the artists and didn’t own a single disc in the top twenty.

Sure, these sorts of experiences can be daunting. Maybe they even carry trace elements of humiliation. But one source of comfort is MPR’s The Current, which frequently plays something good and unfamiliar while you’re in the car (as well as, gratifyingly, some familiar things that bolster your flagging confidence in your taste)—but then there’ll be a string of like ten songs that come after, and by the time they say the names of the artists, traffic is moving again and you’re fumbling to find a pen and something to write on.

I sort of understand how you feel. We go way back. We still occasionally talk, and sometimes we agree that it’s not like it used to be. Other times, discussing some local band we’ve scarcely heard but are happy to dismiss as just another flavor of the month, we’ll conclude that it’s the same as it ever was, and there’s nothing new under the sun. Time and again, we’ll proclaim that the Emperor’s not wearing any clothes, even if we wouldn’t recognize the Emperor of the moment if he were standing naked in our shower.

That sort of sour-grapes, things-ain’t-the-way-they-used-to-be thinking is, of course, yet another telltale marker along the road to geezerhood. We nonetheless seem to have a hard time admitting that we’re out of touch and that we really don’t know a damn thing about the local music scene—and perhaps for that very reason, we often dismiss it as irrelevant or even nonexistent.

For those of us who were, however tangentially, involved in the music scene of the 80s—which some still insist on calling the Minneapolis Music Scene—the nostalgic pull of that period has been hard to let go of. From a vantage of more than twenty years down the road, everything from that time seems more streamlined and clear-cut, even if our memories are a little blurred around the edges (if not completely unreliable).

The screening of the documentary First Avenue HayDay at the Riverview Theater in August brought out all sorts of characters from that old world, and provoked plenty of flashbacks of both the pleasant and the uncomfortable variety. The film demonstrated pretty conclusively that a lot of the bands from that period were truly great. It also revealed that some of the groups we loved back then were not, if the celluloid evidence is to be believed.

Back then, bands would grind away in the clubs, often for years; if they were lucky, they might record a 45 or an LP for one of the smaller local labels, or if they were really lucky, for Twin/Tone. It seemed like everybody’s dream was a major-label contract, and for a few ridiculous years, that dream became a reality for an astonishing number of bands.

What often gets lost in the wash of nostalgia is the fact that those contracts didn’t ultimately translate into much beyond disappointment for most of the bands involved, and that disappointment trickled down into the clubs and record stores. The scene started to feel exhausted, and cynicism smothered much of the old enthusiasm.

But all that was a long time ago. It’s interesting to note that the landmark year of 1984—which saw the release of the Replacements’ Let It Be, Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, and Prince’s Purple Rain—is as much ancient history to today’s twentysomething scenesters as 1962 was to the zealous fans who packed First Avenue during Reagan’s first term. In 1962, the Four Seasons had two of the country’s top-ten singles, keeping chart company with such sock-hopper stalwarts as Joey Dee and The Starliters, Bobby Vinton, and Gene Chandler. It’s hard to imagine that anyone who bought records by those artists in 1962 was popping into Northern Lights to buy Let It Be when it came out twenty-two years later.

Think, though, what they missed, the poor bastards.

Chris Roberts is forty-six years old and hosts The Local Show on MPR’s The Current (89.3 FM). He moved from his native Detroit to the Twin Cities in 1989, at the tail end of what many older fans consider the glory days of the local music scene. “I was drawn here in large part by the stuff that was happening musically,” Roberts said. “I missed it, to some extent, but it seems to me that the scene is as vibrant as ever now. It’s changed, certainly, but so many of the things that are going on now that are really interesting didn’t exist in the 80s, or they were strictly underground phenomena.” For one thing, he sees that there’s a lot more experimentation going on. “These younger bands have twenty years of music under their belts that the older guys didn’t have; they have a larger frame of reference. So along with all the indie-rock bands, you’ve got hip-hop, cabaret rock, electro-pop, and a huge range of electronic music. The stylistic diversity always amazes me.”

That diversity, to no small degree, comes out of the growth of home studios, computer technology, and the Internet, all of which have made it easier than ever for musicians to record, manufacture, package, and promote their own CDs. “Because of that, some older guys might have the impression that it’s not as hard these days,” Roberts said. “But you can’t discount the fact that these younger musicians really know how to use those resources. So many of them are just incredible businesspeople.”

Aside from access to technology, cyberspace itself—the realm of podcasting, music blogs, obsessive online fan sites (e.g., HowWasThe Show.com, More Cowbell, and Pitchfork), and for-profit download shops like eMusic and iTunes—has also ushered in a revolutionary change, not only in how music is produced, but also how it is disseminated. The ’net has proved remarkably effective at building word-of-mouth buzz for bands as well as providing all manner of context and cross-reference for a local and national indie scene that is constantly growing and mutating.

“I think that some of the people who like to disparage the scene maybe just have to accept the fact that they’re older now, and things have changed,” Roberts said. “There’s still a lot out there that I think they’d embrace if they were exposed to it, but it takes some work, and you have to still have the curiosity. You also need to recognize that there’s a certain feeling you have when you’re in your twenties and you attach yourself to a band or a scene. You have that sense of freedom and independence that you maybe lose a bit when you get older. Every generation’s entitled to its own heyday. I do know, though, that my iPod is filled almost entirely with local music, both new and old, and I feel like I can get pretty much everything I need from the scene in the Twin Cities.”

The Internet has essentially become an incomprehensibly massive, yet easy-to-use, combination of an exhaustive record store, pirate radio station, and the densest and most eclectic of zines. It is equal parts bazaar and old-school listening party. Yet that free-for-all accessibility and heady atmosphere of sampling and sharing haven’t come without a cost, of course—primarily to the record industry, but also, perhaps more poignantly, to the independent brick-and-mortar stores that used to serve as reliable hangouts and sources for both new local music and buzz about bands. The Twin Cities have lost scads of great indie record stores in the roughly twenty years since the local scene made its big national splash. Gone are such tastemakers as Northern Lights, Garage D’Or, Flipside, Let It Be, Wax Museum, and Positively 4th Street.

Oarfolkjokeopus morphed into Treehouse and continues to anchor the intersection at Twenty-sixth Street and Lyndale Avenue, which was once upon a time the nexus of the local music fan’s orbit. Across the street is the CC Club, the former de facto clubhouse for many bands and fans. A few blocks to the east, along Nicollet Avenue, were clustered Garage D’Or, Twin/Tone Records, and the headquarters of Amphetamine Reptile. From there it’s a short stroll past the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to the Electric Fetus, which is a surviving—and by all indications, thriving—local monument that manages to be both independent and essential. The Uptown Bar, south and west of Twenty-sixth & Lyndale, was a straight shot down Hennepin Avenue from First Avenue/7th Street Entry and Northern Lights. Though there were plenty of other cool places to see and hear and buy music twenty years ago (the 400 Bar, Let It Be, etc.), that relatively compact constellation of landmarks provided a good portion of the memories that fuel the nostalgia for the 80s.

These days, the scene is not nearly so neatly contained. If that proves a challenge for people trying to navigate it from the outside, it’s nonetheless hard not to conclude that this relatively new musical diaspora is a good thing. While the number of record stores has sadly declined over the years, new venues for live music have only proliferated, popping up all over the Twin Cities map: in St. Paul (the Turf Club), Northeast (the 331 Liquor Bar), the West Bank (the Triple Rock Social Club, the Nomad World Pub), Dinkytown (the Dinkytowner, Kitty Cat Klub, the Varsity), and Seward (the Hexagon Bar). And yet, just as it was back in the 80s, First Avenue is the scene’s polestar, and the number of homegrown bands booking shows and attracting audiences there is a solid barometer of the health and diversity of local music.

“I tend to hit most of the clubs on a fairly regular basis,” said Lindsay Kimball, a twenty-three-year-old intern at The Current. “I think of it as my other part-time job. Most nights, I’ll come home from work and then head right back out. The other night, I went to the Entry to see Sam Keenan, and then over to the Kitty Cat Klub for the Big Trouble show. Most of the venues don’t cater to a specific sound, so bands will sometimes play many different clubs and you end up everywhere. You’ll end up with completely different sorts of music on the same bill, which is fabulous. Even with all the diversity, it’s a really tight-knit scene, both among the bands and the fans.”

Still, the notion persists in some quarters that the present scene is a watered-down version of the 80s. Nate Kranz, who books bands at First Avenue, very much believes otherwise. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty much completely incorrect,” he said. “There are more bands locally than ever before, and more bands getting national press, and out touring and selling out clubs in other cities. You also have a lot of the old-guard bands that are still active in some capacity—Soul Asylum and the Jayhawks, for instance—and there are a bunch of local acts that draw great here. Atmosphere and Tapes ’N Tapes both sell out the mainroom.” Kranz also noted that the ways various bands find success has changed. “For a local band to move between the Entry and the mainroom is not necessarily a slow progression anymore; a band can go pretty quickly from not even selling out the Entry to packing the mainroom,” he said, going on to mention Low, Plastic Constellations, the Hopefuls, Trampled by Turtles, Mason Jennings, Dillinger Four, and Motion City Soundtrack.

The success of a lot of those bands and artists, and the ways in which they’ve achieved it, demonstrates the extent to which the business of music has changed in the last couple decades. Atmosphere, for instance, is the standard-bearer for the extraordinarily successful Rhymesayers Entertainment, the organically and almost collectively grown indie hip-hop empire that now includes a thriving label and a record store, Fifth Element, on Hennepin Avenue. Probably more important, Rhymesayers has the sort of Internet presence, marketing savvy, and shrewd business acumen that make the efforts of many supposedly hip corporations look strained and foolish by comparison.

Tapes ’N Tapes, meanwhile, are the current poster boys for the local indie rock scene. The band has, in rapid fashion, gone from self-producing and releasing its debut CD, The Loon, to receiving rave reviews in national publications, selling out shows in both New York and its hometown, and appearing on the Letterman show. Anybody who cut their teeth on second-wave American punk or indie rock will likely find the band’s disc catchy, accessible, and even comfortably familiar. There are a great many things in the world deserving of your fear and contempt; Tapes ’N Tapes are not one of them.

The local scene never did die, of course. It may have gotten fragmented or diluted, and a product of that fragmentation was the loss of any sort of critical consensus, such as the annual, near-unanimous coronation of a local band or two in the alternative press. Without that, it was tough to keep score if you were no longer in the trenches yourself. Still, people continued to make interesting and even terrific music right up to the tail end of the 80s and all the way through the 90s. For evidence of that, check out RedEyed: MPLS Shoegaze and Dreampop, 1992-1998, a CD of cuts from such overlooked bands as Hovercraft, 27 Various, Colfax Abbey, and Shapeshifter. Locally produced and beautifully packaged, it’s the sort of thing you can still pick up in the handful of remaining local independent record stores.

Bob Fuchs, manager of the Electric Fetus, said his store accepts hundreds of local CDs on consignment every year. “Between the warehouse and the store, we have something like five hundred or six hundred local titles in stock,” Fuchs said, “and virtually all of them on consignment. I’m blown away by how much stuff is being produced. The city keeps getting bigger, and we’re constantly struggling to keep up with the local discs. It seems like we’re seeing ten new discs a week, and it’s all over the place—rock, hip-hop, jazz, country, blues.”

Some of the Fetus’ biggest-selling discs are local recordings that, at least initially, came through the door on consignment. “We dealt directly with Rhymesayers and Mason Jennings for years,” Fuchs said. “Brent Sayers from Rhymesayers used to just run stuff over to us every week, and we sold thousands of their discs.” The Tapes ’N Tapes disc, initially a consignment as well, has now moved into the store’s top ten for the year, with almost five hundred discs sold. Jennings and Atmosphere also share prime space at the top of the Fetus’ list, rubbing elbows with folks like Neil Young, Flaming Lips, Gnarls Barkley, and Bruce Springsteen. And even the most out-of-touch ex-club crawler can take heart in the fact that the disc holding down the top spot at the Fetus is another locally consigned offering: The Bootlegs: Celebrating 35 Years at First Avenue.

Lauper’s latest, The Body Acoustic, pays homage to her own greatest hits in mellow new interpretations. She still has that voice—half Marilyn Monroe, half Minnie Mouse—and she still has that wild, half-Pippi Longstocking, half-Billy Idol hair, but we’re glad that she doesn’t make as big a deal of herself as, say, another icon who dates back to the 80s, Madonna. One could even say Lauper’s talent has only grown over time; indeed, guest singers on Body Acoustic like Sarah McLachlan, Ani DiFranco, and Puffy AmiYumi help show why her songwriting has been so amazingly enduring. 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul; 651-690-6700; www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy

Twenty years ago, one could hardly have blamed Chan Poling if he’d walked away from a music career altogether. His band, pioneering Minneapolis punk-poppers The Suburbs, was in its second abortive go-round with a major record label—this time, A&M. The ’Burbs’ primary ally at the label had left the company, often the kiss of death for an act not well established at a label of A&M’s size, and the band’s phone messages were going unreturned.

“We were right at the height of our frustration then,” Poling recalled last month, during a phone conversation. “It got to be a strain, trying to figure out what the label wanted and what radio wanted.”

The Suburbs were dropped from A&M a short time later, after which the band dissolved. It occurred to Poling at the time that the only way for him to stay happily (and gainfully) employed in the music biz was to concentrate on what he wanted to do.

It’s a strategy that’s paid off with an eclectic string of projects: Poling has scored productions for Theatre de la Jeune Lune; co-composed a musical (Heaven) for Rent producer and former Ordway Center for the Performing Arts president Kevin McCollum; taught music at Moorhead State University, the University of Minnesota, and MacPhail Center for the Arts; written scores and incidental music for movies and TV shows ranging from indie documentaries to Melrose Place; released a solo CD (Calling All Stars); participated in sporadic reunions of the still-beloved Suburbs; and founded a successful downtown studio/jingle house, Pixel Farm Music.

The dexterity needed to cover so much ground is born of more than the musician’s ever-present need to hustle up work; in Poling’s case, it’s a matter of genetic imperative. “Music is in my blood, my biological makeup,” he said. “I wake up thinking about music. I have no choice in the matter; this is what I have to do.”

It’s the rare musician who remains vital even while sustaining a comfortable income from music well past his fortieth birthday. (Poling turns fifty next year.) He has, at the same time, avoided the grinds of touring and running a gauntlet of underpaying saloon gigs.

Poling’s newest passion, at first glance, looks like the hoariest refuge of all for a working musician: a cover band. The New Standards, however, is an entirely different animal from the goodtime combos littering the suburban-bar circuit. Along with Semisonic bassist John Munson and vibraphonist Steve Roehm, Poling is using the band to unearth pop and rock gems from the past few decades that can hang with the evergreen tunes of our grandparents’ generation—in other words, new standards. That might mean anything from playing up the timeless descending chord sequence of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” to tweezing the melody from the roar of Blur’s “Song 2.”

The project started a few years ago during some routine riffing between old friends and music chums. At one point, Poling and Munson found themselves marveling at the structure and nuances of the great (if little-remembered) 1972 Dan Hicks track, “I Scare Myself.”

“I was thrilled that John knew something that obscure and that our common musical songbook was that wide,” Poling recalled. “The next time he came over, he brought his stand-up bass, and we sat around all day going, ‘What about this Kurt Weill song? Do you know this one by Lou Reed?’ We just started playing them in this raw, simple style. And we started realizing that a number of songs, like [the Replacements’] ‘I Will Dare,’ have a real swingy, jazzy feel to them, even if they weren’t written in that style.”

The two agreed that Roehm made for the trio’s obvious third leg, his vibraphone being a natural fit with the piano and bass, and at the urging of Poling’s wife, Eleanor Mondale, the group started gigging and recording. In 2005, a self-titled CD was released, and The New Standards started making waves in unexpected places. A residency at Joe’s Pub in New York resulted in a prominent profile of the band in the “Night Out With” column in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times.

The band has a new album in the preproduction stages, and it just finished another series of New York shows. Having recently hired Wilco’s booking agency, and in the process of fielding label overtures, The New Standards has quickly become more than a side project.

Nevertheless, said Poling, “It’s still all about fun, because we’re all pretty easygoing, and we share a similar vibe and similar tastes. We have no qualms about taking a song we love and improving it. Or wrecking it.”

You can’t spit in Lowertown without hitting a plaque denoting one historically significant edifice or another. Warehouses stand shoulder to shoulder, erected in a passel of architectural styles—from Italianate to Richardsonian to Beaux Arts—monuments to a zeal for development that’s matched only by the recent condo craze. Many of these majestic industrial buildings, like the Romanesque revival Boston & Northwest Realty Company, were designed by Cass Gilbert, the turn-of-the-century hotshot who went on to draw up plans for the Minnesota State Capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court, and New York City’s Woolworth Building and George Washington Bridge.

Roughly speaking, Lowertown is the area between Galtier Plaza (on Jackson Street) and, to the east, the Saint Paul Farmers’ Market, with its onion-with-a-pinwheel sculpture (on Broadway Street). The farmers’ market has been in operation since 1853, making it one of St. Paul’s oldest landmarks.

Lowertown’s north and south borders are, respectively, West Seventh Street and Kellogg Boulevard. But the strip of land between Kellogg and the Mississippi feels a little forlorn; there, Warner Road shuttles cars past downtown, and a little-used pedestrian promenade offers views of the Mississippi at work.

The river is, of course, why Saint Paul exists at all. In its infancy during the 1840s, the city was occupied by voyageurs too rowdy to mix with the soldiers at Fort Snelling. They made their money trapping beaver, mink, otter, and muskrat while the waters were open, hunkering down when ice made travel impossible. And then, with a belch of smoke and toot of the horn, the railroads—and their attendant robber barons—arrived. Bankers soon outnumbered furriers. Warehouses sprang up overnight as the prosperous businessmen of Lowertown took to architectural one-upsmanship, creating buildings swathed in marble, such as the Merchants National Bank on East Jackson, designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style.

A closer look at many of these commemorated structures finds that, their glorious façades notwithstanding, they are no longer centers of commerce and industry, but rather parking ramps. In fact, many of the parked cars belong to the office workers who comprise about a third of Lowertown’s weekday population; other neighborhood denizens include artists in live/work lofts (they’ll open their doors during the St. Paul Art Crawl this month, October 13 through 15) and their newer neighbors, the residents of stainless-steel-and-granite rehabbed condos. But still, even at midday, Lowertown can seem sparse. Perhaps it’s the scale of things—all those eighteen-foot ceilings with their massive beams. A building designed to house huge supplies of grain destined for the East coast, or ore heading for the West, or even the trains themselves, is hardly filled by a scant three or four folks sipping coffee at the Black Dog Café (housed in the Northern Pacific Railway Warehouse).

If Lowertown has a crown jewel, it has to be the Saint Paul Union Depot. There, the spirit of the 1920s, when thousands of train travelers passed through daily, is well preserved. Even as jackhammer dust fills the stretch out back where lofts are being built, the depot’s dark, polished wood and hanging lights exude glamour.

If you go to Lowertown by car, take advantage of the free parking by the river at Lower Landing, where steamboats have docked since the 1840s. Walking up Jackson Street, you’ll retrace the first steps taken by many immigrants in their new city. Crest the hill, and brick and stone buildings appear all around. It’ll seem new to you, too.