by Bob Mehr
The late ’70s rock-and-roll renaissance in Minneapolis got a further boost in the summer of 1977 with the opening of a nightclub called Jay’s Longhorn.
Jay Berine had been a drag racer in North Minneapolis, and he parlayed a successful speed shop business into a piece of a downtown disco called Scottie’s on Seventh. His partners there eventually pushed him out of the business, and Berine was determined to open a new venue. He found the ideal spot at Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street, a restaurant called the Longhorn. It’d once been part of the Nino’s Steakhouse chain and had a bit of an unsavory reputation; a restaurant manager was stabbed there over a gambling debt in front of a roomful of customers.
Opening its doors on June 1, 1977, with a show by the local group Flamingo, the Longhorn followed soon after with its first national act, booking New York rocker Mink DeVille. The drinking age in Minnesota was still nineteen (“Not that we checked IDs very well,” said Berine), and the hunger for live, original music was massive. “The day we opened there were twenty people, and they told twenty other people, and another twenty after that. The Longhorn went from zero to monstrous in a matter of weeks, not months,” said Berine. “Kids from the University of Minnesota, hipsters from South Minneapolis, it seemed like everyone was in a band or knew a band in those days. I don’t want to say we created the scene, but the scene certainly found us.”
Promoters soon began funneling big touring punk and new wave acts—Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello, the Police, Blondie, Talking Heads—into the club. The Longhorn’s legal capacity was 350, though they might sell as many as 700 tickets to a concert and let another 100 people sneak in. Before long, Berine and his booker, Al Wodkte, were putting on local and national shows seven nights a week.
“The Longhorn was where you could sit and look up Debbie Harry’s skirt, hang out with David Byrne, and have a drink with David Johansen,” said Chan Poling of the Suburbs, who quickly became one of the top draws at the club. “I remember Bruce Springsteen coming down to the Longhorn and me and Hugo [Klaers] and the Boss drinking beer together while the Police played. The Longhorn was totally the place that tapped into that whole world.”
Borrowing an idea from his time at Scottie’s, Berine hired local deejays to spin in between band breaks. Peter Jesperson began playing records at the Longhorn practically every night and became something of an attraction himself. “Peter was fantastic,” said fellow deejay Kevin Cole. “He had an interesting way to put things together where you might hear the Sex Pistols and Donna Summer back to back . . . or he’d be playing Elvis Presley and then the Only Ones, just a great mix.” Jesperson also started consulting with the Longhorn on which artists were selling well at Oar Folk, who they should bring to the club, and which local acts were worth booking.
Over its first two years, the Longhorn’s reputation soared, but its finances struggled. “We had tremendous overhead, and everyone was stealing,” said Berine, who almost sold the club eight months in, before taking on some outside investment.
Berine’s reign at the Longhorn would ultimately end in his arrest. With the club’s public profile growing, he became a target for authorities. “Everybody was doing cocaine and Quaaludes in those days,” said Berine, who sometimes paid bands in powder. “It was huge fun, but I was dumb enough to think I was invisible.” In 1979 he was busted at home, with a couple thousand counterfeit Quaaludes, as part of a sting operation. Taking a plea deal, he was sentenced to a year in Sandstone Federal Penitentiary. Berine reluctantly handed over control of the club to his cousin, Hartley Frank.
An outsized character and a professional caterer by trade, the 300-pound Frank worked all the high-class weddings and big concerts in the Twin Cities. He drove a Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and a license plate that read: ROCK 1. Frank had repellent manners and hygiene, as well as insatiable appetites: each day he typically devoured a dozen chocolate Cokes—each thick with Hershey’s syrup. Frank was gay and a notorious chicken hawk, hitting on every young attractive customer and band member who passed through the club, and he was usually seen at the bar with a new boy sitting on his lap each week.
Though he came up with a range of gimmicky promotional ideas—including staging “new band” beer bust bills called “Tiger Nights”—and gave away free tacos and spaghetti to drum up business, Frank was ill suited to run the club. He had no organizational skills and was bad-tempered. He fought with customers, promoters, and artists alike—at one point he nearly got into a physical altercation with Talking Heads’ diminutive bassist Tina Weymouth—and generally had a menacing air about him. “Hartley looked like Jabba the Hut and acted like the head of an illicit organization,” said Poling.
With the help of liquor store owner Zelmer Shrell, Frank would buy out Berine’s interests in the club in 1980. He eventually changed the name to Zoogie’s, before turning it into a full-on gay bar and then running it into the ground in 1982. (Frank would die of complications from AIDS in 1983.)
By then, the Longhorn would be supplanted by another downtown venue called Sam’s. Located at the corner of First Avenue and Seventh Street, in the former Greyhound Bus station, it went through a couple of incarnations in the ’70s. It had started the decade as a hip rock club called The Depot—hosting concerts by Gram Parsons, the Mothers of Invention, the Faces, and Procol Harum—before becoming part of a national disco franchise based out of Cincinnati called Uncle Sam’s.
In 1979 the Uncle Sam’s chain decided to cut ties with its Minneapolis location, leaving the club deeply in debt. The owners wanted to close, but a group of employees, led by manager Steve McClellan, offered to take a cut in pay in order to keep the venue going. McClellan had already begun booking some national acts into Uncle Sam’s—amid the usual disco dance nights and mud wrestling promotions—but saw an opportunity to do more. In addition to its 1,500-capacity main room, Sam’s—as it would be called before changing its name to First Avenue—converted an adjacent side storage space into a 250-capacity club called the 7th St Entry. Opened in March 1980, the intimate room became a haven for local bands. McClellan, by his own admission, was still learning about booking: “I didn’t know metal from jazz, but I knew which people to go to, to help figure that out,” he said. One of his key contacts in helping shape the clubs’ calendars early on was Peter Jesperson, with whom he’d become close friends.
The emergence of Sam’s and the 7th St Entry was yet another confirmation that a golden age of Twin Cities music was at hand. “People started moving from Kansas and the Dakotas and Wisconsin to come to Minneapolis,” said music critic P. D. Larson. “Every time you’d turn around there was another new band, more shows, and everyone was releasing records. There was this headstrong momentum. You didn’t have time to worry about your place in the cosmos ’cause there was always another exciting gig coming up.”
The new wave scene in Minneapolis crested in September 1979, with “Marathon ’80: A New-No-Now Festival.” The brainchild of Tim Carr—a rock writer and programmer at the Walker Art Center—the two-day concert event was held at the University of Minnesota Fieldhouse. Carr and Jesperson lived across the hall from one another at the Modesto Apartments, and the two would stay up late, hashing out bands and ideas for the festival. M-80, as it came to be known, would feature performances by Devo (performing as DOVE, The Band of Love), James Chance and the Contortions, the Fleshtones, and the dB’s, as well as much of the Twin/Tone roster, including Curtiss A, Fingerprints, and the Suburbs.
Arguably the first alternative music festival ever held, M-80 proved to be a watershed. In a few short years, Minneapolis had gone from a tertiary market and musical backwater to a city that was on the leading edge of rock-and-roll.
In the middle of all this action—linking the record store, the label, the clubs, and the festival—was Peter Jesperson. In the fall of 1979, he was the subject of a flattering profile piece in the Minneapolis Star by pop critic Jon Bream. “Jesperson is not a disc jockey on a far-reaching radio station or a columnist for a big-
circulation newspaper,” wrote Bream. “Yet he is the most important rock music tastemaker in the Twin Cities.” The story, which included a big photo of Jesperson sitting in his apartment at the Modesto surrounded by piles of records, confirmed his status as “the gatekeeper to the hip crowd, the guru of the underground, the godfather of the rock cognoscenti,” and someone whose support could make a local band.
Jesperson had seen plenty of good groups and singers. It was his nature to be enthusiastic and encouraging of anyone with promise. But he’d yet to find the thing he was most looking for—that one extraordinary band that felt like the discovery of a lifetime.
For the first six months of their career, the Replacements—née the Impediments—had led a schizophrenic existence. They’d met by charmed happenstance and quickly created an alchemical magic as a band. But their subsequent efforts to perform and garner public attention had been disastrous, to put it mildly.
By the late spring of 1980, they’d done two proper gigs—and been booted from one for their behavior and practically booed off stage for their playing at the other. They’d made a demo recording that had been simultaneously rejected by both the hip label and the not-so-hip rock station in Minneapolis.
The Replacements had zero prospects, but they were undeterred. “Bob and I at least understood that this was the only road up and out,” said Paul Westerberg. “We had no skill: he was a cook, I was a janitor, and it was like, ‘We make it out in rock-and-roll or we die trying.’”
They decided to push ahead with another recording.
The origin of this second Replacements demo would be the subject of some later debate. Westerberg’s Richfield pal Jef Jodell would insist that the recording was, in fact, from a live tape he made of the band’s truncated Paradise Ballroom set that April. Others, including Tommy Stinson, would recall the demo as having been self-recorded by the band in the basement of the Bryant Avenue house. “My brother had a reel-to-reel TEAC, two-track, with two microphones in the room,” said Tommy. “I think that’s what we used to cut those songs.”
Whatever the actual genesis, by early May the Replacements had recorded four new Westerberg compositions: “Raised in the City,” “Shutup,” “Don’t Turn Me Down,” and “Shape Up.”
The difference between the band’s first and second demos was dramatic. Westerberg’s initial songs—“She’s Firm” and “We Ain’t Got No Class” among them—were unsure and overcomplicated, stuffed with too many ideas, words, and changes. A couple were old holdovers, written before he’d even met the band, and the rest were penned before he’d developed a full sense of their strengths.
With the new batch of material, he pared down the arrangements and sharpened his lyrical focus. Compact and driving, the songs took advantage of Chris’s battering beats, Tommy’s kinetic rhythm, and Bob’s bullish riffs. Westerberg also abandoned his efforts to warble in a conventional manner—letting the naturally raw, raspy quality of his voice come to the fore.
The first demo had been cut in a clean, controlled atmosphere and tracked as a three-piece, with Bob overdubbing his parts later. The new songs were captured live, with the four of them working in close quarters, with sound ricocheting all around and the band playing as though their very lives and futures depended on it. They very well might have.
Heeding the advice of the mysterious Denny—the punk-attired passerby who’d dropped in on the band during a basement rehearsal—Westerberg decided to hit up Peter Jesperson. Unaware of Jesperson’s role with Twin/Tone, the Replacements’ sole intention was to solicit a gig at the Longhorn.
In the second week of May, Westerberg purloined a used Maxell C-90 tape from his older sister Anne, dubbed the Replacements’ tracks over her Santana record, and got ready to try the band’s luck again. With the cassette in his jacket pocket, he walked the dozen or so blocks from his house and through the doors of Oar Folk.
Jesperson was easily identifiable from Westerberg’s previous visits to the store. “I knew Pete as the guy at the counter, and thought him, frankly, rather snooty,” said Westerberg.
Clutching the tape, he hesitated for a time, waiting for the right moment to make his approach. “I’d gone in there with the thing in my clammy palm, afraid to give it to him,” he said. “I would think, I’ll go over now, and then another cool guy would show up and I’d think, No, I can’t.”
He finally worked up the nerve and handed the tape to Jesperson. “I remember him accepting it, but not graciously,” said Westerberg, who wrote down his first name and the number to his parents’ house on a scrap of paper. “I was very quick to get out of there.”
Jesperson didn’t listen to the tape right away. In fact, Westerberg had to call a couple of times to follow up before he did. “I apologized and told him I’d listen and get back to him,” said Jesperson. After a couple weeks, and with other Longhorn and Twin/Tone submission tapes piling up, Jesperson began feeling guilty. One afternoon he took a shoebox of demos into the back office at Oar Folk. He started going through them, popping the tapes into a little tabletop boombox, while doing paperwork for the store.
Typically, he’d listen to a couple of songs before rendering a verdict and moving on. “I was playing one cassette after another. I remember having the feeling that there were a lot of bands that sounded like the Stooges,” said Jesperson. “Not a bad thing to sound like, but it was odd. I’d gone through maybe six or seven of them already. Then I picked up the tape Paul had given me.”
Jesperson looked at the cassette quizzically. It had something crossed off and the Replacements’ name written in, along with the titles. “It cracked me up,” Jesperson remembered, “because not only was there no case for it, but on the flip side, in very girly cursive, it said: ‘Santana—Moonflower.’”
He popped it in, hit play, and resumed his work. Upon hearing the jolting, distorted guitar riff that kicked off the opening track—which Westerberg had written out as “Raze the City”—Jesperson’s ears perked up.
“It was the fierceness, I guess,” he said. “It was a crappy recording, but, man, it was such a rush from the first notes.”
He listened intently until he heard Westerberg howl the start of the second verse: “Got a little honey, nice tight rear / She gets rubber in all four gears.”
Jesperson wheeled toward the boombox, stopped the tape, and rewound it. He listened again and felt a familiar excitement. It was the same instant, overwhelming sense of discovery he’d experienced as a boy seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. “If I’ve ever had a magic moment in my life,” Jesperson would say, “it was right then, listening to that tape.”
He went through the rest of the songs, bowled over by the ferocity of the singer, the keening power of the guitars, the inherent swing in the rhythm—this was no paint-by-numbers punk band—and the guttersnipe lyricism. It sounded to him like some magic merger of the ring-a-ling teen anthems of Chuck Berry and the aggrieved snarl of the Sex Pistols.
By his own admission, Jesperson “went completely nuts” over the tape. He immediately called several friends, including his girlfriend, Linda Hultquist, and best buddy, Steve Klemz, raving about it. “I said, ‘You’ve gotta check out this tape. Either I’ve lost my mind or this is the best thing I’ve heard in years. . . .’ They came down and corroborated my excitement.”
Musician Danny Amis happened to be in the store that day, and Jesperson ushered him into the back to hear the demo. “We both mistakenly commented—“‘Well, the Replacements isn’t a good name,’” said Amis. “But ‘Shutup’—I remember hearing that and going, ‘This is better than the stuff coming out of New York.’ Peter was so excited, you could tell immediately he wanted to sign them to Twin/Tone.”
The following afternoon, a now-frustrated Westerberg decided to stop by Oar Folk to see if Jesperson had finally gotten around to their demo. He stepped a few feet into the store when he heard the Replacements’ tape blasting. Worried what Jesperson’s reaction was going to be, he practically ran out.
Westerberg walked around for a while nervously before finally heading home. He’d just settled down to dinner when the phone rang. “I started to take a bite of a hamburger,” he said, “and there was Pete calling.”
After dispensing with the pleasantries—Jesperson explained his role with the Longhorn, as well as his position at Twin/Tone—he matter-of-factly asked Westerberg: “So, were you thinking of doing an album or just a single?”
There was a long silence.
“You mean, you think this shit’s worth recording?” replied a disbelieving Westerberg. “I was just trying to get a gig opening for someone.”
Jesperson told him he still had to play the tape for his partners at the label, but that he was serious about signing the band. “I was on cloud nine,” said Westerberg. “This was just to put in a good word with him as deejay at the club that he might let us open for another band some night. The fact that he called wanting to make a record? It was like, ‘Whoa, are you kidding?’”
Before he hung up, Jesperson also told Westerberg he wanted to see the band the next time they played, hopefully as soon as possible.