At Home in the Archives

I write about music history, and a lot of that history is about, or has intersected with, my hometown of Minneapolis. It was this way when I began writing in the late nineties (when I was in my mid-twenties) and stayed there during the seventeen years I was away (living in Seattle and New York). Six and a half years ago, I returned—to St. Paul, not Minneapolis—to write a book about the pop music world in the mid-eighties, a period when the Twin Cities intersected, suddenly and unexpectedly, with both pop’s center (thanks to Prince), as well as its future (thanks to the bands that presaged the ‘90s alternative-rock explosion).

It was a great advantage to have written that book—Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year—in the Twin Cities, not just about it. But the writing began before I returned. The summer of 2015, I visited the Twin Cities—part vacation and seeing family, part work trip—and the key part was visiting the Minnesota History Center, where I spent a few hours going through the First Avenue & 7th Street Entry Files. I took dozens of photos of paperwork pertaining to dozens of shows at the club between 1981 and 1984. I knew I was going to be writing about the year 1984, and I wanted to get the lay of the land at a place where I knew I’d be setting at least part of the book. Purple Rain was filmed there, and it was the stomping grounds for the punk and indie scenes blossoming that same year—in particular, locals the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, but also their compatriots in cheap recording and constant touring: R.E.M., Black Flag, Los Lobos, and even early U2.

That paperwork was every bit the gold mine I hoped for. My only regret was having to use my iPad’s camera rather than my iPhone’s. (Today, the iffiness of both pieces of technology compared to my updated versions strikes me as perilously hit-or-miss, but I got a lot in any event and I’m glad.) That paperwork often included news clippings (show reviews and previews, often from sources I’d never have found otherwise, such as the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota’s student paper) as well as promotional material, like record company biographies, radio-ad scripts, and riders for band meals. In the case of Purple Rain, there was an abundance of paperwork pertaining to the club itself, like where the audio truck could park and for how long.

This stuff was absolute catnip to a historian, and I hoarded it greedily. A large portion of what I found, along with a number of new interviews and additional research, went into a Pitchfork feature about First Avenue in the early eighties, plus a sidebar featuring some of the most resonant finds from the paperwork. (Much of those pieces were subsequently reworked in Can’t Slow Down.) When Pitchfork’s fact-checkers came calling, I kid you not, I panicked, because I didn’t want anybody else to see what I’d gotten. Obviously, I acquiesced, and by now the joke’s on me anyway—the Minnesota Historical Society has since opened up many of the First Avenue files on its website, linked above, including most of the ones I grabbed. (A number feature redactions of personal financial information, logically enough.)

I moved back to the Twin Cities from Brooklyn, where I’d lived for seven years, in February 2016, staying initially with family before moving to St. Paul that spring. (I’m very fortunate—it’s a great place and I’m friends with the building’s owners.) Although I live within walking distance of the History Center, I haven’t been back yet. But that’s surely a matter of time.

The place I spent most of my first spring and summer back was the Central Library in downtown Minneapolis. Having spent a decade total in New York, plus seven years altogether in Seattle, all of them after that city’s downtown library was rebuilt into a powerhouse, I still say that the Minneapolis Public Library has the most enviable music bookshelves I can imagine. They’re abundant, accessible, and superbly kept; they also teem with ready information.

There are two specific places I’m talking about here, both located on the third floor (the library has four). In the main library are the music bookshelves. To give you an idea, the first shelf of the music biographies section contains, if memory holds, around twenty Louis Armstrong titles, several in duplicate. That’s just one shelf. They go on for a while, winding through biography and history and criticism and the business—a daunting, thorough, incredibly well-chosen selection. Many times, I weighted myself down bringing titles home while working on Can’t Slow Down.

I did so just as much with what I procured down the long atrium (pictured above) from the main library to the open stacks. The open stacks used to be the research library, full of titles that were not in circulation, as well as microfilm and bound periodicals. I found amazing things in the non-circulating books—in particular, books about CBGB’s and disco written by Billboard reporters who put enormous stores of info into them—but as usual when writing history, it’s the day-to-day writing that tells the most.

The bound periodicals yielded consistently useful material. The rock magazines, obviously, were of great use: Rolling Stone, Musician, and Creem formed much of the book’s backbone, but a pair of outliers were in some ways more revelatory. The Music Trades was an instrument-dealer’s trade magazine, and it yielded specific information about biz conventions I was investigating in ways that enriched a couple of the book’s sections. And a run of Sepia, a Black publication out of Houston, offered concrete information I wouldn’t have found otherwise—sales figures for P-Funk albums, Don King comparing himself to Samson. 

The microfilm was, and is, another matter. I have a researcher friend who flat-out refuses to believe that I actually like looking things up on these damn things. If he simply meant microfiche (flat film sheets that require a lot of patience to navigate), I’d agree. But microfilm comes in spools that contain hundreds of pages from all manner of old periodicals, from the Washington Post to the Harvard Business Review, and lining them up and zooming back and forth while looking for precise pieces of info, or sometimes just to see what’s happening on particular dates, is something I’ve loved doing since junior high. My favorite machine was the oldest one on the floor, with its pronounced squeak. 

In the time since, that particular machine has, inevitably, died. But there’s still something specifically satisfying about microfilm, not only because Central has long runs of Melody Maker, Variety, Down Beat, the Village Voice, and so many daily papers, but because it’s how I first discovered the musical past: looking up old Voice rock critics polls at the public library, first to find more records to buy and then simply to read about them again. Besides, microfilm is such a pain to deal with that it leaves all the goodies to those who can be bothered. I’m still mining it for pieces such as this one, on Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times film. I’m sure I’ll find another excuse to do so soon.