You’ve never really experienced “Enter Sandman” till you’ve heard a teen six-piece with two keyboards blasting the Metallica song out across Lyndale Avenue on a summer afternoon.
Set up in someone’s front yard, those eager School of Rock alums move on next to (what else?) Nirvana, while farther on up the road at Twin Town Guitars a band named Doom Loon are returning bystanders to the ’80s with Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar.” As you cross Lake Street you can hear the Goo Goo Mucks doing their best New York Dolls impression outside the Uptown VFW.
Walking along Lyndale on this particular Sunday in June is like slowly turning a radio dial, as one set of musicmakers fades and another comes within earshot: the languid boogie of Spaghetti Monetti, a set of acoustic worship music, the salsa that keeps the dancers outside the Twin Cities Latin Collective moving. When I settle in for a cool drink outside SK Coffee, Hunny Bear mellows my mind with “Just the Two of Us” from a stage set up on 24th Street.
Open Streets Lyndale isn’t a music festival, but you could easily mishear it as one this afternoon.
“Something that we're always trying to think about with our public spaces and our public streets is like, ‘How do we make it possible for people to feel safe, to feel welcome, to feel like it's a place that they want to hang out?’” says Ember Rasmussen, an events manager for transportation advocacy nonprofit Our Streets, which put on the event. “And I think music plays a really huge role in making a place feel like somewhere you want to be.”
Every summer, there’s outdoor music throughout the Twin Cities. But it’s often set aside as a special event—at a particular space like the Lake Harriet Bandshell, maybe at a block party, or at a festival with gated entry. In contrast, an ordinary Minneapolis thoroughfare tends to be aurally uneventful. You’ll hear cars, of course, and maybe snatches of conversation, along with miscellaneous ambient sounds, but nothing compelling.
Since I moved back to the Wedge from the quieter neighborhoods of south Minneapolis in June—just days before Open Streets, as it turned out—I’ve been wondering: What if outdoor live music was simply a part of our landscape instead of reserved for a special occasion at a particular site?
That was a more timely question than I’d expected. Soon the Uptown Porchfest would engulf my neighborhood in battling musical styles. And just a few blocks away on Nicollet Avenue, the city’s Arts & Cultural Affairs Department had planned an event for August called the Mile of Music. I didn’t need to scour the city to learn about the future of outdoor live music in Minneapolis: It was happening in my backyard, almost literally.
“I had just been to Austin, Texas, and San Juan and New Orleans, and I’m like, there's music everywhere,” Ben Johnson tells me. He couldn’t help but wonder: “How come there's not just music everywhere in Minneapolis?”
As the director of the Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Department, Johnson has the opportunity to answer his own question. When the city freed up $500,000 from the Small Business Resiliency Fund established to recuperate businesses that had been impacted by Operation Metro Surge, Johnson dedicated it to an event dubbed the Minneapolis Mile of Music, which took place on August 19.
Johnson sought out Shelley Quiala, the executive director of the all-male singing group Cantus, who has a background in festival production, as well as Dayna Martinez of the Twin Cities Jazz Festival. The idea was to get as many restaurants as possible to host live music on a weekday afternoon. (The name was lifted from a similar event held in Appleton, Wisconsin.)
Johnson’s thinking behind the event was simple: “What's the best happy hour we could have in summer for Minneapolis? And also, let's reimagine this creative spine for the whole city and see if there's something there.”
Though it was focused on the Eat Street stretch of Nicollet Avenue, the Mile of Music also took in part of downtown and Loring Park, and reached up to Main Street at St. Anthony Main, which Johnson eyes as an area with a good deal of potential for showcasing live music. And while many city-sponsored events—I’m thinking especially of those designed to bring crowds back to downtown Minneapolis—seem to guess wildly what might appeal to people, this one seemed instead to meet city residents where they are, and to work with existing attractions.
This is just the first of several events designed to show off Minneapolis music. This fall, nine independent music clubs will host family dance-party events and, Johnson adds, “We're working on another initiative in the fall that's going to be about putting DJs in wild, weird spaces all over Minneapolis.”
From my experience of it, on the Nicollet end of things, the Minneapolis Mile of Music was a qualified success. I saw the R&B act SoulFlower play to a receptive crowd at Eat Street Crossing, while a mariachi band roaming the sidewalks seemed to delight (and perhaps puzzle) passersby. And a few groups were studying their event map, darting from venue to venue.
Part of what makes Minneapolis such a comfortable city to live in—our all too spacious sprawl—is what makes this sort of event hard to pull off. A block or more separated venues, and it’s telling that the best attended place I visited was Pimento, where singer Jamecia Bennett has been holding parties every Thursday this summer.
It’s no less telling that Bennett got people dancing with some familiar soul oldies, including an Aretha Franklin medley that you better believe included “Respect.” Still, let me add that when I stopped in at Icehouse, a trio of Kyle Motl on bass, Davu Seru on drums, and Paul Metzger on guitar, playing much stranger music than most happy hour crowds seek out, had attracted an attentive audience, including some bemused children.
Though it pains my statist heart to admit it, sometimes the best thing the government can do to make the city a lively place is get out of the way.
For instance, if you want to make a lot of noise in Minneapolis, there aren’t a lot of bureaucratic obstacles. You just file for an Outdoor Amplified Sound permit for a nominal fee (waived this year). You do have to provide any neighbors within 300 feet of the event a written notice, but you don’t need their permission. And that’s it—you’re now free to rock out from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. (9 p.m. on Sunday).
That’s to the benefit of the Uptown Porchfest. “The first year we got like two disgruntled emails,” organizer Lisa Martelly tells me. “The second year we got one, and last year we didn't get any. So that's one mark of success.”
It began as a fake-it-until-you-make-it event. “I wasn’t even 30 years old when I did the first Porchfest,” Martelly says. “I had no experience with events, and I just tried really hard to make it look really official. And then I was like, ‘OK, if everybody feels like this is official, then nobody can question it.’”
Even today, it can be hard to tell which Porchfest performances are “authorized” and which have sprung up spontaneously. At the most recent event in August, I caught a set by the “grunge-adjacent” band Rox Populi, fronted by the offhandedly charismatic Roxy Vail, outside Nat’s Books on 27th Street, and that was not on the map. It’s not everyday a stylishly goth babe belts Black Flag’s “Six Pack” less than a block from your house. But really—why shouldn’t it be?
After an afternoon weaving through the Wedge and taking in all the music I could, I stopped in at Baba’s for my weekly supply of hummus and pita puffs. Heading back home down Lyndale, the metal band Kvsket was raging from a porch, and a toddler in a stroller on the sidewalk was just into it, making the most nasty rock face I’ve ever seen on a child. She had found her music.
One business that’s been working to make outdoor music performances a part of its business model is Dreamstate Cafe on the corner of 26th & Lyndale. On the Open Streets Sunday I mentioned earlier, the cafe offered a solid indie rock lineup of Spaceport, Products Band, Shrimp Olympics, and Bathtub Cig. It was the first live music the restaurant had hosted.
“We didn't lose any money,” co-owner Kirstin Wiegmann is happy to report.
“You don't know what to expect, and you know what to expect,” Wiegmann goes on to say of Open Streets. “You know the street's going to be closed, but you don't know what's going to be happening on it. There's the certainty in the experience, and the uncertainty in the gifts of the experience.”
Wiegmann and manager Alex Benick meet me outside at Dreamstate a few weeks later and—full disclosure—comp me a roasted delicata sandwich, which is delicious. (And not just in the way that free food is always delicious.) It’s a gorgeous, expansive two-level patio space that just cries to be used for something.
“It was a lot of buildup,” Benick says of the event. “We did a lot to try to cover our bases, but it turned out like… it almost went too well.”
They built the stage especially for the event. “We had bigger visions for what the stage might look like, but then it started getting really complicated,” Wiegmann says. “And Alex was just like, ‘You know what? I'm just going to get some two by fours and some plywood. I'm just gonna bang something together, and we're gonna make it work. You know, and like it's actually great—like it's super cute and it does what it needs to do.”
I voice one of my habitual complaints about the Minnesotan spirit: Its resistance to casual urban strolling. Though they’re happy to circle a lake, the people of the Twin Cities seem to require an event to pull them out to Lake or Lyndale, Hennepin or Nicollet, Broadway or Central.
But Wiegmann accepts this. “Special events, special moments, are what’s going to bring people out on the block and like out for the experience,” she says. And two businesses on this block—Odd Mart and Disco Death—already regularly host events.
The cafe has hosted two music shows in the days since, along with a filthy little puppet event you may have heard about, and the owners are trying to decide what happens next.
“If we were paying for all the permits and then you pay for the sound guy—it does start to add up pretty quickly,” Wiegmann says. “And then if you're not bringing in the equivalent or more business or scaring away your existing business on a Saturday night because they don't want to listen to a loud band…”
She switches gears and continues. “There are a lot of things we still need to figure out and learn, but at the same time, we just want to make space for things to happen,” she says. “Fun things need to happen right now, and we want to be a part of making fun things happen.”
And that’s really all it comes down to, isn’t it? What’s frustrating about the discourse surrounding Uptown is the overwhelming sense that it needs to be “saved.” But while cities do face problems (buildings left vacant by rent-hungry commercial landlords, for instance) that do need solutions, the city itself is not a problem to be solved. It’s simply a place we live in and fill with things that make our lives better, and sometimes that thing is as simple as letting a teenager add atonal piano to Nirvana’s “In Bloom.”
