Inside the Prince-Beloved Minneapolis Venue, First Avenue

After six years of working at famed Minneapolis venue First Avenue, Sonia Grover, Nate Kranz and the rest of the staff got phone calls one November morning in 2004 telling them to come get their stuff — the nightclub was closing. The legendary venue, best known as Prince’s stomping grounds and the site of his 1984 Purple Rain film, would be shuttering its doors for good. 

“We were just kind of told the doors are going to lock, so if you have anything in the building, get your s— and get it out of here,” says Kranz, who serves as First Avenue’s GM. 

Just five months earlier, the venue’s original founder, Alan Fingerhut, had fired the club’s longtime management team of Steve McClellan and Jack Meyers, as well as financial advisor Byron Frank, and decided to run First Avenue himself, which ultimately led the club into bankruptcy.  

Kranz and Grover, who is First Avenue’s current talent buyer, got a friend to pick them up in a station wagon and immediately went down to the iconic venue, which was built inside an old Greyhound bus depot, to get their band folders and, most importantly, their “huge OfficeMax style paper calendars,” says Kranz. “We’re like, ‘Look, we have no idea what the hell is going on if we lose that calendar.’” 

As Kranz and Grover were scrambling to move the many shows they’d booked to other Twin City venues, other staff were grabbing bits of memorabilia that have not made their way back to First Avenue since. At the same time, the local population went into fight mode.  

“It can’t be overstated how much love there is for First Avenue from the local community,” says Kranz, “and that includes our government officials.”

The staff quickly started communicating with Byron Frank, who had made the wise financial decision to purchase the building only four years earlier and stepped up to prevent the venue’s imminent closure. To help in this effort, then-mayor R.T. Rybak (a frequent First Avenue visitor) moved the bureaucracy along at lightning speed — making calls to federal judges, getting the bankruptcy proceedings to move at a record pace, securing a new liquor license and anything else the club needed.

“The mayor was invaluable in being able to tell the city staff, ‘This is not the normal course of business. This is important to the city. This is the heartbeat of our city. You need to move this to the top of the docket,’” says Kranz.

Within two weeks, First Avenue and its attached 250-capacity venue 7th Street Entry were hosting shows again, and the city has remained protective of the cultural institution that Grover calls “a truly special, magical place” and which has hosted such legendary artists as Frank Zappa, Tina Turner, The Kinks, B.B. King, U2 and Run-DMC.

To commemorate First Avenue’s 40th anniversary in 2010, the staff decided to add the now-iconic white stars to the formerly all-black building. The stars — introduced in honor of one of the venue’s former names, Uncle Sam’s — feature the names of bands and artists who have played First Avenue, with some stars left blank for those to come. Grover explains that the staff knew the paint job would be relatively quick and decided not to make a public announcement about the process.

“For a day or so, the building was white or cream colored and, oh, boy, did we learn the hard way that we should have made an announcement beforehand,” says Grover. The paint job was in the local news and all over social media, with community members calling the venue in a panic. “The community feels like…Byron owned First Avenue at the time, but this belongs to all of us, so everyone should have known what was going on.”

The stars are now a tourist attraction for a building whose reputation precedes itself. The distinctly curved building was originally the Northland-Greyhound Bus Depot. The space was designed at the height of luxury travel in 1937, with public phones, shower rooms, air conditioning and checkered terrazzo floors (which remain to this day) in stunning art deco style. Just over 30 years later, the bus depot relocated, and Minneapolis native Fingerhut had the vision to turn the space into a rock club called The Depot in 1970. Later in the decade, it took on the name Uncle Sam’s, but by 1981, it became First Avenue and 7th Street Entry and was led by the partnership of McClellan and Meyers.

The 1980s also saw the emergence of one of Minneapolis’ greatest sons, Prince, and in a sense, First Avenue became his venue. Anyone who worked at or frequented the venue has a story of seeing Prince there, says Grover, but “I don’t think people ever took it for granted.”

“The vibe was always different if Prince was in the room,” says Kranz. “It gave [people] the feeling of, ‘Well, s—. I’m definitely in the right f—ing spot right now.’ ”

First Avenue’s current stage is one custom-designed by Prince for the filming of Purple Rain, and Frank added the only VIP space in the venue, the Owner’s Box, to give the superstar a space to watch any shows he attended, with or without notice.  

“Every year we go down the list of, ‘What can we do to get better, to improve?’ We’re like, ‘What about a new stage?’ But how do you tear up the stage that Prince personally designed? You don’t,” says Dayna Frank, First Avenue’s current owner. She adds that what makes First Avenue “so special is that mix of authenticity and legacy while still having the highest-class modern amenities, best sound system and best traffic flow in one location.”

Dayna Frank became the steward of First Avenue in 2009 after her father, Byron Frank, had a stroke. More than a decade before her father got sick, Dayna — who had grown up at First Avenue and attended Sunday night dance parties with other Minneapolis and St. Paul teens — moved away. But once he fell ill, “I stepped in and realized how special and irreplaceable it was,” she says. “I wanted to help maintain it and do what I could to keep it active and keep it independent. My dad thankfully recovered, but I had fallen in love with working there and the people there and stayed on after he got better.”

With 16 years under her belt, Dayna still considers herself “a newbie” on the staff. Both Grover and Kranz have more than 25 years at First Avenue, and the venue’s website boasts an entire page dedicated to employees who have worked there for more than a decade.

“We love live music. It’s so fun to be part of it in a behind-the-scenes way,” says Grover when asked about her longevity at the club. When she started in 1998 as an assistant to the booker, the company only ran First Avenue and 7th St. Entry. Now, First Avenue Productions books more than 1,000 shows annually at the additional venues it owns: the 350-cap Turf Club, the 650-cap Fine Line, the 1,000-cap Fitzgerald Theater and the 2,500-cap Palace Theatre, which it co-operates with Jam Productions.

In 2020, as the live music business shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dayna doubled down on her commitment to remaining an independent venue when she became the catalyst for the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Prior to the pandemic, many indie venues were siloed and viewed each other as competitors in an already thin-margin business. But she had visited indie venues in other cities and gotten to know owners in a non-competitive manner, which led to her reaching out once the pandemic started to create the trade organization.

“If 10 years ago, I had said, ‘Let’s start a trade association,’ there would have been a lot of ‘Why? What’s your angle? Why are you asking me for my economic data?’” says Dayna. “But it was this moment where either we were all gonna survive or none of us were gonna survive.”

Dayna subsequently became the founding president of NIVA, which successfully lobbied for the 2021 Shuttered Venue Operators Grant that provided more than $16 billion in funds to help independent live event venues survive through the pandemic.

“There is something unique about having the ability to control a room or make decisions based solely on what is right for the local community and the local artists and the folks on the ground,” says Dayna of keeping the legendary venue independent. “I’m the only owner. There’s not private equity. There’s no investors. Nate, Sonia and I can do what we feel is right with no outside influences and no ulterior motives. That’s a really wonderful and powerful position to be in.”

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