A girl committed suicide in the fifth stall in the bathroom, so it's always been legend that that's not a good one.
Tim Kennedy:One night I see this girl with straight brown hair, straight-out-of-the-'70s look. Come the end of the night we're upstairs getting people out, and I see her by the girls' bathroom. I go, "Okay, hon, you gotta get going." Me and Betsy went into the bathroom to get her out and there was nobody there. We both saw her walk in, and she was gone. That was a ghost, absolutely.
Daniel Corrigan
Related Content
More About
Molly McManus:I think there's probably ghosts, but you also got to think about how many millions of people have been there. There's a lot of energy in that building.
Grant Hart:Steve had an early fascination with heights. There were a couple times when he would be hanging from high balconies in a drunken state. Steve cleaned up--first went the blow, then went the alcohol, finally the cigarettes. But even in his worst substance-abusing days he was doing a better job of running the club than anybody that he's tried to pass it on to in the meantime.
Rod Smith:In the early '80s coke was so prevalent that when Cabaret Voltaire came to town, someone arranged to have the area on the balcony to the left of the stage guarded, and everyone was just chopping up lines and hoovering them up in plain view of staff. There were maybe two or three coke dealers working at the club at any given time. It dropped off in the '90s because the coke dealers all either quit or got fired.
Tim Kennedy:Drug use--it was there, but it wasn't the focal point. It's just the same as any rock club.
Rod Smith:Heroin has always been a very rare commodity at First Avenue. There wasn't a lot of interest. I remember one night I was doing door and Layne Staley of Alice in Chains had escaped from Hazelden and made his way to First Avenue and was looking to cop. We had to tell him to try the Uptown.
Randy Hawkins:I had Elastica refuse to go on because I couldn't find them heroin. This tour manager calls up the office and says, "Yeah, the girls are sick, they've got the flu, they can't go on." The Entry's already sold out, and I'm like, "Gimme that phone." The tour manager asks me, "Did you happen to have any luck with that?" And I'm like, "No." Just out of regular policy, I try not to buy acts drugs.
Chan Poling:When we were younger and first starting out, this is the one business, the one milieu, where you're going to run into a lot of drugs and booze and people who love it. If we were all dentists, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I mean, when the Replacements and the Suburbs would tour together, if you'd thrown a match in there, it would have been the end of the world. So the logical outcome of that is people sober up or die.
Peter Jesperson:The day I got out of drug treatment, Steve took me to a bar. We went to the Fine Line to see Steve Forbert. That's a pivotal moment in anyone's life, and I felt really safe, you know: I'm with Steve, nothing bad's going to happen to me.
Rod Smith:First Avenue had an after-hours shooting range in the basement, I believe in 1996. People would bring guns. Usually there'd be a lot of alcohol and weed. There'd be anywhere from five to 10 people in the basement, all at least moderately fucked up, but all very careful, holding their guns vertically as they waited to take their turns.
Tim Kennedy:Let's just say I may have heard about it. But I'm sure there were never any rifles there.
Mike Wolf, First Avenue DJ, 1991-1995:There's a door between the men's room and the women's room--that was the record room, which had a lot of what Roy Freedom and Kevin Cole had built up over the years. I know that more pot was smoked there than in any enclosed space of comparable size in the world.
Rod Smith:The Subhuman Room was under the stage. It was named that thanks to Tom Surowicz, who was writing for the Twin Cities Reader at the time. He had complained about going to see some Entry show and having it blotted out by subhuman disco. It was just a room where staff people and sound people would go and smoke pot and do coke and drink. Jack Meyers finally demanded that it be boarded up.
Kelly O'Brien, publicist:People used to hide coats under there, so you almost had a bed, practically. It was a good place to go and have a little privacy in the dark.
Rod Smith:Access to secure rooms has always been the secret to sex at First Avenue.
Tim Kennedy:When the Target Center was being built, it was a race to see who could have sex in the foundation. Lots of the staff's couples were over there trying to see who could get in to break it in first.
