Day 28: Minneapolis, MN
Welcome
Yesterday we played a show in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Breakfast came from an unusual direction yesterday. Our friends from the band The National had dined at an excellent Himalayan restaurant the previous evening and had very generously brought us back a stack of takeaway meals to enjoy. We saved them to eat in the morning, and so I took my first meal of the day in front of the fireplace in the hotel lobby, a reheated Vege Thali from Little Tibet Madison.
Our drive to Minnesota had us heading northwest out of Madison on I94, up through the western part of Wisconsin. The scenery alongside the highway was mostly cornfields as we crossed this state, the nation’s 8th largest corn producer, and it is a landscape I never get tired of seeing, old barns, hard-working tractors, shiny silos, and the odd crop duster.
We almost succumbed to this stand of flashing name key fobs.
After five hours in the van, we pulled up outside the venue in downtown Minneapolis and disembarked into a glorious afternoon, enjoying the warm sun for a few minutes before we had to disappear into the dark interior of the building. This was the biggest room of the tour so far, and it was also housed inside of the more architecturally and historically interesting buildings we have come across. If you have seen the music video for Aerosmith’s ‘Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing’, or for Prince’s ‘99’, these were both shot inside this huge hangar-type structure known as the Minneapolis Armoury.
Dating back to 1936 the Armoury was a Public Works Administration project, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the Great Depression, and that’s where the building’s architectural style of PWA Moderne takes its name from. This style typically combines elements of Art Deco, Art Moderne, and Beaux Arts, using conservative and classical elements to convey a permanent, and monumental feel in a time when the government needed to exude authority and stability. Kasata limestone is the material used in the construction, a sedimentary rock that is rich in dolomite and magnesium making it resistant to weathering.
The Minnesota National Guard used this building from its opening until 1985 and it provided training facilities and quarters for 16 artillery, infantry, and naval units, along with supply rooms, and administration and medical facilities. Simultaneously it also served as a convention centre, sporting facility, and music venue, and as much as I have read about The Armoury I haven’t been able to figure out how all these different functions coexisted in the space.
It took quite a while for us to find our green room because it was in the top corner of the building, a 260m walk from the stage door and catering facilities, which doesn’t sound like much but adds up when you make the trip ten or twenty times in an evening. Once you got there the trip was worthwhile, though. Our room was several stories up and had a balcony with a brilliant view out over the stage and right to the end of this huge indoor space which was in the preparatory stage of the evening. Hospitality staff were setting up behind the many bars, the merch tables were getting laid out, and security were moving the barriers into place, all part of the process of entertaining 6000 people for three hours.
Our soundcheck happened as it usually does at 5pm and despite our best efforts to set up quickly and give Gabe plenty of time to optimise the PA in this cavernous room, we were hampered by a broken channel on our stage box, which meant that the electric signal generated by one of the microphones wasn’t making its way through one of the many junctions on the way to the mixing desk and therefore couldn’t be sent out to the speaker system. The National’s crew helped to diagnose this fault but unfortunately we ended up with less than ten minutes to do any real sound checking, and Gabe would have to wing it on the gig (luckily he loves and is great at doing this).
Two old friends turned up to say hello to us after soundcheck and they were Chris and Kerry from the band Bad Bad Hats, who we toured with in 2019, back when the blog was still in its infancy. They took Liz and Tristan for a walk around town ending up at the city’s waterfront on the Mississippi River, which was looking nothing short of magnificent on this fine evening.
At 7.30pm we walked out in front of what felt like a staggering number of people. Something about playing indoors just makes the crowd feel huge, much more so than playing at an outdoor festival, and it was a powerful feeling to experience. Our set came off nicely and although it was difficult to feel like you had a connection with the audience the mood in the room was good.
I don’t like awarding penalty boints but I was forced to award 1000 of them following an incident after our set. In the process of clearing the stage we were helped by some of the local stagehands, two of whom carried my bass amplifier off into the backstage area while I was packing down my pedals. I arrived back there to find that the head unit which sits atop the speaker cabinet and contains most of the sensitive electronics had tumbled onto the floor as they were setting it down, and when tested it was now exhibiting some symptoms of intermittent functionality.
As much as we would have loved to stick around for the rest of the evening and watch the show from our fantastic vantage point we had a night drive to do, getting a head start on our 1500km drive to Denver. We left after dark, heading south on I35 into the state of Iowa and after four hours we arrived at the capital of Des Moine, and the incredibly welcome sight of a brightly illuminated Holiday Inn Express.
Lifting the roller door: The view from our green room as The National kick off.
Here is Tristan’s yesterday vlog.