The Current Rewind: March 4, 1991

Description: One day after the LAPD beat up Rodney King, an Ice Cube concert went down in history as one of the most violent shows ever held at First Avenue. Hosted by Jay Smooth, we ask rap experts and former First Ave staffers about gangsta rap, security, and the uneasy relationship between the Minnesota music industry and Black hip-hop artists.

This is the sixth episode of The Current Rewind's "10 Pivotal Days at First Avenue" season. If you missed the first five episodes, catch up below.

• April 3, 1970 (The day it all began)
• Nov. 28-29, 1979 (The days that told the future)
• Sept. 27, 1982 (Bad Brains/Sweet Taste of Afrika/Hüsker Dü)
• Aug. 3, 1983 (The birth of "Purple Rain")
• Oct. 22, 1990 (Sonic Youth/Cows/Babes in Toyland)

Transcript of
The Current Rewind
season 2, episode 6: "March 4, 1991"

Anne O'Connor: We're talking about almost 30 years ago, but my memory of this was like, you opened up the gate at the horse races, and everybody was off to it.

[Ice Cube, "The Bomb," with the lyrics:

"With the L, the E, the N, the C, the H
The M, the O, the B, the great
Lyrics that make the beat swing and I gotcha
It's the hip-hopper that don't like coppers." Hard cut.]

Anne O'Connor: And it was just like an explosion, and it was non-stop all night long.

["The Bomb" picks up where it left off, running through these lyrics:

"And if you try to upset the pot, son
You get kicked in the chest like a shotgun
I make the beats, I make the breaks
I make the rhymes that make you shake
Make you find
Ice Cube never caught in the middle
I make stuff that kick you in the a** a little." Hard cut.]

Anne O'Connor: We just went from one fight to the next fight to the next fight. There was no breathing time. There was no downtime. It was just, "What emergency is there to go and deal with next?"

[Ice Cube's "The Bomb" returns with a sample of spoken audio and several voices singing, "The bomb"]

Cecilia Johnson VO: Gangsta rap was the most controversial music of the '90s – praised as an expression of Black America's righteous anger, reviled for its misogyny and depictions of violence. Taking cues from Schooly D and Ice-T, Los Angeles group N.W.A popularized the genre with their album Straight Outta Compton. Their most talented rhymer, Ice Cube, left the group to go solo in 1990. In early 1991, he brought his show to Minneapolis's First Avenue, for one of its most memorable nights ever.

["Hive Sound" by Icetep]

Cecilia Johnson VO: [over theme] I'm Cecilia Johnson. This is The Current Rewind, the show putting music's unsung stories on the map. For our second season, we're looking back at one of the Twin Cities' – and the country's – greatest live venues through a series of pivotal nights. We're bringing on guest hosts for several episodes. In this one, Jay Smooth – the New York hip-hop radio legend and cultural commentator – joins us to tell the story of one of the most infamous shows in First Avenue's history. I do want to warn you: This episode contains explicit accounts of racism and violence.

[rewind sound effect]

Jay Smooth VO: Way back in 1991, I founded New York's longest-running hip-hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad. It was a pivotal time for hip-hop music, when it was still just beginning to cross all sorts of cultural boundaries. And the other love of my musical life back then was the Black Minneapolis Sound, as defined by Prince and his many collaborators – who, in their own way, were on a similar path of bringing Black music into spaces where it hadn't necessarily been all that welcome.

So, as a devoted student of Prince and hip-hop who came of age in that era, the First Avenue club and its relationship with Black music, and hip-hop, specifically, has always been an object of fascination for me. And though it was primarily defined as a rock club, First Avenue did host a number of high-profile hip-hop shows in the '80s and early '90s, according to someone who saw a lot of them.

Tim Wilson: Timothy Wilson, Urban Lights Music owner.

Jay Smooth VO: Tim's record store, Urban Lights, is a community hub in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul.

Tim Wilson: I remember seeing Run-D.M.C. I remember they had Jam Master Jay kind of suspended in the air, swinging back and forth, and they couldn't jump around on the stage, because the records were skipping and stuff like that, but they still made it through. I remember going to KRS-One; the sound crashed and he literally had one of his people beat box, and he continued to perform. [Tim laughs]

Jay Smooth VO: On top of the big names from out of state, Minnesotan hip-hop acts the Micranots and the I.R.M. Crew sometimes performed in First Ave's smaller room, the 7th Street Entry. Still, it would take a while for the club's overall attitude to change, from what sound engineer Randy Hawkins, in Chris Riemenschneider's book First Avenue: Minnesota's Mainroom, called, quote, "anti-rap." The non-white population of Minneapolis grew nearly 70 percent during the '80s. But hip-hop took longer to bloom in the Twin Cities than on the coasts, partly because the success of Prince, the Time, and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis made funk the sound du jour there in the '80s. One of First Avenue's most successful dance nights was More Funk, every Thursday with the club's longtime DJ Roy Freedom. Prince and Jimmy Jam would sometimes bring test pressings for the occasion. Tim Wilson also DJ'ed there.

Tim Wilson: You know, it was disco, funk, rap, kind of all mixed up into one hodgepodge. It was just a little bit of hip-hop at the time, because rap just hadn't really – hadn't really captured the imagination of the world, let's say it like that. It wasn't the Wall Street darling that it is today. So it was a record here, a record there, but it was just a lot of Minneapolis Sound stuff. Of course you would get a lot of Prince and people like André Cymone, the Girls, Ta Mara & the Seen, Alexander O'Neal.

Dan Corrigan: More Funk with Roy Freedom? We used to call it More Fights with Roy Freedom – ha!

Jay Smooth VO: Dan Corrigan has been First Avenue's official photographer since 1995. These clips are from a 2003 interview he did with Pete Scholtes of City Pages.

Dan Corrigan: There was one night, there was the biggest fight I've ever seen down there. It was just crazy. It started on the dance floor and kind of went around the right and spilled all the way out to the entryway.

Jay Smooth VO: That brawl took place in 1990, during More Funk's fifth anniversary. Randy Hawkins told our writer Michaelangelo Matos about that night.

Randy Hawkins: The fifth anniversary of [More] Funk night it was a similar situation of losing control of the club. There was a few times where it was like, "We've lost control of this."

Jay Smooth VO: Now, this kind of thing didn't happen very often. One reason for that is First Avenue's security system.

Sabrina Keith: There's, like, a light switch at various locations throughout the club, like emergency buttons you press if something goes wrong.

Jay Smooth VO: Sabrina Keith was a bartender, stagehand, and superglue employee of First Ave, working on and off from 1988 to 2004.

Sabrina Keith: And you flip the switch, and let's see, upstairs, a central light goes on. It's, like, a siren light – a red siren light. And then, I think, at the front door there might be one, as well. And then, you look over to the side of the stage, and there's many lights of many different colors, and hopefully just one of them will be spinning, and that would be – that gives you an idea of where the trouble is. And actually, just the other day, me and another old employee were talking and can remember pretty much where all the trouble lights are. It's really disturbing. [laughs] I shouldn't know that green means pool tables, which means it's by where the current coat check is and no more pool tables.

Jay Smooth VO: The origin of the so-called "trouble lights" is still fresh in Richard Luka's mind. He had been recruited to work security in 1975, when the club was still called Uncle Sam's. You may remember him from the Ramones and Pat Benatar episode earlier this season. Richard spoke with our producer, Cecilia, and First Ave's longtime general manager Steve McClellan.

Richard Luka: The reason for that light was that in March of 1977, I was working alone. We'd purged a lot of people out of there at