Tag: Minneapolis Music in the 80s

  • Dark Carnival | Frozen Statues

    I’ve been revisiting some of my Minneapolis music past and there is one band that managed to evade all of my attempts in the past to locate any of their music in physical format or online: Dark Carnival.

    This is not the superband from Detroit by the same name that involved Stooges members and had a female lead… yeller? (I was not impressed, suffice it to say.)

    This iteration of Dark Carnival was from a slightly earlier period of 1983-1988, and probably classes as more as proto-goth than goth. I’m fairly certain I saw them live at least a few times at one of the many popup alley and record store gigs, outdoor block parties and all-age shows I managed to find when I was too young to be admitted to drinking shows.

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  • Zines from the 80s

    I was just doing some digging around into the past and stumbled across an item that was a fixture of my youth but I had completely forgotten about.

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  • Zombie Love | Morticia

    We can live for eternity
    We can live for eternity tonight

    Dress of black, face of white
    Lips of red, what a frightening sight
    Are you ready to try zombie love?
    Zombie love

    Back in the peak of my 80s “goth” phase, there was an admission I was willing to make — should anyone ask or care to enquire. It was no grand secret:

    I did not think that the subculture should be taken too terribly serious.

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  • More Trouble, Boys

    The biography I am reading for the Minneapolis band, The Replacements, is both lengthy and well done. I’m just crossing the half-way point and the tale has reached that point in their story where the band started to show their cracks with their lead guitarist, Bob Stinson.

    There was always a bit of tension there between Bob and the singer-songwriter Paul Westerberg. Paul was a little older than Bob and Chris Mars (the drummer) and all of them were older by quite a bit than Tommy Stinson (bass player). Paul used his age and experience to take over what had originally been Bob’s band, Dogbreath. [Side note: Tommy was very young and playing bars on a regular basis by 13 years of age.]

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  • Trouble Boys

    I’m currently reading through Trouble Boys: The True Adventures of The Replacements, a biography that I picked up on sale for Kindle a week or so ago. I’m less than halfway through it but, by golly, it is a great read already — although I might have to admit being biased because I lived in Minneapolis at the time that the story largely takes place and it fits with my memories fairly well.

    Growing up in 70s-80s Minneapolis, Minnesota was a fantastic time for someone who loved music such as myself. I didn’t really move beyond my family’s taste in music until 1980 or so (which, even by my eclectic standards, was abysmal), but the scene had only really started building up steam the decade before and was just coming to a head by around then anyway.

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