Uptown Bar all tapped out

It wasn't like a funeral at the Uptown Bar & Café on Sunday night. That was more the case on Saturday, when the devilish surf-rock band Lusurfer led a procession with a coffin down Hennepin Avenue.

The final night at the soon-to-be-demolished Minneapolis watering hole Sunday wasn't any big blowout, either. The biggest surprises Sunday were more about what was missing than who showed up.

Among the conspicuous MIA items in the night were the flat-screen TVs, already taken off the walls by the owner's family. The menus were gone, too, since the kitchen ran out of its hangover-curing food Saturday afternoon.

And one of the first things the regulars noticed absent on Sunday was doorman Ron Upton's familiar long, white beard. He had cut it off onstage a night earlier as a symbolic gesture -- and as a pragmatic one, since he might need to find a new job.

"It still feels a little raw," Upton said, either talking about his face or his emotions.

In business 70-some years, with 35 employees of late (only one of whom quit early), the Uptown was shut down to make way for chain retail stores. Talk of reopening the bar in a nearby site remained strong Sunday, especially after Mayor R.T. Rybak showed up for Friday's sold-out show and pledged his support.

As general manager Dennis Willey put it, "I think people would be a lot more upset tonight if there wasn't such a good chance of us reopening."

In the end, the Uptown Bar's last hurrah was a lot like any other night there, which seemed fitting for a bar that was never all that flashy. Its best trait may have been the feeling that it had always been there.

Disparate lineup of bands

As on many nights, Sunday's bands were all wildly different from one another. Poppy wordsmiths the Twilight Hours headlined, featuring former members of former regulars Trip Shakespeare. They were preceded by innovative jazz trio Happy Apple, which had made a live recording there.

For the occasion, lip-synching opening band the Hawaii Show created "The Uptown Monster Ballad," a melodramatic, '80s-style hair-band anthem that drew a sentimental response despite being tongue-in-cheek.

Talent booker Brian McDonough said he had sought bigger names to play the final night -- as big as Guns N' Roses, in fact, whose bassist Tommy Stinson virtually grew up at the bar (as a member of the Replacements and the son of longtime bartender Anita Stinson-Kurth). McDonough was impressed just to get a response from GNR management.

"But they said we would need somewhere to land a helicopter," McDonough said with a no-jiving grin.

It also seemed fitting that the musicians who did perform arrived via very short car rides. One reason why the Uptown took off as a vibrant music venue in the mid-'80s was its proximity to low-rent houses and apartments where musicians lived on top of each other. These days, pricier condos are going up in Uptown alongside all the new retail space (not to mention all the empty older retail space, too).

"I can't imagine Uptown without this bar," said Happy Apple bassist Erik Fratzke, who also performed there Saturday with his metal band Zebulon Pike.

Twilight Hours bassist John Munson said he loved the place for its corner-bar feel -- which outweighed its oft-derided sound system and boisterous, boozy crowds.

"I can't tell you exactly how many times I've played here," Munson said, "but I can tell you that every time I have played here I haven't been able to hear myself onstage."

Among the first people in line at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday -- doors opened at 8, and a waiting line had formed by about 8:30 -- longtime Uptown area residents Cassandra Pupovac and Jenn Newman said the bar "is the only bar any of us who live around here go to anymore."

"All the other bars around here now cater to the same narrow demographic, but here you had diversity," Pupovac said.

By the end of the Twilight Hours' set around 1 a.m., half of the beer tap handles at the bar had cups over them indicating their emptiness, and the last of the well whiskey and other random liquor had been poured.

Standing outside the door as the masses slowly, pensively streamed out, the beardless Upton shook his head in disbelief. Coincidentally or not, the doorman is likely to soon lose his second job at Uptown's Rainbow Foods, which is to be torn down for a fancier grocery store.

"It's hard to see this place go," Upton said of the bar, "but it's nice seeing the customers raise hell here right up until the end."

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658