If a rock club closes in Minneapolis' Warehouse District, does anyone notice?
The answer to that question should be known by Nov. 30, when Mill City Nights will host its final concert. Thus ends a four-year run of trying to bring live music to a part of downtown that favors Top 40 DJs and shot bars — and of trying to make a dent in First Avenue's Teflon-resilient grip on the Twin Cities concert market. Clearly, Mill City Nights' operators at concert industry behemoth AEG Live failed on both fronts.
"A venue this size is a challenge in this market," Joe Litvag, senior vice president at AEG's St. Louis office, admitted when the closing was announced in September.
The fact that Mill City Nights was run out of St. Louis was one of its problems. I felt lucky if I ever got anyone there to e-mail me back, and I was probably the only music writer in town to write nice things about their place — even after they assured me the room could hold 2,000 people before opening night in March 2013. That led to the notorious Jane's Addiction concert, so overcrowded they doled out refunds, slashed capacity to 1,200 and even changed the name of the place (it opened as The Brick). But it never quite got over the bad reputation.
By coincidence (a good one!), Mill City Nights' last show on Nov. 30 features one of rock's gloomiest and doomiest bands, Finnish death-metal vets Children of Bodom. The venue has several other gigs in the interim, too, including Danish electropop singer MØ on Nov. 26, country singer Kelsea Ballerini this Saturday and — what are the chances? — another Finnish metal band, Sonata Arctica, on Tuesday. Jake Rudh will also spin a Thanksgiving Eve Transmission dance party Wednesday.
If you've never heard of any of those acts besides local boy Rudh, that's no surprise, nor is it an anomaly. Except on nights First Ave was already booked, Mill City Nights' calendar in recent years was usually loaded with outcasts, underdogs and unknowns, from country singers on the periphery of major-label rosters to second-stage Warped Tour bands to, yep, a lot of extreme metal.
That lack of familiarity is actually a reason to lament the venue's demise. It's always nice for bands to have a choice of where to play in town. It's just obvious that so many artists favor First Avenue, just like most fans.
AEG is the second mega-sized entertainment corporation to go up against First Ave and lose. Live Nation did so with more success in the late-'90s and early-'00s, but at a far worse venue. Still called Clear Channel back then, the company booked the Quest, a 1,600-capacity venue that replaced Prince's Glam Slam across the street from Mill City Nights' future site on 5th Street N. If there is a hell for defunct nightclubs, the Quest was a shoo-in. It had horrendous sound, even worse sight lines and was always managed like a cattle corral.
