A fifth-grader when Minneapolis’ fabled M-80 rock festival took place in 1979, Chris Strouth is happy to confirm it lives up to the hype he’d been hearing for decades.
“All the boomers in this scene just won’t shut up about this thing,” he remembered.
Too young to have been hanging out in Minneapolis’ 7th St. Entry after it first opened in 1980, Rick Fuller now better understands the big things happening in the puny room inside First Avenue in those days.
“It was such an incubator for what all came next,” he said.
Thanks in large part to Fuller and Strouth, the rest of us who weren’t around for these legendary moments in Twin Cities music history can also now get a taste of what they were like. The two music-centric filmmakers culled archived video footage to create a pair of movies showing exclusively at this week’s Sound Unseen festival.
“M-80,” which captures the Walker Art Center-sponsored “no wave” music fest, screens Friday night at the Main Cinema. The two-day fest was put on at the University of Minnesota Field House and featured Devo, the Suburbs, Suicide Commandos and a couple dozen more acts pushing rock’s boundaries at the time.
On Saturday afternoon, Sound Unseen will screen more footage from that era at the Parkway Theater in a film billed as “7 Nights in the Entry.” It’s taken from a weeklong video shoot organized by Twin/Tone Records in September 1981 featuring local underground groups already on or hoping to be on the label, including then-fledgling bands Hüsker Dü and the Replacements and fun lesser-knowns such as Fine Art, the Dads, Things That Fall Down and Wilma & the Wilbers.
In both films, the video footage — digitized from ¾-inch tape — is as lo-fi as many of the bands seen in it. However, the audio quality is surprisingly strong. Credit goes to Twin/Tone label co-founder Paul Stark, who captured the music in each film on a mobile recording unit he had cobbled together around that time.