Sept. 27, 1982: Bad Brains/Sweet Taste of Afrika/Husker Du

Almost 40 years ago, D.C. rockers Bad Brains played First Avenue with two Minnesotan openers: Sweet Taste of Afrika and Husker Du. While Husker Du are relatively well-known today, Sweet Taste of Afrika are all but forgotten. Meanwhile, Bad Brains are world-famous, but their hurtful behavior has flown under the radar. In this episode, we tease out the complicated relationship between the three bands on the bill, their genres, and their identities.

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

• April 3, 1970 (The day it all began)
• Nov. 28-29, 1979 (The days that told the future)

Transcript of
The Current Rewind
season 2, episode 3: "Sept. 27, 1982"

[Bad Brains' "Banned In DC"]

Cecilia Johnson VO: D.C. rockers Bad Brains are among the best-known hardcore bands in history. They're famous for their live shows. Imagine a scene like this:

[volume inches up]

Cecilia Johnson VO: Lead singer H.R. is flailing, his voice curdled from screaming, and drummer Earl Hudson rides the cymbals hard. A song later, the band dips into reggae. The kids who were moshing just a minute ago are now letting their shoulders slump, swaying from side to side, until Dr. Know fires up the guitar again, and the audience churns back into a pit.

Maybe you've experienced this in person, maybe you've just heard about it...but whatever's the case, for a lot of people, Bad Brains are one of the only Black rock bands they've heard of. Let's talk some more about that.

[Icetep's "Hive Sound"]

Cecilia Johnson VO: [over theme] I'm Cecilia Johnson, and this is The Current Rewind, the show putting music's unsung stories on the map. For our second season, we're exploring the history of First Avenue, the downtown Minneapolis venue that has become one of the Twin Cities' – and the country's – greatest clubs.

[Icetep's "Hive Sound" crescendos, plays for several seconds, and fades down]

Cecilia Johnson VO: So far, we've seen First Avenue evolve from the Depot to Uncle Sam's to Sam's. For this episode, we'll jump ahead to 1982, when Bad Brains, Sweet Taste of Afrika, and Hüsker Dü shared the Mainroom stage.

We set out to tell a story about one of the most revered bands in punk music. But we ended up learning a lesson: that while representation is definitely necessary, if you treat individuals' identities as their virtues, you can actually allow them less humanity – and excuse the harm that they've done.

Honestly, this episode presented a lot of challenges, and we want to let you in on them as we tell this story. So let's do that. I'm super excited to introduce our guest host for this episode. She runs the show Rock and Roll Over at the University of Minnesota's Radio K and her name is Zoë Challenger. She's definitely one of our youngest guest hosts this season, but I can already tell she has a ton of talent and wisdom to share with the world. Here she is.

[rewind sound effect]

Zoë Challenger VO: I'm Zoë Challenger. Being a Twin Cities native, I am embarrassed to say that my first concert at First Avenue was when Noname came to town in January of 2019. I was 19 years old, and I went alone. While I grew up with a desire for musical exploration, I did not grow up in a musical household by any means. I told my parents I was going with a friend, when in reality, I couldn't find anyone to go with me. So I draped my mother's elegant hand-me-down wool coat over my plaid skirt, crop top, and tattered stockings. I let the material confidence override any underlying social anxieties.

As an only child, I've never been afraid of being alone, but walking into a venue by myself brought up new feelings. Since that night, I found myself at the First Avenue Mainroom or the 7th St Entry nearly once a week until the coronavirus pandemic hit the nation. Most of the time I would arrive alone, but over time, I would find myself running into more and more familiar faces at any given show. Maneuvering the block of 7th Street and Hennepin Avenue will always be an act of muscle memory.

Over the last 50 years, First Avenue has hosted a variety of big names, but the early 1980s were jam-packed. From 1982-84, the calendar swerved from funk to punk to New Wave, with acts ranging from talkbox legends Zapp & Roger, to Minnesotan rockers the Replacements, to Bow Wow Wow, the band behind "I Want Candy." That's not to mention Prince, U2, Ray Charles, and a then-unknown Wynton Marsalis. But if you were to look through the 1980s First Ave band files that are now housed at the Minnesota Historical Society, you'd struggle to find a particular category of artists: well-known Black American rockers.

The Minnesota music community has a lot of excuses for this, the most common one being, "There weren't that many Black rock bands to book." It's true that funk and soul were much more popular among Black Americans, especially those raised in the church. But it's too easy to say that Black rock wasn't a thing. In fact, according to those band files, rock-adjacent bands War, Ipso Facto, and Defunkt played First Avenue in the early '80s. But aside from the Historical Society files, those shows hardly left a paper trail, whether in microfilm archives or the internet. Which brings us to an issue at the heart of this story: which legacies last and which fade away.

The story of Bad Brains is fairly well-established. The D.C. group originally banded together in the 1970s as a jazz fusion ensemble called Mind Power. After going to a Bob Marley concert and hearing the Ramones' song "Bad Brain," they were influenced enough to change not only their name but also their sound, ending up with a mix of punk rock and reggae. At this point, a pattern was beginning to form with Black musicians who dove into punk music; they were often eclectic in their genre-molding and evolution.

In Minneapolis, local punk bands who'd been performing at bars like Duffy's and the Longhorn had a new room to fill: the 7th St Entry, a small space off the side of the First Avenue Mainroom.

Steve McClellan: And there was just, say, we got this empty room. It's a storage area.

Zoë Challenger VO: Around the same time as he opened the Entry, general manager Steve McClellan hired Chrissie Dunlap, who ended up booking the space.

Chrissie Dunlap: I started out just 100 percent Steve's assistant: You know, his desk (and office generally) was just filled up with contracts, riders, promo material, you know, label stuff, cassette tapes everywhere. And I would go in there and just try to prioritize things – tell him, "This needs to be signed, this, you gotta do this." And then I would just sorta take the promo material and start promoting shows. And as time went on, a lot of that detailed stuff ended up leaving Steve's desk and [moving] over to my desk. The bands would start calling, looking for gigs, and, you know, I started out giving the info to Steve and kinda working on him with it, but he was busy doing the real talent buying, and I was there during the day more when the phone rang and people stopped by with cassettes and stuff. So I just kinda, little by little, picked it up.

Zoë Challenger VO: One of the bands Chrissie would book – a lot – were Hüsker Dü, the St. Paul punk group who opened for Bad Brains at First Avenue. But that's not a huge surprise; in the '80s, they were playing upwards of 60 shows a year. Hüsker Dü guitarist Bob Mould wanted to tell us all about this era, but right when we were producing this episode, he was actually called for jury duty. While Bob did his civic duty, we grabbed a clip from the audiobook of his memoir, See A Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody.

Bob Mould: We started the spring tour in the Midwest, with our four-year anniversary gig at First Avenue in Minneapolis. First Avenue was originally a bus depot in downtown Minneapolis. It became a nightclub in 1970, and 7th St Entry was the coat check before becoming its own 300-capacity music room. First Avenue had been a cornerstone of the Midwest rock scene for years, and to play the 1,200-capacity main room was the goal of many a Midwest musician.

Zoë Challenger VO: Along with Bob, bassist Greg Norton and drummer/songwriter Grant Hart recorded their debut album Land Speed Record at the Entry in '81, and they released it via New Alliance in January 1982.

Bob Mould: The band always played with purpose – there wasn't a lot of goofing around in the live shows. On the faster material, Greg would start jumping in the air or do scissor kicks. I typically wore a grave, glowering expression, digging deep into my guitar when not singing. Grant was behind the kit, looking much like Animal from the Muppet Show band, except with longer hair and bare feet. We were young and inexperienced, but we had tons of energy and were able to create a solid wall of so