The Impresario Returns

The man in charge of the door for the five-band bill at the Acadia Café tonight is also the master of ceremonies, and he juggles these twin responsibilities as best he can. He smiles at the Thursday–evening trickle of university students and West Bank roamers coming in from the rain and gives his pitch: “Hello! There’s no cover charge, but if you’d like to donate to support the musicians and our organization, it’s $5. Now, that’s only suggested—if you can’t pay that much, you could give $4, or $3.”

This friendly shakedown fails as often as it succeeds. That it works at all must be at least partly due to the aging-biker visage of its perpetrator: the sixty extra pounds that were the cost of quitting smoking, the graying beard, the hair that goes no farther north than his eyebrows. But what eyebrows! They are ferocious; every bit as intimidating as another man’s bulging biceps.

This is the current incarnation of Steve McClellan, and when he is running Lo-Fi Thursdays at the Acadia, he is approximately 1.85 miles away from his previous life’s work. That is the distance between Acadia Café and First Avenue, the big black Greyhound bus station-turned-nightclub where McClellan spent thirty-two years managing an extended family of employees and booking a true tastemaker’s assortment of musical talent, including many acts that came to define “the Minneapolis sound.” The club—where Prince filmed Purple Rain, where Hüsker Dü got its start, where multiracial crowds danced every week to the newest new thing—was McClellan’s home, and McClellan was its soul. McClellan’s identity was so firmly intertwined with First Avenue that separating the two seemed all but incomprehensible.

But the 1990s saw McClellan wed (to a rocker, of course), and the couple’s decade-long union created two daughters. “They’re the most important things in my life,” McClellan says of the girls, who now split their time evenly between their parents’ separate houses. Unfortunately, the only thing parents and nightclub managers have in common is that they must both occasionally deal with noisy 4 a.m. dramas involving unreasonable human behavior—otherwise, these dual roles are incompatible. “When I got married and had kids, it really changed my status down at the club,” says McClellan. “I just didn’t feel like I was home enough to be a good dad, and I wasn’t at work enough to do a good job. Each place was not getting enough of me.”

In 2004, after more than a year of upheaval (including the club’s brief closing and a trip to bankruptcy court), First Avenue finally parted ways with the man whose vision had guided it for so long. And so Steve McClellan’s path went in a different direction. At fifty-eight, still committed to diversity, indifferent to lucre, hostile to rock icon posturing, and passionate about the plight of humanity, the man who was once an impresario moved into the roles more suitable to his elder statesman stature: teacher and mentor. Oh, and emcee.

McClellan leaves the donation jar at Acadia’s entrance to introduce the next act. “OK, please welcome Art Vandalay to the stage. Art Vaandalaaay!” he booms into the mic, after asking around for help pronouncing the band’s name. (It’s a reference from Seinfeld, but McClellan was never much of a television-watcher, because it’s an activity that requires people to sit still.) His duties tonight are part of his job as the executive director of the Diverse Emerging Music Organization.

DEMO, like McClellan, got its start at First Avenue. (It was originally envisioned as a nonprofit project of the club and was for a time known as the Developing Arts and Music Foundation.) The organization’s mission is to “support, educate, and promote emerging musicians and enrich communities eager for diverse, multicultural  musical experiences.”

DEMO exists as a helping hand for bands hoping to make the leap from the garage to the stage. Raw talent, enthusiasm, and practice might get a band a solid set list of songs, but it can be hard to get noticed in the local music business. How do you convince the booker at a Twin Cities venue to give you a chance to play a show? How do you cultivate your audience? What about releasing a record? DEMO tries to connect young bands building an identity with the knowledge accumulated over the years by those on the inside of the biz. It’s a bypass around the school of hard knocks, courtesy of one of the characters who used to do the knocking.

Rachel Joyce, assistant director of public relations at the Walker Art Center, is currently chairman of DEMO’s board of directors. A longtime music-head (as the Nite Nurse, she cohosts the world music radio show Shake & Bake on KFAI), Joyce had a run-in with the dark side of McClellan when she was just a teenager booking punk shows for the fun of it. “One show that I did was really successful—that was 7 Seconds. Somehow Steve caught wind of it, and the next time 7 Seconds were coming into town, he wanted the show. So he called them, and they said, ‘Ziggy [Joyce’s old nickname] already booked us.’ Steve had no idea who I was. He thought I was a competing promoter, and I wasn’t—I was just sixteen, living with my parents. He got my phone number and called my home, and my mom said, ‘Rachel, there’s a man on the phone for you.’ So there’s this man screaming at me, ‘Who the f*** do you think you are?’ But I didn’t know there was competition for bands. I was just worried about getting through my algebra class. I lived in fear of Steve McClellan for years after that,” Joyce laughs.

Now, it’s that same indomitable spirit that makes McClellan so valuable to DEMO. Besides gently shepherding newly born folk-pop acts through their first coffeehouse gig, McClellan also acts on DEMO’s behalf when it comes time to book acts for its money-making benefit shows. “If I could have any agent on the planet represent DEMO, it would be Steve, for that reason,” Joyce says with appreciation. “You can just sit by and watch the fur fly, and it’s gonna be the other guy who caves.”

McClellan, born into a south Minneapolis Catholic family, with eight brothers and two sisters, chose to enter Nazareth Hall seminary in ninth grade. “I was going to be a priest, I was gonna change the world!” he says with remembered zeal. Though that sense of responsibility, of communal feeling, has clearly never left him, he only lasted a year before switching to DeLaSalle. He went to the University of Minnesota, but the times were too interesting (it was the late 1960s and early 1970s), and his habit of taking courses with little relation to his degree program worked against him—he stayed on for years, but never graduated.

After his split from First Ave. became public, McClellan was contacted by St. Paul’s McNally Smith College of Music to participate in some panel discussions. The private school soon added him to its faculty roster. He now teaches several classes in the music business department. “Being around students is really good for me. It keeps stuff fresh,” he says. “I always tell them, ‘I’m going to learn a lot more from you than you are from me.’”

But it’s definitely a two-way street. As liberal arts chair Janis Weller says, “He’s got the real voice of the music industry, so he talks to students not about what might happen or what used to happen but what is happening.” He regularly takes his students out of the classroom and into the real world for field trips. After three decades spent dealing with rock stars and the drug-and-ego-filled cosmos in which they shine, the loquacious McClellan has an arsenal of anecdotes to enliven any discussion. “It was like a performance,” says music business department chair Anthony Cox of sitting in on McClellan’s Venue Management class.

Back at Acadia, the night is winding down, and McClellan is counting up the money for the young acts who got their chance to play without having to prove themselves first. (As DEMO’s literature boasts, “We will book most artists unseen and unheard.”) Lo-Fi Thursdays don’t bring in as much money since the café moved from its Franklin Street location. Unlike at the old Acadia, the stage is in the same room as the dining area, so the audience is at once larger and less attentive. Though a recurring theme when talking to McClellan is his uneasy relationship with money—his lack of motivation in making it, his bafflement when it comes to managing it—he seems genuinely concerned at the meagerness of the amount each artist will take home. Which makes sense when you consider that his true passion is dealing with people, and people you are handing out cash to are generally happier the more cash you are handing them.

For McClellan, it always leads back to the human connection. This summer, he and DEMO’s Rachel Joyce are helping contribute to the Twin Cities Pan–African festival, a weeklong celebration of African culture being held August 6–10 at The Cedar, Parkway Theater, and other locations. “We really do see it as a way to bring communities together through music, to welcome our new neighbors, and show that the Twin Cities can graciously welcome new people into their community,” says Joyce. “We’re finding ways that DEMO can make music an agent for social change. Steve has a heart of gold and is a true idealist in a profession that has very few.”

He’s also on board a venture to turn the old Palace Theatre in downtown St. Paul into a nightclub on the scale of First Ave. His focus has broadened in the years since he last ran a venue though, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone if he took his years of management savvy and personal connections and settled permanently into the nonprofit world.

“I want to be like my brother,” reflects McClellan, whose sibling just returned from a stint working on humanitarian projects in Haiti. “Happy working with the people I’m working with, doing something that feels good, not necessarily for monetary gain. Just a great group of people, doing something that feels important.”

Sarah Askari is a freelance arts writer based in Minneapolis.