Got to Be Something Here: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound by Andrea Swensson

Author:Andrea Swensson [Swensson, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: HIS036090 History / United States / State & Local / Midwest (ia, Il, In, Ks, Mi, Mn, Mo, Nd, Ne, Oh, Sd, Wi), MUS020000 Music / History & Criticism, MUS039000 Music / Genres & Styles / Soul & R 'n B
ISBN: 9780816632336
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Although their sons wouldn’t know it until years later, Prince’s dad, John Nelson (seated at piano), and André Cymone’s dad, Fred Anderson (upright bass), performed together in the Prince Rogers Trio, making the young musicians’ meeting seem predestined. Photograph by John F. Glanton. Courtesy of the Hennepin County Library.

With the exception of the Andrews Sisters and polka artists like “Whoopee” John Wilfahrt, the early 1960s marked the first real period of commercial success for musicians in Minnesota. As Elvis’s swiveling hips were still haunting parents’ dreams and the Beatles’ mop tops were making their way across the pond, a slew of young bands like the Trashmen (with their song “Surfin’ Bird”) and the Castaways (with “Liar, Liar”) started climbing the charts and handily filling up ballrooms around the region. The Trashmen were an especially interesting case study in what made music successful in the early 1960s. Their big hit “Surfin’ Bird” was a note-for-note mash-up of two previously released songs by a black doo-wop group from the West Coast called the Rivingtons, “Papa Oom Mow Mow” and “The Bird Is the Word.” The Rivingtons struggled to chart either of their songs when they were released in 1962, but the Trashmen found immediate success with their remake, showing just how eager the Twin Cities pop radio market was for R&B-meets-rock sounds from clean-cut young white artists who could connect with the metro area’s large population of suburban teenagers. And connect they did. The influx of attention and cash caused the local rock scene to explode, and for the first time the artists making contemporary music in Minneapolis could be heard on the radio (KDWB) and could be followed in daily newspapers and specialty magazines like In-Beat and Twin City ’a Go Go.

But not everyone was invited to the party. In a pattern that still persists to the present day, the music community in the Twin Cities seemed to be split along racial and ethnic lines. In 1965, the city’s most powerful booking agent, Dick Shapiro, estimated that there were 350 bands in the metro area “good enough to get away with a dance job.” Shapiro and similar booking agents were sending these young rock bands all over the state, from school dances to small-town armories and ballrooms to large rooms like St. Paul’s Prom Ballroom. Even after the Trashmen and Castaways proved that teenage local rock bands could draw fans to ballrooms by the hundreds, soul music was less of a guarantee for bookers. Despite the national success of soul groups like the Impressions, Temptations, and Martha and the Vandellas, it was uncommon to hear black R&B and soul artists coming across Twin Cities airwaves. During the week of March 6, 1965, for example, the Temptations’ song “My Girl” had skyrocketed to the #1 position on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and could be heard on most Top 40 radio stations in the country—except for the Twin Cities’ KDWB, whose top songs that week were by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Righteous Brothers, Roger Miller, and Petula Clark.

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