Hard work makes Minnesota Music Cafe a great place to play

Jim Walsh

Pop Music Critic

We are starved for authenticity, and don't the entertainment vultures know it.

In the '90s, one of the biggest trends in the club industry has been for a chain, calling itself "Famous Dick's Bisquick and Booze" or some such, to come into a town, buy up a formerly genuinely quaint pub, plaster the walls with faux-faded posters of Elvis and B.B. King, throw in some old-timey license plates and antiques, and -- voila! -- instant atmosphere, authentic city history.

Never mind that the same atmosphere can be had anywhere in the country, like so many golden arches. But if you look around hard enough, there are still examples of the real deal. Like around the corner of Seventh and Payne on the edge of downtown St. Paul, where the marquee reads, "Yes We're Open!"

After weeks of anticipation, the Minnesota Music Cafe(449 Payne Ave.; 776-4699) opened last week. At 4 p.m.Nov. 12, the city building inspector finally gave the go-ahead. Five hours later, the place was packed wall-to-wall with people, who surveyed the club with big eyes and open jaws, and offered congratulations to the owners, Karen Palm and Billy Larson.

"Almost everything in the joint has a story," says Larson, standing with Palm near the sound board. "We bought the dance floor from a place in North Dakota. The bar's from the old Mirage. We got those curtains behind the stage from a school auction in Mankato for 100 bucks. The tables, we found in ads in the paper.

"We did it on a shoestring. We did all the labor ourselves, and you feel good when you walk in the place. You can sort of feel the heart and soul and blood and guts that went into it."

When Palm and Larson bought the building in July, it was just another dive bar -- which has been the case, in various incarnations, for the past 20 years. But the building was originally owned by the Gentile family of St. Paul's East Side, who ran a first-class restaurant/bar. That is the legacy that Palm and Larson hope to tap into.

Palm spent almost 20 years as booking agent at the Rockin' Eastside, Larson is guitarist with legendary Minnesota hard-rockers Raggs, and to help make their dream a reality, the two East Side natives parlayed their reputation into karmic capital.

"For the years and years and years we've been in this business, we've been straight with people, and it's all coming back now," says Palm. "We had at least 30 people help us do stuff here -- construction, cleaning, hauling, everything -- for free."

The music room features an impressive dance floor and showcase stage, and banners saluting such Minnesota musicians as Lonnie Knight, the Hoopsnakes, Lamont Cranston, Eddie Berger, Bob Dylan, Chameleon, Yanni, Gary Puckett, Frank Yankovich, Augie Garcia, Doug Maynard, Prince, the Time, the Jets and more.

The stage is huge, with a first-rate sound and light system. The past week has featured sets from bluesman Joe Juliano, R&B veterans Checkers and the progressive jazz quartet the Jaztronauts. In the coming weeks, Willie Murphy, the Lights Out Committee, Raggs, the Solid Senders and Lamont Cranston will help christen the club.

"There won't be a musician that gets up there," says Larson, nodding toward the stage, "who won't know we weren't thinking of them."

In the front bar, the walls are dotted with mini-shrines to Dylan, Willie and the Bees, and others. Above the bar, there's a picture of Palm, a former fishing guide, with a string of fish, next to framed photos of Larson with his friend, Faces/Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood. This night, the place is buzzing with people playing an electronic trivia game, shooting pool and watching basketball on cable TV.

"All those years at the Rockin' East Side – and nobody cared," says Palm. "Now we've got older people

from the neighborhood stopping in, and college kids from Metropolitan University, St. Kate's and the U of M. The firemen from next door come over to say hi. And the day we opened, the neighborhood beat cop came in and said we increased the property value 100 percent."

Much of which can be credited to the two friends' persistence. They spent long hours working in the summer heat, and at one point, Palm was furiously taking out a wall with a sledgehammer. The sight prompted Larson's teen-age daughter to turn to Palm's teen-age daughter and say, "Wow. Your mom is strong."

"This might sound corny, but at the time, that song 'I Believe I Can Fly' was on the radio all the time," says Palm. "And I said to my daughter,'Katie, I'm gonna have to be able to fly to pull this off.' "

"It was tough," confirms Larson. "We both lost a lot of weight."

"There were a lot of obstacles put up by the city of St. Paul, but we really knew we could do it," says Palm "And we just kept going, because we knew it wasn't going to be good just for Billy and me. We knew it could be good for the neighborhood, and the musicians, and the people who work here."

Although the construction is over, both Palm and Larson admit that the real work has just begun. Both have mortgaged their houses to launch the club, and they realize it will be a long time before they make any money from what Larson calls their "labor of love." Which is what it feels like, even to an outsider. Indeed, the trendiest thing at the Minnesota Music Club is probably the Traveling Wilburys' guitar that rests next to the Dylan display. There are no "old-timey" anythings here. Just guitar picks, photos, sheet music and dusty, faded album jackets. The memorabilia comes not from the factory, but from real people's real collections.

Whether the club will be around as long as the musicians it seeks to honor remains to be seen. But a promising sign came Tuesday night, as Palm and Larson showed a visitor around. As the clock struck midnight, the MMC got any bar's official baptism: a woman with a pickle bucket full of roses, walking up to patrons, saying, "Roses, one dollar."

"It has character," says Palm, her eyes drifting up to the Prom Ballroom posters that paper the dining-room walls, her face beaming bright as her auburn hair. "You can tell that a corporate entity didn't come in here and 'rough it up,' " says Larson.