How First Avenue got its stars
The black building with the silver stars started life as an Art Deco bus depot. Then Joe Cocker opened it, disco nearly killed it, and Prince made it immortal.
Ask anyone in Minneapolis where the center of the music universe is and they will point at a black building on the corner of 7th and First Avenue North, covered in silver stars. The stars, more than 400 of them, each carry the name of an artist who has played the room. Reading the wall is the fastest music history lesson in America.
The bus depot years
The building opened in 1937 as a Greyhound depot, Art Deco, blue brick, air conditioning and shower rooms, the glamorous way to leave town. Greyhound itself was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, which makes the whole thing feel fated. The buses moved out in 1968 and left downtown a very sturdy, very empty landmark.
The Depot, Uncle Sam’s, First Avenue
In 1970 Allan Fingerhut turned the depot into a rock club called The Depot, and opened it with Joe Cocker and the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, a first show most venues would kill to claim. When disco swallowed the early seventies the room became Uncle Sam’s, a chain franchise with DJs. By 1981 it had shaken off the franchise and taken the name it holds now, First Avenue, with the small side room on 7th Street, the Entry, becoming the metro’s proving ground for new bands.
August 3, 1983
The room’s immortality was sealed on a single night. At a benefit show on August 3, 1983, Prince debuted a new song called "Purple Rain," and the recording from that night, the one on the album, is the First Avenue crowd you hear. The film came out in 1984 and put the club on screens worldwide. The star wall, the black paint, the room itself: after Purple Rain they stopped being local landmarks and became pilgrimage sites.
The club still runs every week of the year, and its calendar anchors our First Avenue venue page and the nightly board. See a show in the Mainroom, then find Prince’s star. It is painted gold, the only one.