Thirty years ago — May 10, 1988 — the World Wrestling Federation brought a card to Duluth for the sixth time. A television crew came along to capture matches for four episodes of the syndicated weekly program Superstars of Wrestling.
Ten year’s ago today, May 3, 2008, Duluth was featured on the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. “Megan saw this at Duluth Airport,” the post noted. “Given some of the bad food I’ve eaten in airports maybe it is a pizza-like item. Or maybe the menu isn’t actually printed ON a pizza.”
The post failed to mention one thing a commenter noticed. The person who wrote the sign also misspelled the name of the place.
The Afterburner Bar & Lounge at the Duluth International Airport closed several years ago and was replaced in 2014 by the Arrowhead Tap House.
A little cartoon retrospective on the 2008 Homegrown Music Festival, drawn by Chris Monroe in 2008.
This postcard of the Duluth Bethel building was mailed 105 years ago today — May 1, 1913. It’s not easy to read, but the sender appears to be “Auntie Paul” and the recipient is Mrs. Mildred Wilkinson of Clare, Mich.
If you’ve been living under a chicken you might not know Duluth’s 20th annual Homegrown Music Festival is upon us. There is a 108-page Homegrown Field Guide available at locations all over town with the details. Updates and peripheral tidbits can be found below.
Homegrown website
Homegrown schedule
Homegrown Facebook page
Homegrown Twitter page
Seasons 1-5 of Seth Langreck’s Duluth Band Profiles
Admission wristbands are $30 for the full eight days of music, but there are also many free-admission events.
There’s pretty much no such thing as a rock band anymore. A rock band couldn’t possibly be as cool as a screamocore post-punk dream-rock math band. The proliferation of such terms, however, has created some confusion among casual music fans. “What in the world is grindcore?” some wonder.
That’s why the Homegrown Music Festival steering committee commissioned the handy list of meaningless music-style descriptors with vague definitions that appears below. The glossary was originally compiled for the 2007 Homegrown Field Guide, and appears here as a refresher course.
Obviously it’s not necessary to include well-known genres like rap, soul, techno, country, hip hop, blues and reggae in the list because most people are familiar with those terms.
Also, since the list of music-writer lingo is seemingly endless, and this particular writer is lazy, numerous terms such as trance, electronica, reggaeton and synth pop will have to be left undefined. The goal here is not to be comprehensive, but simply to be helpful.
American roots music is basically folk music, but saying “American roots” or “Americana” instead of “folk” leaves the impression the artist is more like Woody Guthrie than like Joni Mitchell.
Black metal is thrash metal played by people who dislike mainstream culture and religion. The goal is to show contempt for anything conventional by distorting and otherwise mangling song structures while shrieking a lot. You know, get mad at the man, take it out on music in general.
Bands that were part of the first Homegrown Music Festival in 1999 tended to be long-running acts that played dozens if not hundreds of shows. Some recorded numerous albums, others put out just one album or at least a few scattered singles.
The exception is 2 Sleepy People, a short-lived act that is nonetheless remembered for stealing the show the one time it played Homegrown. Available above is a rare recording of the group, captured at the Shaky Ray Records studio in Duluth’s Hillside, one day before the very first Homegrown. The track was recorded by Mark Lindquist, who supplied it to Perfect Duluth Day for your pre-Homegrown 2018 nostalgia fix.
R.I.P. DJ Baby Judy.
This undated photo shows the old Duluth Curling Club perched on a bluff at the shore of Lake Superior. The building at 1338 London Road stood from 1913 to 1984. More Duluth Curling Club history can be found in “Postcards from the Duluth Curling Club.”
A Nice Relaxing Sea Cruise
Dale R. Botten
Page Publishing
(Jan. 18)
Web Watching: A Guide to Webs & the Spiders that Make Them
Larry Weber
Adventure Publications
(Jan. 25)
Chance Poems
Poems by Michael Kleber-Diggs, Julie Gard, Sheila Packa and Kathleen Roberts
Edited by Kathleen Roberts
Wildwood River Press
(Feb. 3)
Uploaded to Flickr 10 years ago today — April 16, 2008 — is this montage of shots by photographer Jules Ameel. The six members of Duluth band No Wings to Speak Of are shown at Gronk’s Grill and Bar in Superior devouring a six-pound Enger Tower Burger.
Once again we feature a “Dutch Kid” pennant postcard, similar to “Duluth vas dere best” and others shown in the recommended links to this post.
This picture postcard was mailed 110 years ago today — April 13, 1908 — from Minot, N.D. William Richert had just arrived in Douglas, N.D., presumably after a stay in Duluth, and sent the card to his brother Charles in Sublette, Ill. The card arrived on April 15.
“Located at the edge of the Duluth loop district,” the Lincoln Hotel’s spot on West Second Street was “most advantageous,” according to this old brochure.
This postcard image looking out from Skyline Drive at the city’s hillside, downtown, Aerial Lift Bridge, Minnesota Point, Lake Superior and so on has been used a few times as Perfect Duluth Day’s cover photo on Facebook, and more than once has been met with the question, “Who did this painting?” The answer is, we don’t know. Old postcards rarely credit the artist. But maybe someone out there knows.
In an effort to better serve the community, Perfect Duluth Day announced today it will convert its nearly 15-year-old website into an all-advertising format, then launch two new websites to separately serve eastern and western Duluth with neighborhood-specific features and folksy tidbits.
