Pivotal moments in Minneapolis music live on screen in two Sound Unseen film fest entries

A fifth-grader when Minneapolis' fabled M-80 rock festival took place in 1979, Chris Strouth is happy to confirm it lives up to the hype he'd been hearing for decades.

"All the boomers in this scene just won't shut up about this thing," he remembered.

Too young to have been hanging out in Minneapolis' 7th St. Entry after it first opened in 1980, Rick Fuller now better understands the big things happening in the puny room inside First Avenue in those days.

"It was such an incubator for what all came next," he said.

Thanks in large part to Fuller and Strouth, the rest of us who weren't around for these legendary moments in Twin Cities music history can also now get a taste of what they were like. The two music-centric filmmakers culled archived video footage to create a pair of movies showing exclusively at this week's Sound Unseen festival.

"M-80," which captures the Walker Art Center-sponsored "no wave" music fest, screens Friday night at the Main Cinema. The two-day fest was put on at the University of Minnesota Field House and featured Devo, the Suburbs, Suicide Commandos and a couple dozen more acts pushing rock's boundaries at the time.

On Saturday afternoon, Sound Unseen will screen more footage from that era at the Parkway Theater in a film billed as "7 Nights in the Entry." It's taken from a weeklong video shoot organized by Twin/Tone Records in September 1981 featuring local underground groups already on or hoping to be on the label, including then-fledgling bands Hüsker Dü and the Replacements and fun lesser-knowns such as Fine Art, the Dads, Things That Fall Down and Wilma & the Wilbers.

In both films, the video footage — digitized from ¾-inch tape — is as lo-fi as many of the bands seen in it. However, the audio quality is surprisingly strong. Credit goes to Twin/Tone label co-founder Paul Stark, who captured the music in each film on a mobile recording unit he had cobbled together around that time.

"It was pretty easy and routine to set up, so I tried to take advantage of it," recalled Stark, who concocted the idea for the seven-night Entry run specifically for film and recording purposes.

The Entry had just opened a year earlier in the former bus depot café space. This footage shows the Entry stage along a different wall from where it wound up two years later.

"All our bands [on Twin/Tone] were playing the Entry at the time, and so were the other local acts we were interested in," Stark continued. "The crowds there were starting to build.

"We didn't know what we were going to do with all the footage," he added with a laugh, "but we thought we should document what was going on."

Alas, the Replacements' performance in "7 Nights" — which would have been the most valued footage 43 years later — is something of a hot mess, and not in the fun 'Mats-on-a-tear way. Their guitars are conspicuously out of tune.

"Basically, we used the songs where you could tell the least," said Fuller, whose task it was to pick out a couple tunes apiece from each of the Entry entrants for the film.

Still, Fuller rightfully added, "You really get a sense of the hyper energy and speed the Replacements had in those days, and you get to feel what it was like when Bob [Stinson] would burst into a solo."

Hüsker Dü's performance — some of which was heard in the 2017 box set "Savage Young Dü" — is much more solid and similarly fast-paced, with Bob Mould grouchily yelling at slam-dancers near the front of the stage.

Watching some of the other bands in action is fun. The punky bands Wilma & the Wilbers and Fine Art each show off pioneering frontwomen in the indie-rock scene. The Hypstrz, led by the Mighty Mofos' Billy Batson, deliver a wild remake of one of 1980′s biggest pop hits.

Fans also can play a "Where's Waldo?"-like game throughout "7 Nights" looking for future members of the Jayhawks, who can be spotted in three different bands (the Neglectors, Stagger Lee and Rusty Jones & the Generals).

'Distortion and weirdness'

One of the very few musicians to perform at both that Entry run and M-80, Suicide Commandos singer/guitarist Chris Osgood has a conspiracy theory as to why footage of him does not appear in "7 Nights in the Entry."

"Honest to God, I think it's because I wore shorts that night," said Osgood, who played that event with the Commandos' offshoot band L7-3.

Osgood isn't shorted in "M-80," though. A couple of songs from the Commandos' hard-rattling set at the festival made the movie, including an all-star finale with their signature song "Complicated Fun."

Also heavily involved behind the scenes as an organizer, Osgood said the continued reverence for M-80 is a testament to its primary creator, late Walker arts curator Tim Carr, later a record label liaison for the Beastie Boys and Babes in Toyland.

"Tim was the one savvy enough to get the U of M to agree to let us go wild in the Field House, and to bring in all these unusual acts," Osgood said.

In addition to Devo — billed as "Dove: The Band of Love" at the festival because of a contract dispute — out-of-town performers at M-80 included New Yorkers the Fleshtones, Judy Nylon, Dark Day and James Chance & the Contortions; Londoners the Monochrome Set; Omaha's fiery Charlie Burton and Television's Richard Lloyd (the latter not part of the film for rights reasons).

Other homegrown players featured in "M-80″ are NNB, Fingerprints and Curtiss A, whose appearance Fuller aptly summed up as "just burning the place down."

Keen musicheads might spot Alejandro Escovedo performing with Ms. Nylon at the fest. A year before releasing "Whip It," Devo performed in matching sun visors and green suits, whose colors can be seen in separate footage shot by Twin Cities filmmaker Chuck Statler featured in the new documentary "Devo" (showing Wednesday night as part of Sound Unseen).

In the "M-80″ movie, Devo's and every band's colorful attire is lost in the monochromatic black-and-white footage originally captured by hired director Al X Gav (whose whereabouts are long lost to all involved).

"It was a cheap way of doing a three-camera shoot," Strouth theorized of Gav's grainy footage, upselling it as "having this distortion and weirdness to it that seems to fit the aesthetic of the music."

Still, the music is what really thrilled Strouth when he finally got his hands on the old M-80 film reels, which had been lost for decades but eventually wound up archived at the Minnesota Historical Society.

"So much of it was ahead of its time and really shaped a lot of music that came later," said Strouth, likening M-80′s influence on the Twin Cities music scene to the impact the Sex Pistols' short-lived concert run had on other cities.

"So many people who were there went and started their own bands after M-80."

In the case of both films — footage from which had been seen in previous Sound Unseens — Strouth and Fuller thought showing them this year was a nice way to honor the film fest's 25th anniversary and pending hiatus.

And because getting licensing rights to so many different bands' music would become impossible for wider release of the video or audio, Sound Unseen might be the only way to relive these big-bang-like musical moments.

Sound Unseen

"M-80″ screening: 9:30 p.m. Fri., the Main Cinema, 115 SE. Main St., Mpls., $15.

"7 Nights in the Entry:" 2 p.m. Sat., Parkway Theater, 4814 Chicago Av. S., Mpls., $15.

Rest of the fest: 7 p.m. Wed. through Sun., multiple locations.

Tickets and info: soundunseen.com.