Part Wolf, Minneapolis soccer bar and music venue, closing on Jan. 28
January 26, 2022
Last week, after weeks of rumors, fueled in part by its closing down for a few weeks for repairs, Part Wolf — the soccer bar and show venue on the West Bank in Minneapolis — announced on Facebook that it would conclude business following a final party on Jan. 28. The notice garnered mass grieving: yet another vibrant Twin Cities show venue, gone.
“It was definitely a shock,” said Cristian Ybarra, aka DIE/ASPORA, a DJ and promoter who threw numerous events at Part Wolf, including Bimbogate, which will be the final party there. “We all knew that the bar was on the market for a while — [it’s] in the back of your head. Obviously, there’s been murmurs online.”
“We thought it could happen,” said Raechelle Bolin, a general manager and booker for the venue. “But it had been on the market for so long. And we’d been continuing on; we just didn’t see it actually happening. So it was a shocker when it would happen, not that it would happen.”
The biggest reason is that Part Wolf — and before it, Nomad World Pub, which occupied the same space before being sold and renamed in 2019 — had occupied a unique place in the Twin Cities nightlife ecosystem. It was both a favorite of longtime regulars and people trekking in to check out a lively mix of shows, from punk to hip-hop to metal.
“Towards the end, everybody considered it more of a venue than a bar,” said Alex Rausch, also a general manager and booker. “Covid has changed things, obviously. But before then I would try to have music every single night of the week.”
Rausch continued: “One of my favorite things about the neighborhood is the regulars that come in and over time [and] become your family. It felt very homey from the beginning. With the responses we’ve been getting it, I definitely can tell people care about that place just as much as I have,”
Both Bolin and Rausch came aboard right around the time the venue changed hands. Bolin had been a Nomad regular for years before joining the staff. The music there, she explained, had been “more folksy or indie; bluegrass, jazzy things. When it switched over to Part Wolf, we went ahead and switched more to LGBTQA performances, more rock performances, more rap showcases, so there was more variety. We have a lot of people from the neighborhood that would come out for all of the events, and the interest can differ. The same people that I’ve been seeing for years are still the same.”
The emphasis on up-and-coming queer DJs and musicians was crucial to Part Wolf’s unique energy. (The venue had hosted Grrrl Scout, the queer dance party, going back to its Nomad days.) “When you think of the diversity of that bar, there was a lot of effort that went into it, even within the last two years,” Ybarra notes.
“That’s something that we kind of all pride ourselves in — me being a Black queer woman as well,” said Bolin. “That’s something that we advocated for: We also had Grrrl Scout, as well, and Cristian I have kind of been working towards creating a safer place. Even within our shows, as far as our musicians that have played inside of the venue, we have lots of people that represent the queer lifestyle as well,” including “many of our rock shows.”
The series of DIE/ASPORA parties promoted by Ybarra and Bolin are a good example of the part Part Wolf played in the local club ecosystem. They were diverse by design — one party would be Goth and darkwave, another hyperpop, still another house music. The venue’s finale, Bimbogate, will feature “hardcore femme DJs all night.” It’s a tribute to “a simpler time of velour tracksuits, blinged out flip phones and frosted eyelids”; it’s also Ybarra’s birthday party.
“When I got my residency, I got free rein to do whatever I wanted,” Ybarra said. “And I think it really opened up, not just doors for myself, but for other people to be like, ‘I want to throw something crazy, too.’ It was definitely a bug that went around.”
Then there was Part Wolf’s instantly legendary Halloween-weekend party last October, another DIE/ASPORA event, utilizing both the stages — the main bar and an upstairs lounge. “It was packed wall-to-wall,” said Ybarra. “There’s only a handful of instances where I’ve seen it that packed, as a promoter. Luckily, the electricity didn’t go out until about 12:45; Pixel Grip was the only act left.”
It wasn’t just Part Wolf — the electricity went out for a chunk of the neighborhood. Bolin was upstairs when it happened and went to a nearby window: “I could see that the whole entire block all the way down to the hospital,” she said. “At that point, it’s ‘Everybody, I need you to safely move yourself downstairs, because there are no lights in that hallway.’”
“People definitely were freaking out,” Ybarra said.
The evening ended in an orderly fashion, with management taking the stages to guide people out. “Everybody was super great about it; they listened and understood,” said Rausch. “It was not an ideal situation, but everybody was really understanding.”
But in the months since then, the resurgent coronavirus began mutating into stronger strains; Omicron has sharply curtailed the nightlife comeback that seemed a given back in October. “Covid did go ahead and kind of take quite a few people,” said Bolin. “A lot of things changed throughout the neighborhood as far as Covid.”
With the club likely to become, as has been widely reported, a pharmacy, an era has definitely ended.
“It was a launching pad,” noted Michael Todd Grey, the DJ/promoter of the popular dance party The Assortment, which the Nomad hosted prior to the party’s moving to Mortimer’s. “What’s sad about their closure is that it’s just a great space to get started, and we’re losing a lot of those venues. It feels like gentrification is really having hard impacts on people’s ability to express themselves, specifically in music.”
