Ahead of the Minneapolis venue’s 40th Anniversary Block Party on Saturday, Sept. 20, founder Lowell Pickett spoke with The Morning Show host Jill Riley. He brought stories about hanging up on McCoy Tyner’s agent and behind-the-scenes details for Prince’s 2013 residency at the club.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Jill Riley: You're listening to The Current. Well, the Dakota is celebrating its Ruby anniversary, and that means 40 years for the music venue and restaurant that's located in downtown Minneapolis, and to celebrate: throwing a party. Here to talk about the venue's decades-long run and about the block party celebration, is Dakota founder Lowell Pickett. Lowell, congratulations on the 40th anniversary of the Dakota. And also, welcome to The Current.

Lowell Pickett: Well, thank you. That's Thanks for inviting us over. That's great.

Jill Riley: Yeah, very nice to meet you. So the Dakota opened in 1985, so if I'm doing my math, that's 40 years, 1985. I wonder if you could take us back to that time, because the Dakota wasn't always located in its spot on Nicollet Mall. It was once a St Paul location. So I wonder if you could take us back to the beginning and the opening and the creation of the Dakota.

Lowell Pickett: You're right. It was in St Paul originally it was in Bandana Square. At the time, during the 1980s people were developing these old buildings, or old kind of iconic places from the Industrial Revolution period, into shopping centers, into places, entertainment centers. Same thing happened with St. Anthony Main and Riverplace and other parts of the country to Faneuil Hall in Boston. So they thought they would do that with Bandana Square, which are the central shops for the Northern Pacific Railroad. I went out and looked at it because somebody really wanted us to at the time. I was involved with a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis called Faegre's, which is one of the pioneers of the Warehouse District, and they wanted a restaurant there. And I was so knocked out by the scale of the building. I was just, you know, it wasn't like it was in the crossroads of commercial commerce, but the building itself was so incredibly beautiful. It was just these massive timbers inside and the brick walls, limestone walls.

And so understanding that it really wasn't a place that most people thought about going to every night, I tried to think of why I would go there at the time, you know, with my friends, and what I would do. And I would go to places like Night Train in North St. Paul because they had great food, and they had jazz. Shirley Witherspoon, an iconic singer in the Twin Cities, would sing in this place. It was kind of it was a very cool place in the north edge of St Paul. I'd go to W.A. Frost and the Black Forest [Inn] because they had outdoor dining. I'd go to places that had good wine by the glass lists, because I liked good wine, and they weren't that common back then. And good food, good chef-driven food. Those were the things that attracted me. And I thought, "Well, those are the things." And music, you know, some, some place I could hear some music in the bar.

Jill Riley: So the music was really the complement to what the restaurant was going to offer.

Lowell Pickett: Exactly. It was to be able to go in and have a nice dinner and hang around with your friends, and then going into the bar and continue having a great time with your friends and listen to some great jazz in the background. And that's really what it was designed to be initially. For the first couple of years, everybody who performed there was a resident musician that lived in the Twin Cities or lived in Minnesota. That also left the quality really high. Because we are one of the things we have, that you guys know at The Current, we have such an amazing talent, amazing musical talent in this community, and we benefited from it. People Like Shirley Witherspoon and Moore by Four, Rio Nido, just great, great bands and great, great artists. They performed there every night.

At one time, we'd been open a couple of years, and I got a phone call asking if we would have a jazz pianist there, if we would book a jazz pianist named McCoy Tyner. And McCoy is one of the seminal pianists of the 20th century. He was one of these, one of the great pianists in American music. When he was 19 years old, he joined the John Coltrane Quartet. He transformed what jazz piano, what modal playing [and] really influenced people in rock and pop and jazz. I mean, he's just, he was a giant. And asked if we would have him at the Dakota. Well, we weren't doing national shows. But in another lifetime, when I was in my 20s, I was making films, documentary films, and we were doing a bunch of stuff with the Walker Art Center. For the fun of it, I arranged a concert for the Walker at the Guthrie Theater of McCoy Tyner, and he and I had become friends. Through the course of this conversation, McCoy ended up coming to the Dakota as a favor. He and I had become good friends, and we'd spend a lot of time together over those 10 years that preceded this phone call. And there's more to it. The agent pushed really hard. I said, "We don't do that. I'd never seen it in our club. I thought that music belonged at Orchestra Hall."

Jill Riley: Mmhmm.

Lowell Pickett: And at one point he kept pushing. And I said, "You know, I'd love to have McCoy Tyner here. I think it'd be an incredible honor, but we don't do that. And I think for you to keep pushing him like that is an insult, an insult to him, and I think you owe him an apology." And I hung up on him.

Jill Riley: Wow.

Lowell Pickett: My first agent exchange. So he called me a couple of weeks later and said, "I saw McCoy last night." And I said, "Yeah." He said, "You're friends. I brought up your name." And I said, "Well, I told you that." He said, "No, no. He said, 'You're really friends.' And if you want him to come and play in your restaurant, don't worry about the money. Pay him what you can afford. Get him a great piano, and he'll be happy to come." And so we did and rented a nine-foot Steinway and put him up in the Whitney Hotel. Now it no longer exists, but it was this amazing hotel down by the Stone Arch Bridge that felt like you were in one of the great old European hotels. And he stayed there, and he played and worked out really well. People loved him. And he told the agent, "The room was beautiful. The crowds are great. People were really nice to us, and the chef's a genius. I'll go back anytime."

Jill Riley: That's nice, yeah, and so, but that moment, do you feel like that moment really kind of opened the door?

Lowell Pickett: Well, it did open the door. McCoy was incredibly influential, and Ahmad Jamal, who's another very influential jazz giant, worked with the same agent because McCoy had liked it. Ahmad Jamal came, and then shortly after that, Betty Carter came, and then Carmen McRae. Carmen was there for three nights. Her manager said to me that she's having such a great time, and this is really rare and really unusual, because she's a little hard to please. And at the end of her engagement, she said, "You've got to have Shirley Horn here. I'm going to get a hold of her and make sure that she knows about this place." Betty Carter did the same thing. She said, "You have to have Nancy Wilson here. You have to have Freddie Hubbard here." So it just kind of went from person to person by the end of the summer, or into the into the fall. Freddie Hubbard had come. Horace Silver had come and Joe Williams, who was one of the giants, kind of, really on a level of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and one of those great iconic singers of the history of jazz. And so all of a sudden we were kind of on the radar of some of those artists and some of those agencies. So it just sort of happened serendipitously.

Jill Riley: You're listening to The Current. My guest, Dakota founder Lowell Pickett, is talking about some history and evolution and really the beginning of the Dakota Jazz Club, which now we call the Dakota. What was the point which you moved locations? When did it become a Minneapolis venue?

Lowell Pickett: Well, we always considered ourselves Twin Cities.

Jill Riley: To this day, yeah.

Lowell Pickett: I didn't grow up in the Twin Cities, and this kind of division between Minneapolis and St Paul always seems silly to someone who moved here. It's one metropolitan area, and they both have, you know, they're different personalities. That's part of the charm, that's part of the real attraction of the whole area. But we always considered ourselves a Twin Cities place. In 2002, I think the the hard, one of the hard things that happened in the course of our history was 9-11. That changed the way people traveled. We had artists who canceled because they were no longer flying. Became difficult for international artists. We had a show scheduled with a great South African pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim, and he just stopped flying. He stopped. People were, it's hard to remember now this many years on, but people were shellshocked by that. We weren't sure exactly the best way to approach that.

Around the same time, a friend and I had been talking. He was interested in becoming a partner of the Dakota. We had talked about it off and on. We had started a foundation together to bring jazz to kids, some of the artists at the Dakota, into schools. And his name is Richard Erickson. Richard and I became partners in 2002. One of the things we decided to do at that time was either to move to downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul. We looked at different locations and the place we're at now, somebody was having dinner one night. They owned City Pages. Tom Bartel, who had created City Pages, a great arts and entertainment newspaper, said that the space that we're currently in, he had heard it was going to be vacated by Kieran [Folliard]. He had operated a restaurant, who has The Local and he's a mainstay.

Jill Riley: Oh, sure, yeah.

Lowell Pickett: So, and Kieran had a place in there called Zinc, and they were going to be leaving. And I called Kieran, and he put me in touch with the people at Target. And because it's in Target's headquarters building, it's on the Nicollet Mall, and we went through some conversations and ended up thinking, "This is the right move." We were thinking about moving near where the new Guthrie is, but this other opportunity came up, and so in 2003 we moved the Dakota to the Nicollet Mall. That's where we've been since then.

Jill Riley: Yeah, and the rest is history.

Lowell Pickett: And the jazz part of it, you know, everything that we had done up until that time was jazz, 100% jazz, all the music. And by the by that time, we'd been in Bandana Square for 18 years. We were bringing national artists through the Dakota on a regular basis. Harry Connick Jr. had played there with Chick Corea, Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea did some stuff together one night. We'd had a number of amazing shows. And when we moved downtown, we thought, well, we need to really expand the musical offerings a little bit. So we started adding blues and more New Orleans-based music, more R&B, and, you know, all comes out of the same source. New Orleans is like the source point for blues, for jazz, for it really, for rock 'n' roll, because that came out of that, that whole context. And so we started presenting more music like that.

And then in 2008 when the recession hit, we had a real serious look at what we were doing and how we were going to weather this. Do we kind of curl up in a ball and say, "Hope this is over soon." Or do we get proactive and try to reach out to more people? And we took the latter route, and we started adding more kinds of music. It's always been my feeling that if you like one kind of music, you're going to like other forms of music too. Just because you're not familiar with an artist in who in another genre, like jazz or bluegrass or hip-hop, if you happen to listen and really like listen, you like great rock 'n' roll, or you like great classical, generally, you're going to be predisposed to appreciate greatness, virtuosity in another in another genre, I've always believed that.

Jill Riley: Well, and there's so many artists that it's hard to put them in one box of like everything that you've mentioned. Or you can trace the roots of rock 'n' roll, or trace the roots of soul music. And I'm glad that you said New Orleans, because I think that's a great example. But yeah, I mean having the foresight to continue to evolve. I mean, clearly that's what has led to the success of the Dakota 40 years strong.

Lowell Pickett: Yeah, well, we're just following the music.

Jill Riley: That's great. Dakota founder Lowell Pickett in The Current studio. You know, 40 years is a long time, and I'm sure that it would be hard to recount so many of the highlights. I mean, so many great names have come through. But if we're talking about the history of the Dakota and I don't ask you for a Prince story, I probably wouldn't be doing my job. Because not only did he perform there, but he was a patron. I mean, he was somebody that, again, a music fan in the Twin Cities, who would come down and would see live music, yeah, yeah. And I have a memory of, you know, Prince playing at the Dakota for three nights in 2013. I mean, that was a that was a pretty big deal when it happened.

Lowell Pickett: That was incredible.

Jill Riley: Yeah, can you talk about that a little bit?

Prince at the Dakota

• Prince opens his run of Dakota shows with a funky instrumental jam
• Prince's second night at the Dakota Jazz Club heavy on jokes, hits
• Prince ends his run at the Dakota with smoky, standing-room-only shows

Lowell Pickett: Sure. I got a call from Prince's manager at the time, and she said that they'd like to do something. This is in December, and, "We'd like to do something. We don't know exactly, you know what it is, but we'd like to do multiple nights." And nothing was confirmed, because Prince was notoriously mercurial. And I heard a story once that Prince was the only artist in popular music who could decide 30 days out that he wanted to do an arena tour, which is a huge thing, a huge undertaking.

Jill Riley: Logistically, yes.

Lowell Pickett: And venues and promoters would do it because it was Prince, and he'd pull it together. And in his mind, it was all there. So through a number of kind of fits and starts, we weren't sure if it was really going to happen. When it actually was confirmed was on a Monday night in January, and they confirmed it for Wednesday through Friday of that week.

Jill Riley: Wow.

Lowell Pickett: And we'd left our schedule blank that week anyway. We'd put in, we'd made up three names of bands and put them in and just kind of made something up, like one of Denver's favorite bands, or something,

Jill Riley: Sure.

Lowell Pickett: And so I got a call. I was in New York at a music conference, and on Monday night, I got a call saying, "It's on, we're gonna do it Wednesday through Friday night. And here's what we've decided we're gonna do." The first night was all instrumental, and there were two shows a night, three different bands. First night all instrumental playing, Tower of Power style arrangements with a six-piece horn section. Prince is playing both guitar and keyboards, but primarily guitar. He loved Tower of Power, which I knew because he'd come to see Tower of Power at the Dakota.

Jill Riley: Okay.

Lowell Pickett: And the second night, the same horn section, but added three backup singers, and then he started doing things from his catalog. And the third night was the debut performance of 3rdEyeGirl, his last band.

Jill Riley: And that was the surprise, if I remember correctly, yeah.

Lowell Pickett: And Donna Grantis, who is the lead guitar player in 3rdEyeGirl, she told me a few weeks ago that that was their first public performance. They didn't even have a name for the band yet. I'd forgotten that there was no name for the band yet. And then about two-thirds of the way through that night, he said, "You know, why don't we come back tomorrow night?" DJ Rashad, the DJ who'd done all the pre-show music for him. "We're gonna be back here tomorrow night. We're just gonna mess around on stage and have some fun. And, you know, come on back." So we had an unannounced fourth night where he co-hosted a DJ show. He played keyboards and sang along with the music that she was playing. It was pretty cool.

Jill Riley: Yeah, that's an incredible story. And just one of many, many stories that if those walls could talk, they'd have a lot to say. But I'm talking with Lowell Pickett, the founder of the Dakota, who you know, you have a lot of those stories in you. It's fun to talk about the history of the Dakota and to talk about what a special venue that is. But we need to talk about the celebration that's going to happen, because there's a big block party celebration planned for Saturday, September 20. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the lineup. You've got bands like The Suburbs scheduled to play, Davina and the Vagabonds, the MacPhail Faculty Jazz Ensemble, but also newer groups, like Room3. They are incredible live.When I watched them at the First Avenue Best New Bands showcase, my jaw was hanging open. I described them as "precise." So why did you choose those specific bands?

Lowell Pickett: Well, a couple of different things. We really wanted. 90% of the bands that are playing that day are all from the area. All live here, and we've become known as a place where a lot of touring musicians come. We presented a lot of great shows, iconic bands from around the country, but our roots are really in the local community and the music here. The reason we could exist here is because we have such an incredibly vibrant community. And by the way, you're part of that. I mean, The Current is absolutely part of that, and broke new boundaries and radio by doing what you do. That wouldn't be possible in some other cities, to be as successful and to be as forward-thinking as The Current was, is because we have this musical community here.

Jill Riley: Yeah, it's the ecosystem.

Lowell Pickett: And we're just part of it. We have great venues in the Twin Cities that help that ecosystem. I mean, if you look at First Avenue or Cedar Cultural Center. We've got this sea of really wonderful places to hear music, and as a result, there are great musicians here. So we're going back to the roots a little bit, and we're bringing Room3 represents the future of music in the Twin Cities. In many respects, MacPhail Faculty Jazz Ensemble. The faculty at MacPhail is loaded with great musicians, musicians who live in the Twin Cities, primarily that then have augmented their playing with teaching there. Michael Cain, who's the director of education now, world-class pianist. A lot of people don't know this. They might have seen him play at the Dakota before. The last time he toured and was at the Dakota, was with Terence Blanchard. So that group offers something that you know, it's education. It's the future of music. Great musicians, Jamecia Bennett is a three-time Grammy Award winner of the Sounds of Blackness. She's a world-class artist. She's one of the most exciting singers that I've ever seen. She certainly could be on any stage in the world and belong there completely. And she lives here. She's part of our community here, and she represents a little bit different kind of music coming out of the Sounds of Blackness. She brings more of a gospel feel to what she's doing. The Suburbs: iconic. And I don't know if the original schedule you got also included Tina, Tina and the B-Sides.

Jill Riley: Oh yeah, talk about Tina and the B-Sides. I mean, again, just like these staples of the Twin Cities music scene.

Lowell Pickett: And Tina has a couple of different things. She's been doing, of course, Tina and the B-Sides is an iconic band, and in the Upper Midwest, it's one of the iconic rock bands in our history. But she also does this kind of off-center thing. It's almost like an off-center lounge thing called Sinatra to Simone.

Jill Riley: I've heard about this, yeah.

Lowell Pickett: And it's really cool. You know, lesser hands, it would be schtick and it wouldn't be. But in her hands, it's brilliant. So she's going to combine a couple of different things. It's going to be primarily a rock show, but there'd be some of those elements pulled into it. Davina and the Vagabonds. We're kind of joined at the hip to Davina. We've she's been at the Dakota so many times. She's now touring internationally. She has a national booking agency. The week after the Dakota Block Party, she's playing at the Monterey Jazz Festival. I mean, and she's another musical treasure. She's one of those examples of someone who moved to the Twin Cities years ago, because this place offered professional opportunities. Getting back to Prince, a lot of the reason that those opportunities exist here is because of him. He stayed here. He didn't go to one of the coasts. It allowed you to look at somebody like Michael Bland, who's a brilliant drummer. Or a number of other people who played with Prince and were part of that Paisley Park community could live in the Twin Cities and have international careers. They didn't have to move somewhere else. And that brought more people to the Twin Cities.

Another young group, Kavyesh Kaviraj and Omar Abdulkarim. Kavyesh is a brilliant pianist, originally Indian heritage. Chose to live in the Twin Cities to pursue his career. He is a brilliant jazz pianist, and Omar grew up here. Omar is a great trumpet player, but he's been touring internationally now. Omar used to come to the Dakota with his dad to see shows when he was 12 years old. Years ago, 11 years old, and now, you know, he's a professional musician touring internationally. Went to the New School in New York. So there's a special element with Omar and Kavyesh and representing a certain kind of music. Then we have somebody from one band from out of town. Oh, then Patty Peterson and Connie Evingson and Ginger Commodore and the Jazz Women All-Stars. That's another part of the musical community, another facet of Twin Cities music, that's really special.

And then Glen David Andrews, who's from New Orleans. A lot of people aren't as familiar with him. They know his cousin a little bit better, Trombone Shorty, but the Andrews family is one of the great New Orleans musical family like the Marsalises. There are a number of those. There are several of those families that have made a huge difference to music in New Orleans. Glen David is a mainstay at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. I saw him perform one time. One weekend, he closed out the festival in the blues tent, and one weekend, he closed out the festival in the gospel tent. And he has this charisma. He started walking through the audience, playing and singing, stepping from chair to chair, you know, just they're all folding chairs in the gospel tent, and he's going from chair to chair, and he's got the whole place worked up into a fever. And if he had walked out of the tent down to the river, that tent would have emptied out and followed him. You know, it was like a Pentecostal preacher, that kind of energy, that kind of charisma. So expect maybe a second line that afternoon. Okay, maybe expect a few 100 white handkerchiefs waving in the air. And then we're going to be doing some things for kids too. We're going to have a kids' corner, and MacPhail Center for Music has an amazing program for younger kids, and they're going to be there with an instrument petting zoo.

Jill Riley: Okay, yeah.

Lowell Pickett: We'll have some face painting and band called The Bazillions. We'll do a set for kids that's really geared for, you know, like seven, eight-year-olds. I mean, music is a lifelong thing.

Jill Riley: Yeah, it's all part of the ecosystem. And it sounds like it's going to be just an incredible day with the Dakota's 40th anniversary block party celebration, Saturday, September 20. Lowell, congratulations again. 40 years of incredible music, and like you said, celebrating the music community. That's what it's all about. I want to thank you for coming by, and I wish we could talk longer, because I know that you've got a lot of stories, so I hope you'll come back another time.

Lowell Pickett: Would love to and thanks for being here. Thanks to The Current, and you're an amazing part. You're an integral part of this musical community.

Dakota 40th Anniversary Block Party. 2 p.m.-10 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 20 at Dakota with stages inside and outside on Nicollet Mall. With The Suburbs; Glen David Andrews; Jamecia Bennett; Tina Schlieske; Nachito Herrera; Davina & The Vagabonds; Kavyesh Kaviraj & Omar Abdulkarim; MacPhail Faculty Ensemble; Patty Peterson Presents Jazz Women All-Stars w/Ginger Commodore, Connie Evingson, Mary Louise Knutson, Joan Griffith, Sheila Earley and Stephanie Wieseler; and Room3 Collective. Free. Details

Credits

Guest – Lowell Pickett
Host – Jill Riley
Producers – Nilufer Arsala, Alexander Simpson
Digital Producers – Reed Fischer, John Kueppers