Recap and photos: First Avenue's Celebration for Conrad
May 26, 2026
During First Avenue’s Celebration for Conrad, a public memorial for the club’s nearly four-decade stage manager, First Avenue executives Dayna Frank, Nathan Kranz, and James Baker bestowed the stage on which they stood with a new honor.
The Conrad J. Sverkerson Stage was unveiled at about 5 p.m. on Sunday evening. It was an inevitable coronation — the stage was his commanding post from 1990 until his death from cancer on September 30, 2025. That’s just past a generation in real years, and countless generations in musical ones.
This event was clearly a family affair, and for many, a visibly emotional one. (This reporter is not exempt, either.) A notable number of kids were in attendance. There was a lot of hugging about, and a lot of first sightings in decades. Everyone seemed glad to see one another, whether they knew each other or not. Conrad was the connective tissue, but it was also evident that many of the room’s bonds also went beyond him.
The crowd moved freely in and out of both First Avenue’s mainroom and the Depot, next door. (The 7th Street Entry, and the bar near the office door upstairs left, were reserved for family.) The club’s front sidewalk was as much a hub of discussion as any of the upstairs tables, from the height of the afternoon to the start of dusk.
The stoic, but real emotion that flowed through the crowd found its focus and expression during the early part of the event on the newly bestowed Conrad Stage. Ike Reilly, in from Chicago, hosted the evening, and introduced his longtime partner, Dina Bizzaro. Though she kept things short on stage, cutting herself off deliberately after a couple minutes, she was a formidable presence in the room. (This reporter got to shake her hand.)
It's hard to imagine a more emotional moment than the one that followed. Reilly introduced the Sverkerson family: seven siblings, led by his brother Mark, as tall and lithe as Conrad. He told a couple of Conrad’s pithy jokes, e.g., that if the stage manager had changed his name, he would be an ex-Con. As he spoke, the full familial contingent gathered to his right (audience left), minus three, on the stage of the most recently lost. Nothing about it was lost on anyone, except maybe some of the more playful of the small kids.
As you’ll see from Steven Cohen’s accompanying photos, the Sverkersons, and everyone else onstage, had as a vertiginous backdrop a slew of images featuring, but not limited to, Conrad. Unto themselves, they provided (and, here, provide) a veritable gallery show of the man’s history — and not only within the club. The Conrad those of us who worked at First Avenue saw in action for so long was also a guy who liked to play golf and go fishing with his friends.
Though he quit drinking more than a decade before his death, Conrad was a fixture in many area bars, and seeing him in candids from those places (Dusty’s, for example) enlarged him. He never did the kind of road work that many people who came up working on his stage would do, including Randy Hawkins, who manned the sound for the Celebration, weeks after a long trip to Europe running the boards for Atmosphere.
This report cannot comment firsthand on all of the musical performances, but an early one certainly stood out. It came from Kristina Lund on ukulele, performing some classic Ween. Lund prefaced it by reading from a texting chain with Conrad explaining how they’d come to this selection, and then sang it with terse force, almost as a mountain ballad.
Performers from the night also included Trampled by Turtles, Bill Patten Trio, Neil Young tribute Tired Eyes (featuring Rich Mattson, Alan Sparhawk, and Dave Pirner), Grant Johnson, Eleganza, and the Cactus Blossoms. Video tributes from Ani DiFranco and Dr. Dog frontman Scott McMicken also played on the big screen.
Oh yes: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also showed up. He was there to make a proclamation of Conrad Sverkerson Day in the City of Minneapolis, just three months after Peggy Flanagan had made the same proclamation for the State of Minnesota. First Avenue may never be the same without Conrad Sverkerson, as Mason Jennings said, but it doesn’t look like Minneapolis ever will change, thank goodness.
