The grassroots touring circuit for independent American rock bands was just beginning to cohere in 1981. “Booking was like being an explorer,” says Jefferson Holt, who managed R.E.M. at the time. “Punk” of whatever stripe was still viewed with extreme suspicion by middle America. “The people who were running discos and blues clubs just didn't get it,” says Holt. “I remember us playing this cavernous place in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. [The promoter], a young Italian-American guy, took me back to this room, and there were all these older guys. I felt like I had walked into a Scorsese movie. There was nothing to be afraid of, really, but we were the aliens.”

“Alien” is precisely how R.E.M. felt when they pulled into Minneapolis on the freezing afternoon of Thursday, November 26, 1981. Holt was behind the wheel; the gig paid $300, a kingly sum for a group whose members were on a strict $2 per diem. A blizzard was underway, and the venue where R.E.M. was to play—the 7th Street Entry, the 225-capacity side room of a disco called Sam’s, located at 701 First Avenue North, smack in the middle of downtown—was still closed when they arrived. So was nearly everything else—it was Thanksgiving. “The only place open was a Greek restaurant,” says Holt. “There was a Greyhound sign spinning around. It was like an Edward Hopper painting. We were… concerned is an understatement. We didn't know who was going to turn up for an unknown band on Thanksgiving night.”

Steve McClellan, the general manager of Sam’s and the Entry, wasn’t sure, either. Though R.E.M. had made some national noise that July when they released the 7" “Radio Free Europe” on the small Hib-Tone label, they were barely known outside their hometown of Athens, Georgia. That night, the Sam’s Mainroom headliner cancelled, and McClellan moved R.E.M. into the bigger room. “They didn’t want to do it,” says McClellan. “And they were right: We should’ve kept it in the Entry.” McClellan later estimated the night’s attendance as 88 people—in a room that held 1,200. “It was pretty sparse,” says Paul Spangrud, one of the club’s DJs, who was working that night. “But everybody was on the ground floor, right in front of the stage—everybody who was there wanted to be there.”

That included Peter Jesperson, a pivotal figure in the local indie rock scene who co-founded Twin/Tone Records and manned the counter of south Minneapolis record store Oar Folkjokeopus, hawking indies and imports as pop radio drowned in REO Speedwagon and Air Supply. He also managed a fledgling group of punks called the Replacements, whose teenage bassist, Tommy Stinson, attended the show with him. “[R.E.M.] were every bit as great as we'd hoped they'd be,” recalls Jesperson.

“Bands don't like playing to that emptiness,” says Holt. “But because of the enthusiasm of the people that came out, it was one of the best shows that they ever did. When we showed up to disasters, their attitude, especially [guitarist] Peter [Buck]'s, was, ‘Fuck it. If eight people are going to show up, they’re going to leave and say: We saw the best band in the world.’”

R.E.M. would appear at the venue two more times the following year: On April 26 they drew 347 people, and then 942 came out to see them on September 22, a month after the release of their first EP, Chronic Town. By then the club was no longer Sam’s. “On New Year's Eve of 1981 we changed the name to First Avenue,” says McClellan. “Everybody had a million ideas [for a name]. First Avenue was a default.” Thirty-five years later, it remains one of the longest-running rock venues in the country—birthed, more or less, by accident.