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Starting in the late 1970s, alt-weekly writer Martin Keller and photographer Greg Helgeson chronicled the birth of the Minneapolis Sound, the modern-rock revolution and the 1980s comedy boom.
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The two seemed to be everywhere on the scene, “perpetually walking the thin-grooved line between fandom and journalism,” as Keller puts it in their new paperback, “Hijinx and Hearsay: Scenester Stories From Minnesota’s Pop Life” ($25, Minnesota Historical Society Press). Part photo book, part “fragmented memoir,” it summons an entire era in chatty chapters packed with revelatory images.
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Helgeson took this portrait of the former Time members just as their hitmaking career was taking off in 1984. “Jimmy has always been the more outspoken of the two, while Terry is typically the more introspective one, but his funny one-liners will catch you off guard and deliver the money quote.”
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Prince during his first concert as a solo artist, in January 1979 at the Capri Theater in north Minneapolis. Keller interviewed him later that year: “He sat on the kitchen floor in Bobby Z’s apartment, his hair in long, cornrow braids and his guard up.” They didn’t have another sit-down until 1996 at Paisley Park, when Keller shared some vegetarian bean soup cooked by Prince’s then-wife, Mayte. “I think God puts you in the place you’re supposed to be,” the singer said. “Flying back from a concert tour from around the world, and you look down over the land and all the beautiful lakes, and it just feels like home, that this is where I belong.”
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