Tonight the Duluth City Council will consider suspending the Norshor “Experience” liquor license.
Here’s a picture of among other things, future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Link Wray who had one of his last public performances in the United States at the NorShor before he died a few months later. He played with a number of Duluth rockers, some of you were there, it was pretty amazing.
I was involved with the NorShor Theater for most of 2005 and part of 2004 as concessions manager, chief bottle washer and some other things. As we (the people of Duluth through their elected council) consider taking away a business’ license to operate, something I do not take very lightly at all, I am considering some of the things that happened at the theater while I was there. Its just one year, out of nearly a hundred that have come and gone now. Also, my year, was one of the more spectacular failures, so I don’t claim it as a success. And if you ever hear my trying to say it was successful, slap me, I get confused about it sometimes. It wasn’t a business success anyway, possibly a creative one for the community, though, and certainly a success for the people I worked with, the people that loved and shared and experienced joy and beauty during that time. It felt like a success to me in many ways even though I lost more money than I could even count trying to make it happen and there were tremendous private, personal losses, too. It nearly finished me, actually.
I thought I’d share a few things I found squirreled away on a barely visited corner of my hard drive today. It’s stuff I don;t want to look at all the time, but I have still been saving it, because these things matter to me. One time when I was arguing with someone, possibly the city’s liquor license board, I figured out that during that year we had done several hundred events of all kinds, often two or three on the same day, or even simultaneously. So this is just a fraction of that …
I have some more, too, but I’m not tech saavy enough to get them all out. Would be nice to have an online scrapbook someday, since I’m sure you all have lots of photos and programs and such, too.
