Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Conversations with Lowell Pickett are almost too distracting to be helpful. They’re like spinning a roulette wheel, and every pocket the ball pops into pays off with a gem of a musical anecdote: “Stevie Wonder told me…I was talking to Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer…Hugh Masekela, do you know him? Legendary South African trumpet player; he was close to Nelson Mandela and helped Paul Simon with Graceland…Do you know Toots Thielemans? For the longest time he was considered Belgium’s greatest musician; he’s featured on two postage stamps. Charlie Parker loved him, and Miles loved him. One time right before Christmas, I picked up my voice mail—just a harmonica playing ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,’ a little giggle, and a little click.”
In exactly equal and opposite proportion, conversations with Lowell Pickett about himself are nearly payoff-free—he’s so self-effacing, so absolutely eager to give credit to others, like partner Richard Erickson, who joined the Dakota in the dicey days following 9/11, when the club’s future existence was uncertain. Having a journalistic conversation with Pickett about himself is like being a new employee working the lights for the first time, as Pickett constantly nudges the spotlight over to where he thinks it would be more usefully directed. “There is no ‘I’ at the Dakota,” he told me once, in exasperation. “The Dakota is many, many people.”
And yet, before there was the Dakota, there was Lowell Pickett. If you want to tease out the answer to one of the most enduring mysteries of Twin Cities life—namely, how we got so lucky as to have one of the best jazz clubs in America (so say Wynton Marsalis, DownBeat magazine, and many others)—Pickett is certainly part of that answer. Look at that Dakota calendar: three May nights featuring Graham Nash, of the Hollies and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, interleaved with dates for Richard Thompson, who the Los Angeles Times called “the finest rock songwriter after Dylan and the best electric guitarist since Hendrix.” But why us? Why here?
It all started in the then farm town of Austin, Minnesota, where Lowell Pickett’s dad managed the JCPenney and his mom, a gifted cellist, played with the Austin Symphony and gave living room cello lessons to the town’s kids. Pickett, born in 1949, the third of four kids, was artsy in exactly the ways you could be in the 1950s and 1960s in Austin: sitting on the floor in front of the family cabinet hi-fi, trying to figure out if he could hear both channels of the “stereo” in each ear and, eventually, getting his mind blown by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, playing at the downtown Austin movie theater. He turned himself into the kind of teen who could and would do just about anything to make or save money—fix a car, drive a bus, develop news photos at dawn at the town paper, and generally get any odd job done that needed doing at any business hiring. Oftentimes, that meant restaurants and bars. He leapt from Austin to Northfield to attend St. Olaf College, where he began meeting the friends and attending the concerts that would eventually transform him and, with him, Twin Cities music.
The most important of all the concerts? When The Who played the Guthrie Theater in 1969, when it was still attached to the Walker Art Center.
Looking back 50-odd years later, the idea of The Who, one of the wildest of all 1960s/1970s rock bands and famed for smashing instruments, playing a place where the only thing that usually got smashed was a playbill in the hands of a spectator wondering if things might finally work out for Hamlet? It seems almost unbelievable. But according to Pickett, it was exactly that dichotomy that made The Who agree to the show.
“It was like, The world has changed. This was rebel music, counterculture music, but now they’re being welcomed into high culture at one of the most progressive museums in the country,” says Pickett. “I’ll never forget sitting in the Guthrie, and Roger Daltrey comes out and does an hour of Tommy. Then he spins his microphone around on a cord: ‘We’re going to play some old rock and roll now, sorry.’ And he launched into ‘My Generation.’”
Add to that a 1971 Captain Beefheart show and a 1972 John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra gig, both also at the Guthrie, and Pickett’s world changed.
“It was so moving,” he recalls. “I couldn’t believe music could be like that. Transcendent. Transformational.”
After college, Pickett and a bunch of St. Olaf friends moved into two Northfield farmhouses separated by a road. From that perch, Pickett drove a Head Start bus and developed photos for a newspaper. He also put on his first money-losing concert. The star? Muddy Waters. Someone Pickett knew was bringing Waters into the Twin Cities and thought a second date would generate enough extra money to make it worth Waters’s time. Pickett rented the Northfield Armory, failed to read the musicians’ concert rider, and then ran to a supermarket to get the only beer then available in Northfield on a Sunday—low-alcohol 3.2.
“Years later,” recalls Pickett, “Pinetop Perkins, the legendary blues piano player—he played at the Dakota when he was 97 or 98—his drummer, Willie ‘Big Eyes’ Smith, he was like, ‘I remember that gig. The one with the weird beer.’”
Charging $5 a ticket, Pickett lost $300 on the show—a lot of money in 1973 for someone driving a bus. Charging people money to watch live music, he concluded, was a perilous business model.
When Pickett’s farmhouse went up in literal flames a short time later, he took it as a sign and moved to the Twin Cities to pursue a different artistic dream: filmmaking and public television documentary creation. He and two St. Olaf friends got pretty far making work that appeared on public television and in film festivals.
More importantly, though, it put Pickett in the thick of the local arts and grant-making world. He helped build a new administrative structure for The Southern Theater and worked on the Minneapolis Arts Commission, but he still needed a restaurant gig to help make ends meet. Bob Faegre offered Pickett a management job at his restaurant in return for an equity stake at Faegre’s. It was Faegre’s where Pickett learned about great, chef-driven food.
In 1985, someone from the new board of The Southern Theater was helping redevelop Energy Park and Bandana Square, and because of Faegre’s, asked if Pickett wanted to try to open something. Pickett’s idea was to take the food quality of Faegre’s, offer a good wine list, and bring in musicians—but, with the Muddy Waters experience in mind, offer music with a low or no cover charge. And for a few years, that worked. But then McCoy Tyner, one of America’s greatest jazz pianists and a founding member of the John Coltrane Quartet, called Pickett looking to play a ticketed show at the Dakota.
“I said, ‘No, there’s no context for something like that in the Twin Cities,’” says Pickett. “‘People don’t spend money for a show like that.’ His agent kept calling. Finally, he said, ‘Just get him a good piano, and pay him what you can afford.’ I couldn’t say no.”
After that, Pickett couldn’t say no to Carmen McRae, who adored chef Ken Goff’s food and told Pickett that playing the Dakota was the most enjoyable three-night gig she’d ever had.
The Dakota’s fate was sealed. In the years since, the Dakota, which eventually relocated from St. Paul to Minneapolis’s Nicollet Mall, has hosted Philip Glass (who brought a boom box and played his personal Allen Ginsberg poetry recitation), Aimee Mann, Rosanne Cash, Robyn Hitchcock, Arlo Guthrie, Diana Krall, Wynton Marsalis, Lucinda Williams, and too many other stars to list. Adele and P. Diddy even played private gigs at the Dakota (for Target executives). The literal thousands of musicians who have come to the Dakota, and the bookers and managers around them, call and text constantly, making Pickett’s phone bop around on a table like a popcorn popper at full tilt. He says he spends around six hours a day on his phone—10 on a long day. And he has since 1985.
It’s easy to understand why everyone wants to talk to him. He’s mellow, encouraging, kind. In hours of conversation, I heard him get mad exactly once. It was while telling the tale of the venerable New York City club The Bottom Line charging musicians for a pitcher of Coke.
“It just disgusts me,” Pickett says. “Why would you invite someone to play and then charge them for their Coca-Cola? My experience is that touring musicians are often treated terribly. I always have the thought, ‘Treat people well. If they’re coming to perform in your room, the food, the transportation, the instrument they requested—make their life easy; give them what they wanted.’ Treat people well. Why would you do anything else?”
That’s the dark secret at the heart of the Dakota’s success. In a world where musicians are often treated terribly, Lowell Pickett’s efforts to treat everyone well are a beacon that draws musicians from all over the world. When people tried to scalp tickets to Prince’s 2013 Dakota run, Pickett personally called the posted Craigslist phone numbers and told them he’d cancel any tickets at the door that didn’t match the purchaser’s credit card.
“It’s stealing from the musician,” he says. “If Prince wanted to sell thousand-dollar tickets, he would. He wanted his fans. The [Craigslist] guy said, ‘That’s illegal.’ I said, ‘Try me.’ We had a run of great nights. Prince was happy. What more could I ask for?”
Nice guys finish first? Sometimes— especially at the Dakota.
Liner Notes
Another key characteristic of Lowell Pickett’s personality and his unlikely ascent to the heart of the world of elite musicians is that he seems to be essentially the guy who everyone calls for the music-performance equivalent of helping them move a couch. And so, Pickett helps, and worries about money and whatever will happen next, next.
He helped get pianist Nachito Herrera and his family out of Cuba, for instance. And when I was wrapping up this story, Pickett spent a week helping up-and-coming jazz star Samara Joy put together a string of California shows.
When Prince’s people called in 2013 to say, “Prince has some things on his mind. Can you put a week’s worth of fake bands on your schedule?” Pickett did it. And when Prince didn’t ultimately want to use all the nights he’d requested Pickett reserve? Pickett used them as free dance-party nights.
And when former Target exec Bob Ulrich called Pickett and said, “Our music bookings at the Phoenix Musical Instrument Museum aren’t working,” Pickett took over the project and ultimately became the museum’s music director—using his connections to book Phoenix as a sort of cousin to the Dakota to the tune of 275 shows a year.
Later this year, Pickett plans to step down from programming the MIM, and another Minnesotan, Andrew Walesch, formerly of Crooners, will replace him.
Pickett’s general philosophy of helping is pretty simple: “If you just show up and do things, you just end up doing things.”