“All Right, Guys We’ll See You at the Triple Rock!”

Erik and Gretchen Funk met in the fall of 1993, right as Erik’s band Dillinger Four were taking off. Five years later, they opened a business together that helped define the Minneapolis, and American, punk scene.

Seven of the people interviewed for this oral history, unprompted, used the word “clubhouse” to describe the place.

The Triple Rock Social Club opened near the end of 1998 as a bar and restaurant with oversize plates of food—for vegans, vegetarians, and carnivores alike, at a time when places like that, as Erik puts it, “didn’t basically exist at all” in the Twin Cities. “And we wanted to be able to do live music,” he adds. When they took over a bar called Blondie’s on the Ave. in the West Bank neighborhood, near the University of Minnesota, they decided, “Two out of three we can do here, and if it goes well, we can add the third. Which is exactly what we did,” Erik recalls.