There is a lot of hype lately concerning the future of the famous CC Club at 26th and Lyndale in South Minneapolis. Could a change be forthcoming?
First off, the CC Club is not closing according to Randy Segal who has co-owned the bar with Steve Shapiro for the last decade.
"No, absolutely. We just had our 90th anniversary," Segal says about the iconic Minneapolis dive bar.
After 11 years with the bar, Segal says he just wants to retire and is only considering selling the bar. Segal and Shapiro are both 75-years old.
"We have not listed the business for sale," he told WCCO Radio. "Now of course we're getting a lot of calls. We're listening to people but we're not actively pursuing the sale."
If he were to sell, there must be one major stipulation.
"We have to make sure that people have the same ideas, you know, that would carry on the same thing that we did," Segal explained.
That means not changing a thing. Segal says the new owners would have to respect the CC Club's history just like he has done.
"We didn't change a light bulb, and that's the beauty of the place because people come in there, they've been moved, out of town, or they come back 20 years later and they go, 'my God, this place hasn't changed at all.' We might have added a couple of little food specials but otherwise we really didn't make any changes," says Segal.
The iconic establishment has been around for 90 years and gained national notoriety with write-ups in Esquire, Playboy, and the New York Times over its history. The CC Club also notes that actors Tom Arnold and Woody Harrelson frequented the bar (or at least tried to).
Opening in 1933 and undergoing many changes over the decades, the CC Club eventually became a rock band hangout as the Minneapolis music scene exploded in the late-70s/early 80s. It even inspired the song "Here Comes a Regular" by Minneapolis indie-rock legends The Replacements.
Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Soul Asylum, and The Suburbs would pop in for drinks with the neighborhood "regulars". That neighborhood also featured record stores and the alternative-indie record label Twin/Tone Records making it the musical soul of the "Minneapolis sound" and the burgeoning indie-punk music that reverberated through the underground scene of the 1980s.
Although Segal says they haven't yet come up with a figure they'd sell for, he says there needs to be several zeroes in that number in order for them to part with the CC Club.