It wasn't like a funeral at the Uptown Bar & Café on Sunday night. That was more the case on Saturday, when the devilish surf-rock band Lusurfer led a procession with a coffin down Hennepin Avenue.
The final night at the soon-to-be-demolished Minneapolis watering hole Sunday wasn't any big blowout, either. The biggest surprises Sunday were more about what was missing than who showed up.
Among the conspicuous MIA items in the night were the flat-screen TVs, already taken off the walls by the owner's family. The menus were gone, too, since the kitchen ran out of its hangover-curing food Saturday afternoon.
And one of the first things the regulars noticed absent on Sunday was doorman Ron Upton's familiar long, white beard. He had cut it off onstage a night earlier as a symbolic gesture -- and as a pragmatic one, since he might need to find a new job.
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"It still feels a little raw," Upton said, either talking about his face or his emotions.
In business 70-some years, with 35 employees of late (only one of whom quit early), the Uptown was shut down to make way for chain retail stores. Talk of reopening the bar in a nearby site remained strong Sunday, especially after Mayor R.T. Rybak showed up for Friday's sold-out show and pledged his support.
As general manager Dennis Willey put it, "I think people would be a lot more upset tonight if there wasn't such a good chance of us reopening."
In the end, the Uptown Bar's last hurrah was a lot like any other night there, which seemed fitting for a bar that was never all that flashy. Its best trait may have been the feeling that it had always been there.