Bay View has lost another institution. Frank’s Power Plant has closed, according to multiple social media reports. “So I guess Frank's Power Plant had its final last call last night without warning," Brad Serdan, who has booked shows at the bar, wrote on Facebook. "I don't know any details other than it was sold to a new owner ... It was a venue with an old school independent attitude unlike any other in Milwaukee."
The bar’s website is down and its Facebook page has disappeared. Its Twitter account is still up and features posts from just a few days ago. It’s unclear what will happen to the many events that were scheduled at the venue for the coming weeks—Frank’s kept a busy concert calendar—but presumably they’ll be canceled or relocated.
Frank’s Power Plant was one of the last bars in Bay View where class didn’t matter. The bar predated the many of the new establishments that have planted themselves in the neighborhood over the last 12 years or so (Tonic, Burnhearts, Blackbird, Vanguard, Goodkind, Café Central, Colectivo; the list goes on and on). It drew an eclectic crowd of rock ’n’ rollers, punks and metal heads, but also lots of neighbors, workers, and average joes, too. The city needs places like that, welcoming spots where the creative class and working class can rub shoulders with neither feeling threatened or judged.
Frank’s was also a hub of the rockabilly scene that once defined Bay View but has been gradually squeezed out of the neighborhood. In 2009 I wrote a cover story for the Shepherd about the neighborhood’s rockabilly obsession. Much of it now reads like a time capsule, but it captures the mentality that made Bay View so special, this idea that being hip doesn’t necessitate being pretentious or cutting edge, or turning your back on the blue-collar values the city was founded on.
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For that piece I spoke to the late UWM music professor Martin Jack Rosenblum—an unofficial Milwaukee historian in his own right—who explained that from its very beginnings in the mid-’50s, rockabilly spoke to the working-class South Side because it was, “to put it bluntly, trailer-trash music,” he said.
“It was a low-culture movement that came roaring out of these rural country traditions, and so it really spoke to this socioeconomic segment of Milwaukee,” Rosenblum explained. “Really, this remains its appeal. Where rock ’n’ roll would eventually become high culture, rockabilly remained low-culture.” Rosenblum noted that Bay View always had “a closer, immediate knowledge of that past, and I think a lot of that is familial. That culture has always been in the neighborhood, in its closets, in its attics and in its basements, and now it’s coming out in droves in the area’s second-hand shops, where it’s being passed on to a new generation.”
And now, inevitably, some of that tradition is fading away. In a Facebook post, one former Frank’s employee said that the bar will reopen "with a new look and new people," and while it’s unclear what that means, if history is any indication it’ll probably mean the bar will look a lot nicer, cost a little more, and draw a decidedly more affluent crowd. If so, it’s hard to imagine the new Frank’s, whatever form it takes, will be hosting many rockabilly spins. For all the amenities Bay View has gained over the last decade or so, Frank’s Power Plant stands as a symbol of what it’s lost.
UPDATE: Here's a wild twist: The bar is apparently not closed, Milwaukee Record is reporting, though its future is still up in the air.
