The destruction by fire early this morning of Davey’s Uptown Ramblers
Club is, simply put, a tragedy. The bar had operated continuously in its
current location on Main Street in Kansas City for 70 years (and in a different
location for 25 years before that). It has long been a vital performance space
for the local music scene. The shows I attended there tended toward the
alt-country/Americana end of spectrum, but it was also a key venue for
punk and metal. You could drink cheap; you could play pinball; you could smoke
in the side room long after that became illegal. When I was there, I always ran
into a friend I hadn’t planned to see. Mokie, who ran the back bar, is the
Platonic form of a bartender. There were framed photos of Royals long-retired,
and the price of a pour was written in sharpie on the whiskey bottles. The city
around it shed several skins as the decades passed, but the neon at Davey’s kept
glowing.
And now Davey’s is gone, and it’s irreplaceable.
A few months ago, when I listed my ten favorite shows of the
2010’s, I hadn’t even noticed that Davey’s was the only venue I listed twice. My
#1 show of the 2010’s was the tribute show Rex Hobart put on the night that
George Jones died. This obviously hadn’t been planned in advance, but word
spread quickly enough that there were 100 or so people there. The room sounded
great, Rex sang the shit out of songs he cared about deeply, and I say with all
sincerity that if you care about American popular music and you weren’t there,
I wish you had been. It was beautiful. Perhaps the best thing you can say about
Davey’s is that George Jones would have been honored to know that people raised
a glass to sing “The King is Gone” in a bar like that.
Also in my top ten was a show by the Iron Question, a “supergroup”
composed of several local musicians who mostly play in other bands but get
together once a year between Christmas and New Year’s to cover various punk
obscurities (full disclosure, they're friends of mine, but that too is
the point of Davey’s). In some ways, it was the opposite of the George Jones
show—the mix was not amazing; a couple songs went sideways; one musician did
indeed get in a fight with the sound guy. But there were also a lot of songs that sounded really damn good. In its silliness and anger and sparks
of beauty, that show felt like family at the holidays, and Davey’s, more than
anywhere else in town, was where you wanted to be for a show that felt like family.
My literal family has also played at Davey’s—my brother and
my future sister-in-law brought their band through town a few years
back for a show that was a lot of fun. It was a night that ended at Buzzard’s Beach,
so...yeah.
Ben Summers (who’s in the Iron Question) also played that
night, and I’ve seen him play at Davey’s as part of The Grisly Hand more times
than I recall. And since I ought to have a clip of something to play us out,
here’s The Grisly Hand, one of KC’s great bands, playing at Davey’s nearly a
decade ago:
