Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club at 34th and Main, 1950-2020

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: