COWTOWN BALLROOM...SWEET JESUS!

09.06.11 | Goodbye Stan
By ROBERT TRUSSELL
The Kansas City Star
Stan Plesser, a major Kansas City music promoter in the 1960s and ’70s, died Thursday. He was 79.
Plesser, of Prairie Village, was born in New York but moved with his family to Kansas City in 1949. He attended Westport High School and what was then called Kansas City University (now the University of Missouri-Kansas City).
In 1963, Plesser opened the Vanguard Coffee House at 43rd and Main streets. The Vanguard became an important venue for young acoustic acts. Among the performers there were Danny Cox and Brewer and Shipley, who became artists promoted by Good Karma Productions, a company Plesser co-founded and that eventually booked large-scale concerts into the Music Hall and Arrowhead Stadium.
Others who performed at the Vanguard included Glenn Frey (later of the Eagles), John Denver, J.D. Souther and comedians Gabe Kaplan, Steve Martin and Pat Paulsen.
“I loved that club,” Plesser said in 2008. “The audiences were great and listened so well. I would never even put in a cash register. I just put in a cash drawer so there wouldn’t be any noise.”
Plesser once described how he had bounced around, serving a stint in the Navy and managing shoe stores, before he walked into a place called the Lawrence Gallery, which he bought and transformed into the coffeehouse.
“At this time the coffeehouse circuit had passed its peak, but there was really good talent in it,” Plesser said several years later. “The people who were still doing the coffeehouse thing were in it because that was their life, music was their life, and there was no other way for them to go.”
In 1969, Plesser helped promote a free outdoor concert in Loose Park headlined by Brewer and Shipley. The promoters expected a crowd of maybe 4,000, but 20,000 people showed up. Many in the crowd, he later recalled, stayed to help pick up trash.
In 1974, Plesser and his partners opened the Cowtown Ballroom, a former swing-era dance hall near 31st Street and Gillham Road. It served no alcohol and had no seating — just a huge floor where people could sit on pillows. The venue came to be regarded as the Midwest version of Fillmore West in San Francisco. Among the performers there were Frank Zappa, Linda Ronstadt , Ravi Shankar, the Byrds, B.B. King, Van Morrison and a group that became a local favorite — the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

01.12.10 | Purchase the movie on DVD
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