COWTOWN BALLROOM...SWEET JESUS!

Jason Harper The Pitch 5/19/09


From 1971 to 1974, Midwestern youth, mind-altering rock, and THC-enhanced blues and country found a home inside KC's Cowtown Ballroom at 31st Street and Gillham. Some of classic rock's biggest names played at Cowtown — Van Morrison, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, to name a few — and acts such as Brewer and Shipley and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils honed their music there. Local filmmakers Joe Heyen and Anthony Ladesich have cut a film of breakneck speed between archival footage and interviews gathered over the past two years with musicians (famous and not), radio DJs, stagehands, acid philosophers and Kansas Citians who were there when it all went down, and they've assembled a tripped-out oral history of a time when head shops dotted Westport and hippies owned Volker (now Theis) Park. But more than a parade of aging flower children remembering — or, in some cases, struggling to remember — a bygone era, Cowtown pauses to grapple with the town's racial history (Cowtown Ballroom began as an integrated jazz club), feminism, the anti-war movement and the commercialization of music. It's hard to imagine a stronger case for adding sex, drugs, and rock and roll to KC's heritage, a list usually limited to jazz, blues and barbecue.