By Tommy Greene —
I can’t recall anyone, even within the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department, ever calling Volker Park by its formal name, the Frank A. Theis Memorial Mall. Oh, the name certainly would have been in city documents and perhaps even appeared in The Kansas City Star when it was dedicated. But the area and its immediate environs were simply referred to by all as the name of its delightfully whimsical Volker Fountain situated on the site’s lowest ground.
Perhaps with Berkeley’s “People’s Park” in mind, a fellow with the Mother Love Tribe, which put out the Westport Trucker and scheduled the summer park concerts, regularly called it “Volker Park” — a sort-of fractured German for the same thing. His name was David Doyle and it wasn’t long before concert announcements, starting with the May, 24, 1970, edition of the Trucker began to use the moniker. It caught on very quickly.
There were many articles relating to the Sunday concerts that appeared in the Trucker’s various incarnations over the years. The following from the April 24, 1971, edition (click thumbnail to enlarge and read) discussed Volker Park’s earliest shows from 1968 through Easter Sunday of 1971 and what its author thought needed to be done to keep the rock rolling.
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A note on the pictured pages 2 and 3 of the April 24, 1971 Westport Trucker: Many of the people listed as staff and contributors, including the author of the article, formerly produced the Kansas City Screw or were currently with Good Karma Productions which operated the Vanguard Coffeehouse and managed several high-end acts. For example, Good Karma’s Gary Peterson earlier that year had designed a Westport Trucker cover that featured the “toking cow” image that would later be used as Cowtown Ballroom’s logo and Bonnie Harney, along with impresario Michael Waggoner, would take over the ballroom’s day-to-day operations from Frank Polte in June 1973. At lower right are Paul Hartfield and Neil Haverstick of KC Grits at Volker Park. At top is “Trucker Dennis” chatting with Sgt. Pauls west of the fountains.
That sure brings back memories! I haven’t heard the name David Doyle in years! If this is what I think it is, the Trucker guy who was introducing the bands and making announcements went over to the cop cars to see what was up and probably right after this picture was taken a cop from the car behind him jumped out and flipped him around with his back over the hood. The cop he was “chatting” with got out right away and called him off. I remember the Trucker guy and a couple of the cops laughing a minute or two later. The band (who was it? I think it was Jaded whose lead singer, Shake, was still performing in the ’90s. Might have been Sixth Chapter.) played throughout it. They probably didn’t even know that any of this happened until afterwards.
The “click to enlarge and read” isn’t working but I’m going to check back cause I really want to read that article.
In paragraph three, it says, “(click to enlarge and read)” referring to the two-page spread. But there is no link there.
Would it be possible to put a link in that would allow one to read the two pages?
To Johnny Thomas:
Jaded and Sixth Chapter both appeared twice at the 1969 Sunday gatherings which ran from May through August that year and one of them appeared in 1970 (the other had disbanded but I forget which one). Oren “Shake” Russell, however, was not in either of those groups. He did guitar and vocals for Love Street Affair which also performed at the early shows.
It was 50 years ago this month that the final arrangements with KC Parks and Rec were worked out for the Sunday concerts. The Mother Love Tribe would put on at least 105 shows through 1974.
Does that 105 include the Sweetwater show? It was put on by some else.
Yes. It was one of the first shows of the 1969 season. Sweetwater had been booked to perform at UMKC’s “Bum Friday” festivities and I think it was Mike Waggoner who made arrangements with the Mother Love people for them to perform the following Sunday. Mother Love’s David Doyle, Spiderman de Zeppo, and “Fat Steve” Davidoff helped out but it wasn’t a Mother Love show and Volker’s ever-present master of ceremonies, “Trucker Dennis,” was putting his feet up elsewhere that day. Waggoner tried once or twice more over the next couple years to slide a “national” act appearing in town over to Volker, but tight tour schedules ultimately nixed the events.
Wow, thanks. I saw a couple of shows at Volker Park in 1970 and recall seeing Stonegate. I had no idea it had been going on for a few years prior to that and continued beyond. I saw a free concert at UMKC, held outside at night that featured Illinois Speed Press and the Steve Miller Band. The date I have on my concert list is April 20, 1970. Anyone have memories of that show? I was a fan of Illinois Speed Press because of their songs ‘Get In The Wind’ and ‘Beauty’ off their self titled debut. KCJC [or was it KBEY by then] played those songs a lot.
The Station: KBEY.
Both acts gave really strong performances. I was a little surprised to see some familiar faces gone from the Steve Miller Band (such as Nicky Hopkins) and they were down to four guys. Didn’t hurt them at all and, in fact, they had more of a “power” sound than possibly any time before or since. That’s something that could be considered unique about there first Kansas City show. Steve had also recently gotten married to a lady from Boulder, Colorado, and was more even tempered — almost mellow — than I’d ever seen him.
The success of the previous year’s two free Sweetwater concerts, one at UMKC and the other at Volker, inspired the idea of setting up the bands on the Student Center patio just outside where Ed Toler had held the Heat Rash Bash the year before. Illinois Speed Press would likely have filled Pierson Hall but the Steve Miller Band’s string of hits made an outdoor show a necessity. I do not recall all the people who organized the event but Mark Edelman, who would later found Theater League, and a Jerry Vanderver (??? Hope I got that right) played central roles.
The sports field was not considered for the event possibly because of schedule conflicts. It was thought that the wide grassy area running down from the patio to Rockhill Road would be more than adequate but the crowd far exceeded earlier expectations with some estimates running at up to 20,000. Hard to tell in the dark and the way people and cars were situated and broken up by the roads, but that seems too large to me. The location of the acts and sound system on the highest point in the area generated a vast number of complaints — plus a great concern that access to Menorah Hospital was threatened by the traffic and crowds — and the police seriously considered shutting the show down that night.
The darkness and the size of the crowd prompted them to just let things play out because it was believed the any “bad situation” that developed could not be properly controlled. But that’s another story. There was no press coverage of this particular matter — and also no more events of a similar nature held at UMKC after this one!
One more thing, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was part of the weekend festivities and their debut performance in Kansas City was the night before at Pierson Hall.
I didn’t see Sweetwater at Volker Park but I did see them a night or two earlier at UMKC. They were a really wonderful band and they later played at Woodstock. What I’m wondering is does anyone know who opened for them at UMKC? They were a local band and I remember that they were really good. Their name was something like The Riders. When I moved back to Kansas City a few years later the park concerts were going strong and I probably saw at least a show a month at Cowtown Ballroom. Then they both seemed to disappear at about the same time.
To Meagan:
You were pretty close on the name. Thanks to the April 24, 1969, University News we find that they were the Young Raiders. They were from Lawrence and the Kansas Music Hall of Fame, which inducted them in 2009, says:
“This band took up where the original Rising Suns left off. After losing their equipment in a wreck and giving up the band name, the guys decided to go back out on the road as the Young Raiders. Eventually about a hundred of the best musicians in Kansas would serve time in the band. Many of them are still playing music for a living.”
Members Rock Grace and Tom Stephenson later played with Joe Walsh, and Bill “Willie” Leacox was the long-time drummer for America. However, so many noted musicians passed through that act that it’s anybody’s guess as to exactly who was on stage at their “Bum Friday” performance at UMKC.
To Doug Hughes — Stonegate? Or was it Stone Wall?
I could not recall a band named Stonegate playing at Volker Park but, after literally half a century, who knows? It just struck me, however, that the band you mentioned was probably the killer power trio Stone Wall. This group did at least one show per season from 1969 through 1971 but I think that by the 1973-’74 shows the members had all moved on to other things.
Take a look at this Stone Wall performance which was filmed at the same time as the full page photo on the Westport Trucker spread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkT6MrFejhk. Same as you remember? The visuals-only film was overdubbed with a live recording made at One Block West. The synchronization worked out remarkably well. Since the recording could not be easily modified, the film was apparently edited to fit the sound.
Search “Stone Wall” here on KCRockHistory for a fine write-up on the band.
amazing to see what people remember.
btw, anybody got a link to those two pages of westport trucker that tommy greene mentions?
Stone Wall was the band name. Allen Blasco, LeRoy Cline and me, (Rick Bacus) are reatured in the video from Volker Park. The audio track came from our reunion show at the Lone Star club in Westport 10 plus years later. Check rickbacus.com for more information and pictures.
Stone Wall: Great band. Unique video. We are fortunate that it was so nicely married to a live recording elsewhere.
For another look at an early park concert see Impulse Federation (sadly without an accompanying audio) from one of the very first shows at Volker, two years earlier in 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBR5BMYOdjs. The band members are Tom Koob, base and vocals; Rick Fields, guitar; Sonny Dryer, drums and vocals.
Note that the number of people at the 1969 show was considerably smaller than the one in 1971. The strain that the jump in weekly attendance was putting on the park grounds is discussed in the pictured Trucker article, and KCRockHist has added an expandable thumbnail to make it accessible.
Though the thumbnail isn’t directly readable by a single click, it contains all the needed data and anyone interested can simply (1) left-click the thumbnail, (2) right-click the expanded image, (3) left-click “Save image as…” which usually defaults to a Pictures Library unless sent somewhere else, and (4) left-click to open, zoom in, and maneuver.
For commentary on the willingness of Impulse Federation to risk arrest during an open-air show at Pennsylvania Street and Westport Road, see the “I Got Dem Big City Blues” in the June 5, 1970, Westport Trucker.
The article also notes that when the doors of the Aquarius were thrown open to the crowd ejected from Westport and Penn. “. . . the hall was free for the rest of the night with Stone Wall doing some heavy jamming.” Stone Wall again!
In my “”A note on the pictured pages . . .”” I mentioned the participation of Good Karmites Gary Peterson and Bonnie Harney (while they still had time to do such things!) in the early Westport Truckers. A denizen of the Sunday shows just reminded me of another one — Don Harthcock. He is the Ewing St. Times member mentioned in the article as reminding concert goers to pick up the trash when they leave the park. Don was Ewing St.’s lead vocalist and, as time allowed, did some desperately needed proofreading for the paper. Indeed you can find him in the staff box at the bottom of the page along with Bonnie and Gary. Another Good Karmite, Mort Moriarty, shuffled photos to the Screw/Trucker from time to time. Post Cowtown/Vanguard, Gary and Mort would mange an obscure San Francisco act named The Tubes.
Did those guys from Good Karma leaving Kansas City have anything to do with Cowtown Ballroom shutting down? Or the park concerts? They both seemed to stop about the same time.
No. Mort Moriarty and Gary Peterson followed the age-old advice to “Go west young man” and formed the management company Bag O’ Bucks almost a year before the shows stopped at both locations within just weeks of each other in June 1974. There was, however, an exodus of sorts that did have a direct impact. The story is far too complex to cover more than basics here but the exodus included:
(1) Trucker Dennis who organized and scheduled the Sunday concerts. After several trips to New York to coordinate matters with the Trucker’s “Big Apple” staff, he left for good in late May to start up High Times magazine. This had actually been announced the previous year in the special “Legalize Cocaine” issue of the Trucker (the culmination of a series of five fat magazine editions which were separate from the purely KC-produced Weekly Westport Trucker). Other staffers had already left for NY but their departure had no impact on the park concerts. Sadly, the well-meaning individuals then in charge of the weekly Sunday shows were unable to maintain them.
(2) Good Karma withdrew from the labor-intensive and economically risky job of operating a small concert hall. The reason Cowtown closed up shop — and it’s a completely legitimate one — is that the task was simply burning them out. You had to work really hard — and very cleverly — to keep a proper amount of dollars running through a venue of that size. The writing was on the wall re closing the doors as soon as they beheld the big, easy money flowing in from their first stadium show, EltonJohn-BrewerShipley in about Aug ’73 I think. After a few months Good Karma simply stopped scheduling new shows; ran out the clock by fulfilling only the existing contracts; and locked the doors in mid-June (however, they did put on a farewell extravaganza several months later).
Other concert promoters such as Bill Graham in San Francisco and Berry Fey in Denver had abandoned owning and operating their own smallish halls years before and, in fact, Good Karma moved away from such shows just in time. A couple months later the driving force behind Cowtown’s famous dollar concerts, KUDL’s energetic program director Larry Miller, joined the exodus at the end of his contract two years to the day after he began at the station in August 1972, and left for bigger pay — his own “bag o’ bucks” — at WKTU in the New York market. (He would claim that he was “fired” in Kansas City but it was a tad more complex than that.) And though Cowtown existed pre-Miller and could have gotten along post-Miller, changing economics in the concert biz would have made making ends meet after his departure an even dicier affair.
I hope this brief account of events nearly a half century ago helps answer your question.
This is wonderful! All I knew is that things just seemed to stop all at once. I had no idea that all this was going on.
I snatched these old photos of some of the people you’ve talked about from that wonderful Cowtown Ballroom movie https://www.flickr.com/photos/163489711@N04/47933996982/in/dateposted/. The movie has interviews with both Paul Peterson and good old Mort Moriarty.
Thank you!
Parks and Recreation changed the locks on the fountain, that’s where the electricity to run the PA’s and Amps came from. It was underground .
David Doyle, and Dennis G. were good people to know ! I enjoyed my involvement with them. Dennis was one heck of editor !
To whom it may concern, Shake Russell moved to Texas. For some reason he gained ground, and now is in the Texas Songwriters Hall of Fame, even though he is from Independence. He is still preforming all over Texas !
I remember electric generators being used for the power. They’d rent them from somewhere and Trucker Dennis would ask for donations to help cover the cost. They’d drive up on the grass and set them up on the other side of the fountains way back from the bands probably because they were so loud. At some point they must have switched to the electrical system. Those things were L-O-U-D.
And, yeah, that Trucker guy was sharp, a bundle of energy but really focused. Particle laser beam focused. He seemed to be everywhere, often with that girl pictured in the link several messages back. What a doll. I remember reading a blog comment long ago by DJ Jay Cooper that he was seated next to Trucker Dennis during one of his New York flights to set up High times. I think I read it on the official blog of the Cowtown movie.
I’m sure glad you can read that Trucker article now. I want more!
Michael Vohs and Johnny Thomas are both right.
The bands that played at Volker in 1968 and the first couple years of weekly shows that started the following year all were powered by electric generators from Bledsoe’s Rental on Wornall Rd. The big problem with them, though, was an uneven power flow that really savaged the organs. You’d hold your finger on a key and you could clearly hear the note cycling up and down in tone and even volume. Organist extraordinaire Rich Hill played a big, solid-wood Hammond and with an equally big rotary speaker which sucked a lot of juice. The result was murderous the first time he did a park concert. The following year, Trucker Dennis got a bigger generator for Rich’s band but it made little or no difference. What they needed was one with a voltage regulator but that moved into units that were starting to get pretty pricey for a free gig.
Rich had featured in sessions at the Vanguard Coffeehouse (this was the year before Cowtown opened I think) and his Good Karma buddies, living up to their name, told Dennis that they’d foot the bill to get a proper generator for Rich. As things turned out, they didn’t need to cough up a dime. KCParks&Rec’s liaison to the Mother Love Tribe (a guy named Mike Lillis?) knew of the problem and volunteered the city’s power which was controlled from an underground room south of the fountains. Ironically, the ground-level entrance doors were just yards away from where the generators were usually set up.
On-site electricity was used only sporadically at first but within a year or so generators were a thing of the past. There was no problem with access to the power room or large maintenance shed hidden away in the trees northwest of the Nelson as the KCParks&Rec turned over keys for both to Mother Love so the lock change must have happened sometime later. Compared to what was going on in other cities back then the degree of cooperation between Parks&Rec and Mother Love seems remarkable today.
That’s great news about Shake Russell. What a guy. During that first year of weekly shows his Love Street Affair stepped in on only a couple hours notice when one act dropped out at the last minute. Impulse Federation did the same thing.
A correction and a revelation:
In my April 20 comment I said:
“It was 50 years ago this month that the final arrangements with KC Parks and Rec were worked out for the Sunday concerts. The Mother Love Tribe would put on at least 105 shows through 1974.”
It turns out that I was wrong. The negotiations were wrapped up the previous month in March. From Zig Zag 1 published around March 10-12, 1969:
“Mother Love presents, with the permission of the city fathers, a Volker Park Wallow on Sun., March 16, at one P.M. (Dennis says come early) featuring Manchester Trafficway and the Sixth Chapter. —– and —– On the same day, Sunday, March 16, at 8 P.M., at the Town Hall Ballroom, 40th and Troost, Mother Love presents the Sixth Chapter and Cadillac. $1.50 at the door. Dennis says there may be a ! ! L I T E ! ! show! Who the hell is this Mother Love?”
So the weekly Sunday shows started a whole month earlier than I’d though I remembered and, as far as the “Park” in Volker Park goes, it couldn’t have been inspired by People’s Park in Berkeley because the sad events there were yet to occur. Ol’ David Doyle came up with it himself.
Incidentally, Ziz Zag was a sister publication of Frog Tit and The Plain OX, short-lived ditties that today would be called “zines.” Ironically, Stu Albert, whose article in the Berkley Barb inspired the grass-roots effort to renovate the large, derelict vacant lot that became People’s Park, had befriended the somewhat younger Trucker Dennis the year before when they were both Yippies at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. There was no direct connection between the simultaneous activities at Volker and People’s parks though Mother Love would put out individual editions of the Yipster Times for the Yippies in 1973 and 1975 as well as cosponsor the 1975 “Smoke-In” at the Ellipse in Washington, DC with them.
Good accounting of those events and those years. My name is Roger Miller now 66 years leaving outside Sacramento ca. I to went west. But I loved those times and those shows. Was a member of some of the local bands back in the day. Remember Up from Detroit Pearson hall indoors. That outdoor concert Illini seems speed press and Steve Miller could be heard all the way to Westport outside Katz Drug. Local bands scutch as Morning Star, Grits, Ice, Appletree, and of course Jaded my good friend bass player Gregg McArther was there lead singer and base player. And those other local music venues such a The Place and of course the Aquarius. The great Halloween show on campus at the conservatory of art.some great shows, great times, great people big part of my life. Followed music to the west coast.others that followed were Mike Finnigan with Finnigan & Wood. Out west changing personail, and name to phantom Blues band and moved from northern ca. To southern ca. Now Mikes daughter has a band and plays clubs in Friscoand playing events up and down the coast. Hey to all of you cheers, good hearing those names from the past and hope they are all well.
Zig Zag? Frog Tit?
D
Don’t know anything about these. Never even heard of them.
Ha. Ha. I should explain. These were all put out by a bunch of guys centering around Joe Schwind and David Van Hee I knew who had recently graduated from Rockhurst. The zines carried on a friendly rivalry. Hence, you will find comments like this one in Frog Tit:
”There is a great need in Kansas City for well written, point making, crusade winning, powerful speaking, grunt eating, down under newspapers. Frog Tit has decided to move our bowls on YOU.
”Have you ever seen the Pepperland Press? It makes us want to scratch our balls with a meat cleaver. . . .”
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, gently commenting on The Screw, The KC Star (”a poem”), Reconstruction, and finally Zig Zag:
”Zig Zag is a recent attempt. If you have trouble finding something interesting in the paper, it means you don’t live in within a 3-block radius of the editor’s house. They’re impotent and they like it.
”Has anyone ever attempted to do anything striking, original or bold with the paper medium? No. I hope no one ever does. It would crush the trite framework in which this publication was born.”
There distribution was ”Extremely Ltd.”
To Roger and Johnny Thomas:
That Steve Miller and the Illinois Speed Press could be heard all the way over at Katz (Westport and Main) is not surprising. See April 26 post. The KCPD was deluged — not an exaggeration — with complaints from the apartment buildings along 47th Street east of the Plaza; the Oak Hall apartments up from Southmoreland Park; the Rockhill Homes Assn. area east of the Nelson; and even the now long-gone Twin Oaks Apartments which I wouldn’t have thought were at all in the ”line of fire” of the sound system. But it was concern that access to Menorah Medical Center was threatened by the traffic and crowds that prompted the police to seriously considered shutting the show down.
Of course it may have been just spin of some sort ahead of his nomination to replace FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, but Trucker Dennis and Paul Edwards of the Westport Community Council were both told in conversations with KCPD officials that Police Chief Clarence Kelley personally made the decision to let the show run its course. The police principally engaged in keeping traffic moving — and making sure that their presence could be seen. How different might things have developed in the coming years if, as some of his subordinates are reputed to have advised, Kelley had applied a heavier hand that night in April 1970.
The Trucker article supplied here by Rick Hellman mentions that the Amelia Earhart Memorial Flying Band in 1968 was the first rock band to perform at Volker Park and that the weekly Sunday concerts began when ”Sixth Chapter rumbled to a start” the following year. What we learn from Zig Zag 1 (June 22 post) is that Sixth Chapter was opening for the Manchester Trafficway. Now, many old timers are aware that the Trafficway and Amelia Earhart are precisely the same act — same line-up, same tunes — and that their lead vocalist is the outgoing Mayor James of Kansas City. Back then, he was called Sylvester or ‘’Syl’’ by others in the band and friends. I don’t know when Syl became Sly. Perhaps when he got back from the Marines where he was, I think, an MP.
Never could get used to calling him Sly possibly because (I’m showing off my age) I continue to associate it with Sly and the Family Stone. The bottom line, though, is that without the announcement in Zig Zag 1, I wouldn’t have known that not only did this band perform the first Sunday park concert, but also helped launch the Mother Love Tribe’s weekly Sunday shows the following year.
I wish I could remember the details surrounding the aftermath of the Amelia Earhart winning the 1968 Belton Battle of the Bands (the Next of Kin had won it the year before). Sylvester and guitarist Chip Tate were set upon by local toughs when stopping to get some gas. A greatly relieved Sylvester remarked that he was sure glad that Chip missed when swinging a mic stand at the head of one of the attackers: ‘’Would have killed him!’’ And I sure wish I had more than a few of the old Westport Truckers. There’s a ton of ‘’Kansas City rock history’’ — and rock history in general — in them.
I never saw them at Volker Park but I saw the Amelia Earhart band when I got roped into bringing my little brother to a daytime show they did in the Visitation Parish parking lot between the church and the school. It was a school function but it looked like every kid in the neighborhood, Brookside to Ward Parkway, was there. I vaguely remember that I expected something like a “bubbly gum” kid band but they were way beyond that. This would have been 1968. I didn’t go to the Sunday shows very often. Usually only if friends were going there. I wish now that I had.
The Amelia Earhart Memorial Flying Band (aka Manchester Trafficway) were an extremely talented bunch, at their very best when they were doing Jimmy Hendrix and Otis Redding material. Trucker Dennis, who was often with them when they were in their Amelia Earhart phase, actually took photos at that outdoor “mixer” and, with the exception of the shots with Sylvester James, drummer “Bucky” Kort, and some other band photos which got stuck together and thoroughly wrecked, he had them into the 21st Century. I think the surviving pictures are in the possession of Mayor James now.
I didn’t really appreciate the local rock scene until many years later. The Westport Trucker either. Years ago I saw some old editions and it was like I was seeing them for the first time. As for Zig Zag and Frog Tit, I’ve never even heard of them though I do remember that there were other papers. There never seemed to me to be much to them but that’s also what I thought about the Westport Trucker back then. Cowtown was another matter!
The “four little zines”
The David H. Perkins Papers at the Kansas City Public Library contain a copy of Frogtit. The library’s description of their holdings says it’s from 1968 so, if that date is correct, it may be a different edition from the one in the UMKC Library’s Marr Sound Archives run by Chuck Haddix of “Fish Fry” fame (see http://kcrockhistory.com/2017/05/consider-donating-your-kc-rock-history-items/). The content of UMKC’s Frogtit makes it clear that theirs was produced in early 1969. The ‘‘1968,’’ however, is probably just an error and it’s the same publication at both locations. UMKC also has the diminutive pub after the name was changed to The Plain OX and its single edition (?) is somewhat thicker than the original Frogtit(s).
Other early ‘‘zines’’ that UMKC has from that period are Zig Zag and the mimeographed Mother which was a creation of future serial killer Bob Berdella. What makes Mother stand apart from the others is that while the commentary in Zig Zag and Frogtit / Plain OX can at times be harsh, it was clearly done “with a twinkle in the eye’’ and the self-deprecation is evident. In Mother, however, Berdella displays the cretinish tendencies he was known for long before he was torturing and killing people.
As a group the four little zines contain a wealth of tidbits on the scene as 1968 became 1969 including long-forgotten hallmarks along Troost — a café whose name I can’t remember that was on 47th and the Rockhill Theater which played Andy Warhol’s flicks, and the old Strand Art adult theater / strip joint — that were curiosities to UMKC and Rockhurst students who lived near them instead of commuting to the schools. And, of course, these zines contain references to and descriptions of early hipster haunts of the day which peppered the blooming Westport Rd. – 39th St. area.
The Perkins Papers at the KC public Library also contain many editions of the Kansas City Screw – Westport Trucker (he was a founding editor) as well as the literary journals that he and other editors were putting out simultaneous to the Trucker — the Harrison Street Review and Chouteau Review. And, speaking of the Kansas City Screw (which ran on its masthead, ‘‘A twisted devise for holding things together’’), a web site on San Francisco Digger lore ran an article from it that was published in 1969 on the Mother Love Free Store: http://www.diggers.org/free_store_kansas_city.htm.
Interestingly, there was a period where the Trucker itself had a very ‘‘zine’’ feel to it. The UMKC Library has the second (3 ditto pages) and third (8 sheet-fed pages) Westport Truckers from when the staff was reforming after the Screw’s failed — and very short-lived — merger with the more doctrinaire Lawrence, Kansas, paper Reconstruction. Most of the Kansas City staff fled after the first couple editions of the combined paper, Vortex, though a couple of the editors, including Perkins, stuck it out through about its fifth issue.
They certainly have a ‘‘zine’’ feel to them. The new name was also less open to misinterpretation than the Screw and the pub grew very quickly. The 2-page Trucker spread pictured with this blog is from an edition produced less than a year after the first diminutive ditto issues came out.
Before your grandkids throw them away . . . .
— and —
’’Tonganoxie Americana Pie’’ (no kidding)
Chuck Haddix announced in a July 12 comment (http://kcrockhistory.com/2017/05/consider-donating-your-kc-rock-history-items/#comments) that the Marr Sound Archives/LaBudde Special Collections at the UMKC Library is adding a ‘‘Trucker collection’’ to their holdings. He notes, however, that ‘‘there are major gaps’’ in what they have. Anyone with Westport Truckers and other rock ‘n’ roll history they’d be willing to part with are asked to contact him at 816-235-2798 or haddixc [at] umkc [dot] edu.
So before your grandkids toss those old Truckers into the trash, get in touch with Chuck.
And, by the way, Chet Nichols who has some meaty comments preceding the one by Haddix, has a new album of older songs he wrote when he lived in Tonganoxie. It’s aptly titled ’’Tonganoxie Americana Pie.’’ What a fine collection of rock, bluegrass, country and folk tunes! And I love the cover: https://chetnichols.net/cd-tonganoxie-americana-pie.
To Jeff Markel
Jazz guitarist extraordinaire Neil Haverstick (https://microstick.net/ and https://www.classical-scene.com/2018/09/10/journeys-improvisation/), best known in the Kansas City area as the frenetic guitarist of Grits in the 1970s, wrote a fun article for Guitar Nine some years ago that touches many bases including the KC rock scene back then: https://www.guitar9.com/column/40-years-guitar.
I added a comment to another Digger site that reproduced the article and a picture of the page which includes an ad for the Vanguard Coffeehouse and the Colony Bar on 48th and Troost (”KCs Gayest Spot”), https://diggerfeed.org/2017/04/21/dennis-free-store/comment-page-1/:
”The guy who did the Motherlove Free Store is the same ‘Trucker Dennis’ mentioned in this article – http://kcrockhistory.com/2019/03/where-did-the-name-volker-park-come-from/. He later became a historian and author. The Westport Free Health Clinic he helped get off the ground and organized benefit concerts for is still in existence – https://kccare.org/about/history/ – though it went through some big changes about 20 years ago. And this has to be him too – https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1977/4/23/new-parody-is-ridiculing-the-phoenix/.”
The webmaster sent me a nice e-mail where he said that he questioned whether the guy who started the Free Store is the same one who is the author today. Ha!
There’s a lot of interesting stuff on both Digger sites.
To Johnny Thomas:
It’s amazing that those Digger sites have (or one of them has) that article from the KC Screw. I think ”Dennis Free Store” was written by Dave Perkins but it really could have been anybody — John Arnoldy, Cheri Blankenship, Larry Alton, Jo Anne Pieronn, perhaps even crazy Bob Scott. Sadly, the site that also has the little reproduction of the full page, which principally contains an article by lovely Jo Anne, is unreadable when expanded. I’m told that the main KC Public Library has at least some of them in their archives. Haven’t seen any of those for nearly half a century.
It feels weird even saying “half a century” but it’s really that far back in the fuzzy past. Dave passed away some years ago while Dennis is around and (surprise, surprise) a pretty busy guy, but I wonder what became of the rest of the original crew? Cheri and Dave were still at it five years later as was Arnoldy (saw an article of his from New York in one of the Trucker’s High Times precursor mags). Bob Sebbo of the old Mystic Number National Bank did the first KS Screw cover in late ’68 and the full color ”Life does indeed go on and on and on . . .” Weekly Westport Trucker cover just before Dennis left for the last time in 1974.
Hope Chuck Haddix at the UMKC Library is successful with his “Trucker collection” project which I assume includes the Screw and the first few editions of Vortex before the Kansas City staff did a ”Feets don’t fail me now!” from the Lawrence movementoids. If it doesn’t, it should.
And remember — Contact Chuck at haddixc [at] umkc [dot] edu before your grandkids throw those old Truckers into the trash!
The fact that Volker Blvd. runs on the south side of the park was, I am sure, a strong influence on the creation and popularization of the name Volker Park.
The name Volker comes from a local hardware businessman and philanthropist who was prominent in the era around the advent of the 20th Century.
The pidgin German use of Volker instead of Volks is easy enough to understand to the non critical users of language.
I became acquainted with David Doyle and Dennis Giangreco when I became a resident at the establishment of the Trucker House in the fall of 1970. Mr. Doyle liked to muse about various philosophical and social topics and contribute them both orally and occasionally to the Trucker.
Did The Cadillacs ever play at Volker Park? Like the Amelia Earhart Band, they were better than average and were also making the rounds of the school mixers. They featured a guy on saxophone.
At least 2 of the bands at the park with Sweetwater were Blues Garden and my band Queen’s Elevator, M. Waggoner ran a guitar shop at Corinth music w/Jack Manahan & Bill Zickos doing drums. Jack played keys w/Blues Garden, which featured [among others] Jerry Chambers, later of Morningstar. Queen’s Elevator was a group based in Liberty, Mo. Bands that day were all playing Acoustic amps, which were also used by Sweetwater.
To Bill Rook — Thanks! Beyond Jerry Chambers/Morningstar, all the rest of that info was unknown to me and possibly Rick Hellman of the Rock History Project as well.
To Dan Siglar — Yup, David Doyle certainly was a remarkable fellow.
To Jeff Markel — Yes. In addition to performing at Mother Love’s second indoor show (see June 22 post), their Sunday concert in the late spring of 1969, if I remember correctly, may have been the only show that generated a direct response from the police due to noise complaints. Again, if I’m recalling correctly, the police walked in and went into conference with Trucker Dennis as their set we nearing a end. Dennis had the guys make a show of turning their wrists as if they were lowering the volume on their amps. The police left and the Cadillacs were done after one lengthy jam.
The complaints had principally come from the now long-gone Twin Oaks Apartments a couple blocks behind the the band who’s amps were pointed in the opposite direction — and with a large building in between! Even the police on the scene didn’t appear to take the complaints too seriously and the Parks Dept. liaison (Mike Lillis?) believed the complaints to be some sort of organized attempt by busybodies to squash the concerts. The very next Sunday he appeared with a portable decibel reader to take readings throughout the area so that specific data would be available to help beat back any future monkey business about the volume which was not believed to be excessive for a mid-afternoon event. It’s an interesting story that might appear here sometime.
I think the sax man’s name was Scott Trusty, and the KC Screw (aka Westport Trucker the following year) ran a picture of him wailing away under the title ‘‘CADILLACS AX TWIN OAKS.’’ I remember not a word of what the article said (it was, after all, 50 years ago) but I think the photographer was either Good Karma’s Mort Moriarty or professional photog Carter Hamilton. A nice period shot of Mort with Paul Peterson can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/163489711@N04/.
The previous post prompts a question:
WHERE ARE THE PHOTOS OF CARTER HAMILTON?
Carter Hamilton, who passed away in 2012, was a prolific professional photographer with a second-floor studio located on about 37th and Warwick Blvd. At least that’s where it was back in those days. In 1968 and 1969 he would snap pictures at specific Volker Fountain events. He was not at the first electric show put on by the Amelia Earhart guys in 1968, but he did cover the Easter Sunday ‘‘Love In’’ and the second park concert (Mystic Number National Bank – New Action Army – Marshmallow Monorail).
Do Carter’s negatives and prints — or at least some portion of them — still exist somewhere or were they unceremoniously dumped to the curb upon his death? I’ve forgotten most of the photos I saw during visits to his place but I do recall at least some of the 1968 images of the Mystic Number National Bank and those that contained people I either knew or were familiar with:
— A gesticulating Ed Toler towering over Amelia Earhart vocalist Tom Cassidy who appears to be rather amused.
— Little Willy and Trucker Dennis by the fountain’s centerpiece statuary. Willy, his long hair flowing, was decked out like a diminutive Moses and positioned in right profile complete with staff in hand while Dennis to his left front sported a top hat, a cape (or blanket?) across his shoulders was clutching a big round cloth bag of buttons that he was giving away. He was almost full-face to the camera. A psychedelicized ‘‘Buttons’’ and surrounding pattern had been Magic Markered on the bag.
— Barbara Wilson’s then husband posing proudly with his garden east of the park.
— Two black musicians in right profile sitting cross-legged as they pounded their drums. Sitting in the grass in an arc from their left and watching intently were Stephanie Bombeck, Rochelle Sporn of Record Rendezvous, and half of an unknown young man. All were full-face to Carter’s camera. Steve Campbell, who two years later would do the first Freedom Palace poster for their opening with Canned Heat, stands behind Rochelle but you see only his legs.
— And a large number of photos of “The Bank.”
So where are these 1968 photos of Carter Hamilton? The park was a magnet for photographers from 1969 on, but aside from a few Art Institute students and random individuals with Polaroid Swingers, Carter had the field all to himself in the early, early days.
Hopefully his photos will turn up while some of us are still around to enjoy them.
This might be something that you or Chuck Haddix might know the answer to. Way, way back around 1970 or 1971, a band posed for a publicity photo at some graffiti at the rear of the apartment building on the corner of 43rd and Warwick. Do either of you know who the band was?
Naturally, this question is open to anyone who might know the answer to.
I don’t know. Did you see the picture being taken or the resultant publicity photo? Either way, what a neat old memory. For those not familiar with what he’s referring to, the apartment building on the northwest corner faces 43rd Street, the east side faces Warwick Blvd., and the part of the back closest to the boulevard and sidewalk had no windows which made its dark red bricks a great canvas for someone who apparently was a fan of West Side Story. And for or anyone reading this who is under about 55 (Ha!), Romeo and Juliet — Oooops, I mean West Side Story — was a sparkling early-60s musical centering on a love story and gang warfare in New York.
SHARKS and JETS, the names of the rival gangs, were emblazoned in stark white brush strokes across the bricks. Since the apartment’s back faced the front yard of a dilapidated house on Warwick (it’s since been a vacant lot for decades), the wide-open yard space made the West Side Story tribute highly visible to traffic moving south on the boulevard. I remember seeing it for years and the paint was so thickly applied that I wouldn’t be surprised if some perceptible trace of it remains today.
I’ll try to find out who the band was but, as I’ve noted before, you’re asking about a photo taken nearly a half century ago. It does seem, though, like something that might be buried in Chuck Haddix’s UMKC collection.
Speaking of the devil, West Side Story is on TCM right now!
I was in a car going, just as you said, going down Warwick when I saw the photographer shooting the group. I really can’t remember how many guys there were but I’m certain it wasn’t more than five. There was about the same number watching. The camera was on a tripod.
I’d forgotten what a great film that was!
Boy, you got me on that one. Great story.
On second thought it could have been a project by Kansas City Art Institute students. The brick house next to the apartment building, known as the Warwick House, was home to a rotating group of artists who regularly collaborated on art projects. If so, the photo may be in the Kansas City Art Institute Archives. Just a thought.
. . . . and not be a band photo at all.
It’s been suggested to me that it might be In Black and White but the dates (assuming they are correct) seem too late for it to be them. The last time I saw In Black and White wasn’t at The Place, where they played pretty regularly from ’67 to ’69, but at one of the early weekly Sunday shows at Volker Park in 1969. April and still chilly I think. I vaguely recall that they and just about everyone else were in long sleeves and perhaps even light jackets.
John, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for info on this, but, yes, when someone’s blowing down Warwick — and has rock ‘n’ roll in the soul — they could get the impression that it’s a band when there’s any number of other possibilities. Rick Hellman’s looking into this.
Thanks Chuck. Hadn’t thought of the ”Warwick House” across the street in ages. Ed Toler, Arny Young, Rich Hill, others, frequented the place and may have lived there from time to time. Probably did.
See — and hear — Arny Young at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCvR3l8WDZM. Highly, highly recommended. Still a ”Rough jazz” guy. A treat to hear his music and his take on things.
Those were great times. Cowtown Ballroom! Volker Park! I was a little too young to go to Freedom Palace and was never at the Vanguard when it was a coffeehouse but I liked The Sign. I wish I still had some of my old Westport Truckers. It’s really fascinating to read all these behind the scenes details and Tommy Greene, you should write a book!
To Ben Caputo –- I’m afraid that would be beyond my abilities but it just so happens that Rick Hellman, who produces this web site, is gathering material right now for a book detailing the rock history of the Kansas City area. Running the KC Rock History Project has generated a remarkable amount of into that he can make use of so it will be interesting to see how he puts it all together.
For Cowtown fans, Paul Peterson of Good Karma fame (see May 28 post with link) is also working on a book and Chuck Haddix of KCUR’s Friday-Saturday night ”Fish Fry” and UMKC has already written a slew of them — Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop, as well as Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, and The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age & Great Depression — all available via Amazon.
It’s also worth noting that there’s five-plus years of Westport Truckers from the Cowtown-Volker period that, on average, contain a wealth of info on area bands/shows, interviews, commentary on the local rock scene, album reviews, and coverage of the national acts appearing at Cowtown and elsewhere in town. Sadly there are no complete sets of the nearly 100 editions — hard copy or microfilm — at either the UMKC Library or Kansas City Public Library. Even Trucker Dennis has only about half of them or less.
Hey Tommy!
I missed the new Woodstock documentary when it was aired on PBS last month but recently watched it on their web site. It’s OK, but one thing that caught my attention was a segment that said that the governor of New York was advised to send in the National Guard to clear everyone out of the festival area and open up the highway near the festival that had become blocked. Someone else on his staff advised the governor to just let the festival play out and everything would return to normal on its own. The governor took the latter advise and instead of sending in troops to clear people out sent in Army medics in helicopters to assist the festival’s medical teams.
From some of the earlier comments here on the Sweetwater show at UMKC (Apr 26 and July 5), this sure sounds a lot like how the KCPD handled things that night when it looked like access to the old Menorah hospital might get blocked.
To John Thomas:
I believe you mean the outdoor Steve Miller Band show but had Sweetwater on the brain. They played the previous year. But that IS a very interesting insight. I don’t know if Police Chief Clarence Kelley was following a specific mode of operation or just using common sense. The actions — or, rather, lack of action — by NY Gov Nelson Rockefeller during Woodstock beyond ordering in National Guard helicopters and medical teams suggests that it may have been a bit of both in each case. At the Steve Miller concert the KCPD became heavily involved in keeping the traffic moving along Rockhill Rd. and the intersections.
Trivia: Years later Trucker Dennis put out some parody publications and worked for The Real Paper in Cambridge, Mass. He was well known as being less than precise in his spelling and when he moved back to KC in the late ‘70s, Rockefeller’s nephew, David Rockefeller Jr, who was one of the owners of The Real Paper, sprung for a 100-year-old Webster’s Dictionary as a going away present. Trucker Dennis still has it.
Wow! That’s some going away present! I found an article on some of his Boston doings on the Web in a Harvard Crimson article. I posted the link and a few others on July 17. Here it is again, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1977/4/23/new-parody-is-ridiculing-the-phoenix/.
Neil Haverstick of KC Grits has asked Trucker Dennis and Chuck Haddix of KCUR’s Fish Fry (https://www.kcur.org/programs/fish-fry#stream/0) for help locating a copy of the poster from their February 1973 Cowtown show with BB King.
If anyone has a copy that we can scan for Neil, please contact Chuck at haddixc [at] umkc [dot] edu – (816) 235-2798. Neil can be seen at lower right in the Westport Trucker two-page spread at the head of this post and he later wrote as many as a half-dozen reviews for the Trucker. Links to some of his recent efforts and reviews of his concerts/works can be found in this post’s July 17 comment.
Hmm. I knew David Doyle and “Trucker Dennis,” as you call him, was my boyfriend summer 1968-summer 1969. Somehow, I don’t recall David being part of the Mother Love Tribe or his involvement in arranging bands. Maybe earlier on. Dennis did all or most of the work as far as I saw, though it was through him I met David. I was called Blue back then.
Or, maybe David Doyle was involved later if he lived at the Trucker house. Or maybe I remember it all wrong – it was more than 50 years ago. There is a certain copy of the Trucker I’d really like to have, too from spring or summer of 70, I think. A photo of me with my 3-5 month old son in a back carrier at Volker Park was in it. I used to own it but it was destroyed in a flood, along with other early photos of him. That son will be 50 in March…let me tell you, thinking of that can make you feel old! I had planned to go see the issues on file at the KCPL when in town (I now live in Tucson) but I never have time. I’m always too busy seeing old friends from back in the day. I don’t imagine it would help anyway. The quality wasn’t that good in the paper and would be really bad copied.
Sorry, but I can’t sleep and keep thinking of new things.
Was there ever a Volker Park Reunion? Yeah, I know, it isn’t there now but maybe at the Art Gallery? If not, someone should plan a 50 year on in this summer (even though people started hanging out there at least 2-3 years earlier).
To Linda Axon:
It’s terrible that your photos were destroyed. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-familiar story. The photo you described is probably part of the “Happy Birthday Baby Jesus!” edition centerfold of the Dec ’70 – Jan ’71 Westport Trucker. It was made up of a large number of photos taken at the park earlier that year and the one you mention sounds familiar. A Westport Trucker Collection has been started in LaBudde Special Collections at the UMKC Library. They may not have that specific edition yet (and perhaps never will) but get in touch with Chuck Haddix at haddixc [at] umkc [dot] edu, (816) 235-2798. Even if they don’t have it, Chuck can certainly put it on a list of other editions that people have requested that something be copied from.
As for a Volker Park reunion, almost every year a band or two will sort-of throw their own party and play there. But that’s about it.
To Linda Axon:
Terry Collins informs us that, if she’s “got it all straight,” a picture of “Bob and Blue getting married” at Volker Park was run in a September 1969 edition of either the evening Kansas City Star or the morning Kansas City Times and that you can find the photo at a couple places on the web: Among the Kathy Childs posts at https://www.facebook.com/groups/444600045579719 (she was present at the wedding) and the Facebook page of Kathryn A Wyant Schulte: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1278297839816&set=a.1278297799815.2038293.1301123402&type=3&theater. So if you are the person in the newspaper photo, this will be at least one image that can be recovered.
Did the Ozark Mountain Daredevils ever play at Volker? I have two friends who are sure they didn’t but I’m just a sure that I saw them myself and that it was a great show! One of them says it must have been at Loose Park and says I must have been hallucinating.
To Jeff Markel:
You were not hallucinating. At least not then. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils did play there – mouthbow and all – at the Easter Sunday show of 1973 (two years after the Easter concert pictured in the Trucker spread accompanying this post). Marvelous performance. Also performing was Pilgrimage, with their twin lead guitar work reminiscent of Wishbone Ash, and a band that, I’m sad to say, I don’t remember anything of, Slaughterhouse. There was a neat, full-color poster that the Mother Love Tribe made up for the event. They went up all over town so the Good Karma folks ended up getting only about a half-dozen of them. The color poster can be found on the back cover of a Trucker, though,
Since that Sunday show was perhaps one of the five or six most heavily attended of the park concerts, with a KCPD estimate that at least 8,000 people came and went throughout the day, I was going to make the snarky comment that it was a pretty well-known show and your buddies, if they were among them, may have been too blitzed to know who was performing. But, heck, it was nearly a half-century ago so don’t give them a “duh” and rub their noses in it.
TED ANDERSON has been nominated to be inducted in THE KANSAS MUSIC HALL OF FAME . . . But where is he?
From Chet Nichols via Trucker Dennis:
————————————————-
”Ted Anderson has been nominated to be inducted in The Kansas Music Hall Of Fame, which is great, no?
”Well, one big rub, no one knows how to get ahold of him….. THAT IS a problem, yes?
”DO you or anyone you know, know how to reach him…..I know he can be somewhat of a migratory “bird”, by maybe he is living near one of you.
”Please let me know. We have an APB out on him.”
————————————————-
Can you help?
HELP! HELP ! HELP!
Hey Tommy, thanks for posting the note about Ted Anderson. We have an APB out for him. Anyone who knows ANYONE who might know Ted and how to reach him, PLEASE send them my way via email…. chet [at] chetnichols [dot] net
Ted is an old friend and I know this will mean a lot to him. Whomever helps us find him will get a PARTY SIZE bag of Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and a bottle of Sauza tequila.
Please let me know.
Chet Nichols
PS YOU can also reach me through my website, http://www.chetnichols.net …. chet [at] chetnichols [dot] net
On Facebook I was asked if Trucker Dennis was the ‘‘President of The Mother Love Tribe of Westport?’’ I replied: ‘‘He was the Westport Trucker’s long-time editor and I remember guitarist Ed Toler at a Place called the Aquarius called him the Grand Minister of Funk. I remember that because everybody, including Dennis, cracked up laughing.’’
Now I’m second-guessing myself. Ed Toler said that and everybody laughed, but I’m wondering if I got the place wrong. Know anything about this?
I am sure that it was a show that the Trucker / Mother Love Tribe put on.
You’ve got it right. It was the two-night Up Against the Wall Ball held in June 1972. Ewing Street Times (a Good Karma band whose lead singer Don Harthcock helped proofread the Trucker) and Cobra played Friday night. The Saturday show featured Grits (whose lead guitar man Neil Haverstick, https://microstick.net/, did some writing for the paper) and the current Ed Toler – Rich Hill – Bob Hertzog jam band, Secretions.
Don’t remember that but, yeah, that’s vintage Ed Toler.
Whether it was a Freudian slip or just a typo, I got a chuckle out of your ‘‘place’’ being capitalized in ‘‘a Place called Aquarius.’’ Jerry Wyatt had been the last owner of the now legendary rock club near State Line, The Place in Westport, before he opened the Aquarius on 39th Street.
I wish I was that clever! I’d fixed my typo on the post but now I’m going to change it back to capital-P Place.
Turns out I made a small error as well. I’ve been reliably informed that this particular Up Against the Wall Ball was in 1971, not 1972. Chuck Haddix has it’s poster as part of the Westport Trucker Collection at the UMKC Library. Also, if you scroll down a bit you can find it’s and another one Trucker Dennis did, the green, orange, and purple Ewing Street Times – Chet Nichols https://chetnichols.net/home – Sound Farm show at Cowtown Ballroom on the Kansas City Rock History Project’s Facebook page. Cowtown’s second show.
After The Place in Westport and the Aquarius, Jerry Wyatt opened another legendary haunt, Harling’ Upstairs which only closed a few years ago. I sure hope that Rick of the Rock Hist Project interviews him — and do it SOON. He’d be around 80-plus years old now. Great guy.
To Linda Axon:
There’s good news — and there’s bad news — regarding the photos of your Volker Park days that were destroyed in a flood.
— The 1970 picture of you and your family at the park disappeared along with the rest of the Westport Trucker’s photo files in 1975. If the photos were donated to a library or archival collection they were not identified as originating at the Trucker so are unidentified that way in any database. Or they may simply have been discarded as trash or are boxed up and forgotten in some old hipster’s attic. On the up side, however, a good copy of the December ’70 – January ’71 Trucker where it appeared is in private hands. It’s intended that this and other editions will eventually go the Westport Trucker Collection at UMKC Library’s LaBudde Special Collections and, in the meantime, a digital copy of the part of the paper containing the photo has been received by Chuck Haddick.
When Chuck eventually has the original paper in hand, someone skilled in the use of the Photoshop tools used for cleaning up dot-pattern images on newsprint (median, Gaussian blur, sharpening, etc.) should be able to get a lot more out of it. You can contact Chuck at HaddixC [at] umkc [dot] edu. There’s also a chance that a print or negative of this Stuart Crick photograph, taken on either 12 or 19 July of ‘70, may be in the position of his family who owned Crick’s Camera Shop in Brookside till its closing just two years ago. Stuart passed away in 1984.
— The 1969 wedding pictures of you and Bob Lucas taken by Brooks Crummett of the Kansas City Times (”The Morning Kansas City Star”) are no longer in the possession of the Star and, along with virtually all of the Star’s image archives from 1880 through the mid-1990s, — more than 110 years of photos — have been tied up in a nasty legal battle since 2015. This article, ‘‘Rogers Photo Archives sued by 20 newspapers,’’ will provide some details on the horrible mess that the Star and many other dailies have found themselves in regarding their priceless photo archives: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/jun/08/20-newspapers-file-suit-against-nlr-archive-compan/. Historical photos in the Star, such as those used in the periodic ‘‘What’s Your KC Q?’’ are having to be obtained from the KC Public Library.
Luckily, the page-one article in the Monday, September 29 Times covering the previous day’s ceremony was picked up by the Associated Press and made available to its member newspapers — many of whom found it irresistible — and it was published from Corpus Christi to Calgary; Muncie to Manhattan. What this means is that you or anyone accessing it through Newspapers by Ancestry or other archival sites can explore the quality of the printed reproduction of the two Crummett photos at a variety of newspapers and download whichever images look best (in the Kansas City Times, the wedding itself is on the front page and blushing bride Blue on page nine).
As for the article itself, reporter Harihar Krishnan presented an even-handed, some might even say sympathetic, account. Where you are quoted there is no hint of sarcasm or distain:
—————————————————–
‘‘Blue said that she was known as Linda ‘but that Linda died two years ago’ and she took the present name because blue color has been her aura. . . . Lucas and Blue met about three months ago after he arrived here from St. Louis. ‘I knew at once I had always known him,’ Blue said.’’
—————————————————–
Nevertheless, the paper’s editors picked out a quote of Ravi Kristin who performed the ceremony, ‘‘a combination of Hindu, pagan and Polynesian,’’ to make a headline that today would be described as click-bait: ‘‘ ‘Pagan Rites’ Unite Young Couple.’’
Ted Anderson Found Alive and Well in Nashville
Ted Anderson was recently nominated to be inducted into The Kansas Music Hall Of Fame (see Oct 9 posts), Unfortunately, he had somehow dropped off the radar screens of just about all of his old friends. He’s now been located and the person who “found” him will be duly receiving the PARTY SIZE bag of Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and a bottle of Sauza tequila that Chet Nichols offered as a reward.
Chet has also set up a basic site for him, http://tedanderson.bandcamp.com and this is likely to grow as more on Ted’s body of work is added.
Was Santana ever scheduled to play at Volker Park?
No . . . but how on earth did you hear about that? That was one of the four failed efforts to slide a “national” act on tour into a park gig that actually got to the negotiation stage. Mike Waggoner and another fellow were seeing about booking Santana, who’d played at Woodstock the previous year, and Trucker Dennis knew a couple of the guys from his time at the Family Dog. Everyone was on board with it but when the Memorial Hall gig fell through the whole thing was nixed. Truckerite Ken Mednick (sp?) later became their road manager after the band split from Carlos Santana and became Journey.
The other three ‘‘big’’ Volker shows that didn’t come off were Hot Tuna, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the Grateful Dead. I think Hot Tuna boiled down to a scheduling thing. Same re the Dirt Band and by the time it could have been rescheduled (1974) Dennis was already in New York.. On the Dead’s, they and Dennis had by now patched up their differences over how things had played out at the disastrous Rolling Stones free concert at the Altamont Speedway (the Dead had organized it and Dennis, who’d gone back to work at the Family Dog’s new Playland Beach hall during the ‘‘off season’’ between the ‘69 and ‘70 Volker concerts, handled the massive post-show grounds clean-up). But between the Grateful Dead’s huge amount of equipment and various technical issues, Mike, Dennis, and the Dead couldn’t carry it off.
The only ‘‘national acts’’ at Volker were Sweetwater (see April 22- 23, 26, July 29, and Sept 24 comments), and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils (see Oct 8-9 comments). The Trucker, with Dennis as editor, and Mike had wisely refrained from saying anything about these failed efforts while they were in the works. When the Daredevils were actually confirmed, though, full-color posters were produced, it was billboarded full-color on the back cover of the Trucker, and at least one of the radio stations promoted it. Both the Daredevils and Sweetwater shows were ‘‘kept simple’’ in terms of their production at the site.
So how on earth did you hear about the Santana gig one year shy of a half-century after it went nowhere?
A fellow commenting on Facebook said that Dennis had told him ‘‘he was going to have Santana booked to play at volker park’’: https://www.facebook.com/meagan.glass.39?__tn__=%2CdC-R-R&eid=ARDIIP8-62WzqXdcVGX7UCkrfT_gGD4AMdZ3NX7VUccLQZY-cKvodtF8vsL22sADcMwhrQbLLx2LGpXZ&hc_ref=ARTB4mG4jGcHwr0uDpvZxgWIRI_PIBxOJnKz75vfMuO28C3sr1pcGgWuIAJ-iGNlKF8&fref=nf .
Oh, and his thought when hearing that was that Trucker Dennis ‘‘was living in a fantasy world.’’ And you can see why he’d think that.
Indeed.. Dennis and Mike — and other Mother Love / Good Karma people and others with ideas good and bad — would explore and talk of all kinds of such things, but it’s not stuff that would ‘‘go into print’’ unless a deal was done.
People don’t usually get to see the sausage being made. And, frankly, most have little or no interest in such matters. I might like to know why the August 28, 1965, Herman’s Hermits concert was cancelled but just about nobody else would care in the slightest.
I wonder if KC’s rock archives gurus, Rick Hellman and Chuck Haddix, or perhaps Joe Heyen, would want my 2½ by 3-foot ‘‘HOLD ON! – HERMAN’S HERMITS ARE COMING’’ show poster on white-face cardboard?
Oooops!
Yet another goof I need to correct. I’m informed that some of the Volker efforts noted above were initiated by Frank Polte, not Mike Waggoner, and that Polte even talked a little about this in a Trucker interview before impresario Waggoner took over Cowtown’s day-to-day operations. I should check before my fingers start tapping instead of being embarrassed afterwards. Nevertheless, the ”national act” shows that couldn’t cross the finish line were Santana, Hot Tuna, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the Grateful Dead. The shows that actually came off were The Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Sweetwater.
Trucker Dennis – Altamont? Grateful Dead? Family Dog? A lot of people know about him and High Times but what’s all this?
I don’t think anyone is going to punch you in the nose. It’s like you’ve said here many times before, this stuff was a half century ago! An incredible amount of info has appeared here and you let people know when you make a mistake or get more info. I went to the park and Cowtown pretty regularly but I didn’t think about how much it took to keep things running and how interconnected things were but I did kind’a pick up on it though – mostly because of the Trucker.
It’s sad how so much has been lost – that girl Linda (who is obviously almost as OLD as me now) losing her wedding and family pictures, those wonderful pictures by Carter Hamilton you described that are missing and probably gone for good, my own copies of at least a dozen Truckers that disappeared – and I don’t even know when it happened! I was in contact with an author/poet on Facebook yesterday, Paul Goldman https://www.facebook.com/WildJoyTheEcstaticPoetryofPaulGoldman/?modal=admin_todo_tour¬if_id=1571323801127083¬if_t=page_invite, and he couldn’t find his copies of the Trucker either but, thankfully, he had some copies of the paper he worked on, The Collective, which I’m pretty sure was around in 1969 or 1970.
So don’t beat yourself up. You’re doing a wonderful job. I hope that Chuck Haddix and ‘‘Psychedelic Dennis’’ are successful in gathering Truckers for the UMKC collection. I’ll be the first one to start downloading them if they go online.
To Meagan Glass:
You make me blush. As for all the missing Trucker and photos — whether destroyed or simply displaced — this points up the Importance of the Westport Trucker Collection that Chuck ”Fish Fry” Haddix is organizing at UMKC (see July 17 comment and https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2947044732187756&set=a.1379940462231532&type=3&theater). All kinds of other things are also being folded into it beyond Truckers, such as photos, and concert posters, etc., and he is coordinating the effort with Rick Hellman of the Kansas City Rock History Project and Trucker Dennis.
To John Thomas:
‘‘Trucker Dennis — Altamont? Grateful Dead? Family Dog? . . . what’s all this?’’ I’ll break the answer into two parts.
— First, from 1969 forward his activities are pretty well known and certainly better documented than your average Joe. As for the lead-up to 1969 however, he never — that’s never — talked about it with the people he knew in Kansas City, even with those that were very close to him at the time (though a number of people at the Trucker who had been on its original iteration, the Kansas City Screw, and the gentleman who owned the Vanguard Coffeehouse did know). This had to do with his profound disillusionment with how things had developed in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco by the summer of 1967 and the insistence of the elder members of his family who were extremely anxious that the very young boy’s unsanctioned summertime presences out there in 1966 and 1967 not become public.
I know just enough about this to get it all completely wrong, but think I can safely say that, as a self-proclaimed ‘‘energetic teenybopper,’’ he met and eagerly assisted the efforts of a variety of interesting people, such as the Diggers (‘‘the only ones making a serious and consistent effort to help the kids that were flooding into the Haight’’) and Ken Kesey. He also played a very small — but pivotal for him — role in some extremely timely things that were being done by Chet Helms and Chip Monck, both of whom, along with Kesey, he would have a continuing association with that extended into the time when he was getting the Mother Love Tribe’s projects going. As for these subsequent efforts in Kansas City, when asked what he learned from his time in the Golden State by Eric Noble of the Digger Archives in San Francisco (http://www.diggers.org/) he replied ‘‘What not to do here.’’
The result? With his earlier activities tightly under wraps, the baby-faced Center High School junior (who as of late 1968 was, in fact, living on Troost near UMKC much of that time) seemingly materialized out of thin air — as if being beamed into the Westport scene — where he successfully negotiated with the KC Parks and Recreation Department, the KC Police Department, and myriad rock bands to start up the weekly Sunday shows at Volker that would continue into the mid-‘70s. And Mother Love’s first show actually predated the park concerts when ”the kid’’ talked famed trumpeter-bandleader Tony DiPardo into letting him rent out his Party House Ballroom on 31st Street for a rock concert. Today it is a long-vacant lot across from the old Cowtown Ballroom rear loading area. On Friday night, January 17, 1969, however, some 320 hipsters paid ‘‘$1.50 per Head’’ to hear the growling vocals of the Mystic Number National Bank’s Glen Walters plus Trees Bushes and or Tall Grass. Even though ‘‘Psychedelic Dennis’’ brought a unique and robust knowledge to his efforts, that all this was initiated and successfully carried off by a then 16-year-old is mind boggling.
— And, second, there’s the disastrous free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway. He firmly maintains that he and several friends at the Family Dog were manipulated into assisting at the event by the Grateful Dead and their management and that he specifically was lied to about the technical support that the post-show clean-up would receive.
Though considerably less so than about ten years ago largely because many of the participants have passed away and he’d already lost contact with others decades ago, it and his other activities during the ‘‘off season’’ between the 1969 and 1970 Volker shows are better known within certain circles elsewhere than in Kansas City because they’ve long been, as he put it, ‘‘compartmentalized.’’ They were never mentioned in the Trucker because, says Dennis, there’s ‘‘no reason why they should be.’’ Likewise, it seems that innumerable events and projects of his are principally discussed with just the direct participants because, as he’s been known to say with some frequency: ‘‘There’s only so many hours in the day.’’
With the approaching 50th anniversary of that sad affair, various individuals and news operations have expressed their interest in his input or stated that he write an article. He feels that after a half century his memory is too spotty to publish a stand-alone piece on the event — ”a sidebar maybe” — without spending a prohibitive amount of time reacquiring needed details and considers all of this a ‘‘distraction’’ to ongoing commitments. Interestingly, he wrote a letter to the indefatigable Underground Press chronicler Ken Wachsberger explaining his reservations (with additional notes to Haddix) https://www.voicesfromtheunderground.com/voices.htm, that is practically an article in itself.
Speaking of ”a number of people at the Trucker who had been on its original iteration, the Kansas City Screw” above, Chuck Haddix informs us that he is now in contact with John Arnoldy of Kansas City Screw – Westport Trucker – Harrison Street Review fame. Together with Cherie Blankenship, Bob Sebo, and the late David Perkins (whose papers are at the KC Public Library, https://kchistory.org/sites/default/files/MVSC_PDFs/SCs/SC125%20David%20Perkins_0.pdf) they served the full stretch, 1968 to 1974. In underground newspaper ”dog years” that’s pushing 100.
And, as one might expect, he informed Chuck that he has absolutely no copies of the paper at all. N0t a one.
Incidentally, when Police Chief Clarence Kelley gave his blessing to the Trucker receiving two KCPD press credentials, Dennis was issued one and picked Cheri Blankenship to get the other. You can see one of her articles, “Toler Strikes Again,” in the bottom row here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2947044732187756&set=a.1379940462231532&type=3&theater.
Jeez, there’s a lot of info here. I have a comment and a couple questions. I can’t find where the Voices From the Underground link you supplied yesterday gets you to the letter to Ken Wachsberger w/notes to Haddix. Wrong link? I’ve navigated all over that page and can’t find it. And why the name change from KC Screw to Westport Trucker?
Was there any connection between Freedom Palace and Cowtown Ballroom? I was never at the Freedom Palace but there’s a list of who played there from a page in the old Westport Trucker. What a great bunch of shows!
To John Thomas:
This little post and its running commentary have benefited greatly from the input of Chuck Haddix and Dennis Giangreco as well as others. Selling Truckers and being in earshot of a lot of interesting things at the Central and Harrison Street Trucker Houses has also helped, but anyone who’s been reading this can see that they’ve had to get me back on track more than once. Having between us roughly half of the 90-plus Westport Truckers has also put some great reference material at my fingertips.
Both links in the Oct 20 comment are correct and were presented so that readers, if they are interested, can expand their knowledge and horizons a bit. The ‘‘letter to Ken Wachsberger w/notes to Haddix’’ is absolutely fascinating but I don’t have permission to run it and it’s way too long for here anyway. Besides, it’s possible that Trucker Dennis might convert it into an article. The last published article by him that I know of was a few months ago. It was a thoughtful piece on the close — and, for me, very surprising — relationship that Hiroshima author John Hersey had with Harry Truman after the book was published: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/172708. A couple of his post-article comments are a hoot.
When you get a chance, please go to my Facebook page and take a look at the Westport Trucker with all the photo booth pictures, Recognize anyone?
My old Truckers may be lost for good but my cousin Nan found five of them and I posted the covers.
I’m not on Facebook but I do have that edition of the Trucker. I recognize many faces but will have to run your query by Dennis, Chuck, and a few others.
To Ben Caputo:
You may be in luck re your question: ”Was there any connection between Freedom Palace and Cowtown Ballroom? I was never at the Freedom Palace but there’s a list of who played there from a page in the old Westport Trucker. What a great bunch of shows!”
Well, they were separate and distinct projects, but numerous local hipsters, helped build the stages at both locations using the bowling lanes in the abandoned PlaMor bowling alley for their rock-solid stage floorings. Would you call that repurposed? recycled? scavenged? liberated? (See interview with Randy ”Rat” Kratschmer in ”Cowtown Ballroom . . . Sweet Jesus” on the mega-effort to move those monsters, https://cowtownbr.weebly.com/.) And Trucker Dennis arranged for the first Freedom Palace poster and did the early large, full-color Cowtown posters himself. And then there’s impresario Herb Parmer. What was his ever-evolving role in both?
Paul Peterson, https://www.flickr.com/photos/163489711@N04/47934064478/in/photostream/, is in town and may be getting together with Chuck Haddix, https://www.kcur.org/programs/fish-fry#stream/0, and possibly Trucker Dennis. They can certainly ask. And perhaps, if Paul is willing, an interview can be recorded for his weekend Fish Fry on KCUR.
Sad news on the Cowtown’s “toking cow” logo:
Paul Peterson, of Cowtown Ballroom fame, informs us that his brother Gary’s original Westport Trucker artwork and its color separations by Trucker Dennis was misplaced long ago. Add those artifacts to the sad list of other items outlined in this post that have also disappeared into the mists of time.
Just reinforces the importance of Chuck Haddix’s Westport Trucker Collection efforts..
Speaking of Paul Peterson, not long ago you talked about how you’ve had to post corrections here on mistakes you made earlier. Well it turns out that I made a doozy in my May 28 comment. I’d put up a screen grab that I made from the wonderful Joe Heyen film on Cowtown and Paul Peterson, who I thought was in the picture, sent me a message:
“The photo described as me and Dan Moriarty is really my brother Gary. He was the handsome brother.” (https://www.flickr.com/photos/163489711@N04/47934064478/in/photostream/)
I’ve fixed the caption and added
“Paul and Gary, along with Mort, were all with Good Karma Productions – Cowtown Ballroom at the time. I can’t plead innocence, only a little tolerance. Both were mustachioed back then, have extremely similar profiles and the image is dark. But obviously, he IS “the handsome brother.” At least I’ve got it straight now.”
And I repeated it a couple times here. But, to quote some advise I recently received, ”Don’t beat yourself up.” Both Fish Fry Haddix and Trucker Dennis follow this post closely and neither of them seem to have noticed. As to Paul’s comment that Gary is the ‘‘handsome brother,’’ let’s just say it’s a toss-up.
Meagan, I see some things and people left out, like John Vandiver(deceased) Michael Marcoulier,(spelling) who played with Ewing Street Times, and also move to Texas .
Hi Michael, Are they some of the ”unknowns” in Westport Trucker photo booth collage that I put up last week on Facebook? I see that Tommy Greene spoke of ”Jerry Vanderver (??? Hope I got that right)” here back on April 26. Related to your ”John Vandiver” or possibly the same person you think? I remember Michael was the one on guitar, right?
Trucker Dennis is not on Facebook but he’d heard that the Westport Trucker cover featuring photo booth portraits of a numerous Trucker staffers and other Mother Love Tribe folks was popping up even before I did. It was posted by a lady who regularly appears here, Meagan Glass, and it’s no surprise that questions about who is who on the cover are also appearing on the web and in my mail. I asked if he would give me a rundown and, though it took him about a week to get back to me, here it is, top-to-bottom, left-to-right by row:
Row 1
‘‘Fat’’ Jeff Leppert
Crocket
Barbara Wilson
(unknown) [What a smart alec! That’s him!]
John Arnoldy
Wally Binney
Row 2
‘‘Red’’ Chapman
Crocket middle
(unknown)
David ‘‘Da’’ (pronounced Day) Martz
Friend of Da Martz
Ray
Row 3
Kim Marshall
Peg McMahon
Donna Martz (cutout)
‘‘Fat Frank’’ Martz
Brookes DeSoto
Demi
Row 4
David Doyle (as Popeye)
(unknown)
Carl ‘‘Flash’’ Washington
Spiderman deZeppo
Sandy
‘‘Rasty Rick’’
Row 5
Harvey
Dan Siglar
June
Ron Harner
(unknown)
Billy Wentz
Row 6
Princess
Bungly
Dana
(unknown)
Sara Hill
Anita Boyette
Row 7
Scott Yates
Kerry Blumer
Prudence
Leigh
Tom Rose
Brent
Dennis says that he ‘‘could write anywhere from a sentence to a few pages’’ on nearly everyone pictured here, but that there’s no time to do such a thing and he’ll leave that to others. The multiple photo shoots were coordinated by Daniel Johnson (who originally signed his work as ‘‘Beagle,’’ then ‘‘Brookes DeSoto’’) and that Dan also arranged the cover collage. The shoots, conducted at the old Wonderland Arcade on 12th Street, were usually accompanied by raucous pinball action which inspired editor-writer John Arnoldy to name the Trucker’s periodic arts section ‘‘Pinball.’’
Frank Polte and Michael Waggoner on local groups at Cowtown Ballroom and the battle against ‘‘Agency Packaging’’ (excerpted from the Westport Trucker)
——————————
POLTE (Feb. 1, 1973) — ‘‘You can only pick up certain kinds of vibe in a place like the Municipal Auditorium or Memorial Hall. . . . The environment [at Cowtown] takes away the barriers between the musicians and the people. People can get high because the music is higher in a place like Cowtown. . . .
‘‘Kansas City’s music scene is improving because ‘it’s shown it can support more music.’ But people here are ‘like people anyplace. It’s hard to imagine a Morningstar, or a White Eyes, or a Grits as a national band because they’re LOCAL music. You know, it’s Kansas City music and we all kind of put down the place we live. But Kansas City is a place all to itself. It has a uniqueness that no other city has.’
‘‘ ‘In order for Kansas City to grow as a music center, the music that is HERE has to get recognition. We haven’t had enough local music in my point of view. We’re fighting that agency trip of packaging groups together. They’re packaged together and you have to take them both. And a lot of time the talent here is at a lot better level than the opening group we got’.’’
WAGGONER (June 22, 1973) — ‘‘When [Mike was] asked if he would be using more local groups he answered that there was several problems with that. One was that there weren’t enough local bands with original material and that the big-name acts usually brought a group with them. [He added] people don’t want to pay, even when the ticket price is greatly reduced, for local talent. However, Mike said, he would be booking Grits and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. . . .
‘‘Mike expressed disappointment with the turnout for the Trucker’s [Up Against the Wall Ball] where local bands were scheduled. Even though the average ticket price was just $2, only three hundred people came, which cause him to have second thoughts about featuring solely local talent again.’’
——————————
During a live KUDL interview with Trucker Dennis and Cowtown’s Bonnie Harney, Dennis confessed that both K.C. Grits and Morningstar were already booked on the date that Cowtown was available and that he should have just scheduled the Up Against the Wall Ball at a later date instead of going ahead with lesser-known acts.
Postscript: Trucker Dennis was also diplomatic enough to not mention on air that when KUDL somehow ‘‘misplaced’’ the wacky PSA taped for the benefit show, that no one at the Trucker or Cowtown were told about it and the event, instead of getting a minimum of ten spots (with at least four during ‘‘drive time’’) it received only one brief live announcement several hours before the doors opened after it was discovered that there had been almost no advance ticket sales. Oh well.
How did I miss ”Rat” Kratschmer?
Well, I think I know. In the opening article of this page, a tip of the hat was made to numerous Good Karma Productions people who regularly and directly contributed to the Westport Trucker / Kansas City Screw. This was updated in the May 23 comment and in-total named Gary Peterson, Bonnie Harney, Mort Moriarty, and Don Harthcock. Not surprisingly, as the workload increased with the opening of Cowtown Ballroom, the direct input of these people quickly diminished. Soon, however, Randy ‘‘Rat’’ Kratschmer, who’d seemingly been around forever and was part of the glue that held the rock and community scenes together, started writing album and concert reviews for the Trucker.
With so much of my focus in this column on the early years of the Volker concerts and the Trucker, Rat’s work (his witty and informative Nitty Gritty Dirt Band interview in issue 69 is a Westport Trucker classic) inexcusably was not noted except for an account of the building of the Freedom Palace and Cowtown’s stages (Oct 28 comment). Meagan Glass helps rectify this omission in flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/163489711@N04/49128123158/in/dateposted-public/?fbclid=IwAR2_jl8fQeouMXfmRxeZc3kyW3GR7-UF2JfDz0yTFiif5k8IxQ9SZ3Lnays, and will be posting his Dirt Band interview in the near future.
Not long ago you gave a rundown of the efforts to get some “national” acts at the Volker concerts and that most of them failed. I‘ve heard though that musicians from big groups did drop in and play. The ones I hear about the most are members of the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, and the base player of the Jefferson Airplane. Do you know anything about that?
I’ve also heard that some of the Dead had played at Volker. I posted a picture of a thin, wild-haired sax man at Volker on You Hung out at Volker Park and someone identified him as Johnny Almond. I dug back down through it but could find the photo and comments but remember that it was said that he lived in Kansas City then. So there’s half of the Marc-Almond Band!
To Ben Caputo, John Thomas, and those who have e-mailed me on this:
Be patient. I’ve been researching and working on it but this subject gets a bit complex. I hope to have something worthwhile put together soon.
I understand. I’m just really curious. Especially about the Dead because I’ve heard that several times.
Since Trucker Dennis is one of the people you are in touch with there’s something that he may have the answer to. I was looking at a poster for the first Mother Love Presents show on Meagan Glass’s Facebook page. It has his name on it as the artist but the lettering for the date and where it was held looks kind of sloppy next to the rest of it. Did somebody else do those? Just curious if there’s some story to that.
You wrote (Oct 20) that at ”the insistence of the elder members of his family who were extremely anxious that the very young boy’s unsanctioned summertime presences out there in 1966 and 1967 not become public” Truxcker Dennis only let a very small number of people know about his pre Mother Love stuff. Among other things that he knew the guys in the Grateful Dead. I’m told he had an uncle who was a congressman and that’s the reason why his family wanted him to keep quiet about it.
According to Dennis, he did the ‘‘somewhat less artful’’ lettering that you asked about in you’re first message yesterday.
The Mother Love Tribe’s inaugural concert was originally to be the following night, Saturday, Jan 18, 1969, at the Town Hall Ballroom on Troost but the Mystic Number National Bank suddenly received another job offer for that date which paid well above union scale. They couldn’t pass that up but said they could do his on Friday. Unfortunately, there was something else scheduled at Town Hall then and the subsequent scramble gave us the Bank and Trees-Bushes at the Party House one night earlier, the 17th.
What this meant for the poster was that Dennis had to scrap the one with the original show info. It was two-color (bright orangish-yellow background with the bears in black and white and the inside of the lettering in white). Most of these were not even put up or otherwise distributed yet. Dennis had to quickly produce lettering for the new date and location which he described as ‘‘not my best work,’’ and there was ‘‘no time to mess with doing it in color.’’
The new posters started going up several days after Christmas 1968. Most of the first printing was discarded although the backs of some posters were used for various other announcements. Anybody have one? You could probably talk Chuck Haddix (UMKC Library – Westport Trucker Collection) or Rick Hellman (Kansas City Rock History Project) into taking it off your hands.
As for your other comments yesterday regarding Trucker Dennis, I will share my own thoughts very soon. It’s still going to be a bit longer, however, on the Dec 2-3 questions by you and Ben Caputo on the bands/musicians that appeared at Volker Park.
Went to quite a few of the Sunday jams at Volker in my late teens. Remember first seeing “Trucker Dennis” passing the hat for generator gas and thinking to myself “Where do I know this dude from”? Then I remembered it was the 6th grade kid in my neighborhood that we all would play army with. I also remember seeing some drawings and caricatures he drew back then. Amazing talent! I learned how to play guitar from another classmate who lived nearby. He kept playing “Day Tripper” by the Beatles over and over until he finally had figured out the notes. Within a year the guy had learned all the guitar riffs from “Disraeli Gears” from Cream. Impressive. His name was John Thomas , not sure what ever happened to him .
To Jerry G:
Sixth grade! So Trucker Dennis must have been around 11 years old, maybe even 10, when his ‘‘amazing talent’’ was beginning to show. That would have been years before he started making what he called his ‘‘unauthorized’’ summer trips to stay with a friend in SF. He once recalled that the first time he did it, 1966, he took a bus and the following year he flew. That other fellow you mentioned may have been in a grade-school band with Dennis and Paul Grigsby (later — and today — of the JPT Scare Band, http://www.jptscareband.com/). Dennis later maintained that he was ‘‘absolutely the most wretched base player imaginable’’ and that Jim Fox of the Amelia Earhart Memorial Flying Band / Manchester Trafficway was able to put his Gibson EBO to much better use than he ever could. According to Dennis, the last he saw of his old bass it was with the Marshmallow Monorail.
To John Thomas:
Regarding your second Dec 12 message (‘‘I’m told [that Dennis] had an uncle who was a congressman and that’s the reason why his family wanted him to keep quiet’’ about his early activities):
Well, he wasn’t a congressman but he was an elected state official. And as I said in my October 20 comment, there was more to it than that. Rather than have me repeat it all, just scroll up and take a look. I will add, however, that Dennis has admitted that, being a really, really young guy, he readily deferred to those who he later derisively referred to as the ‘‘older, groovier heads’’ who boasted that they would get things squared around with the city fathers after the Sunday concerts in 1968 had been quashed almost as soon as they started (see the second paragraph of the Trucker article at the head of this page. The kid wanted to hear and experience rock bands in the park and, possibly spurred by his association with the Yippies that summer, he concluded that if it was going to happen, he was going to have to do it himself.
Dennis has told that story many times but as to why he kept his lips zipped about his earlier time in SF, I think there was probably more to it than what was said earlier. Many, including a girl he was interested in, were enamored by their ideal vision of the Haight-Ashbury and there were people he knew in Kansas City and who said that they had been there in the ’67 ‘‘Summer of Love’’ and spoke glowingly of it. But he thought the exact opposite — that it had descended into a God-awful mess — and that he, sometimes with great difficulty, would just not volunteer anything. No arguments, no long discussions, no having to explain himself.
There was another wrinkle to this as well. He later said that ‘‘so many people were talking bulls–t about their past and stuff in general’’ that he just ‘‘didn’t want to get into it’’ and added that because many on the receiving end well understood that much of what they were being told might be exaggerated or completely made up, it would always be in the back of people’s minds that he ‘‘was bullsh–ting too.’’ And besides, talking about the past ‘‘unless there’s a good reason to do so’’ just ‘‘takes up time I don’t have.’’ I never heard him say this specifically but ‘‘Best to just DO’’ could well be a motto for him.
With the exception of an extremely small group of people like Good Karma’s Stan Plesser, and Truckerites John Arnoldy (who’s according to Chuck Haddix is still around) and David Perkins, Dennis kept it to himself. I didn’t really know anything of this until years later after he moved back from the East coast but, looking back, had gotten an inkling of it when Ken Kesey dropped by the Trucker House and they were yacking like they had just seen each other yesterday — and Kesey later returned with Allen Ginsberg in tow. And when Steven Gaskin came through town, he and his wife and a few others all came up and gave Dennis big hugs. And it quickly became apparent that many of the SF bands appearing at Cowtown (and their managers) knew him. One oft-told story I twice heard from Good Karmites was how, even years later when they went to the airport to pick up Journey (mostly guys who had earlier been in Santana), the very first thing the band asked is where they could find Dennis.
I took it all at face value and didn’t really think at the time about there being a back story. He always seems real focused and busy so it wasn’t like you’d feel you could butt in with out-of-left-field questions like that.
Hope this gives you what you’re looking for because this is about as far as I can go without permission. It’s interesting that despite his extreme visibility back then there seems to be more people out of Kansas City than in it that know of his ‘‘other’’ activities. And it turns out that Dennis did produce that article I mentioned at the end of my October 20 comment. ”Altamont: After the Bleeding Stopped” can be found on the History News Network (George Washington University), http://www.hnn.us/article/173736. It appears to have inadvertently lost a word here and there and he confirmed that when the editors were rearranging it and cutting its length down they inadvertently lost a couple words they didn’t intend to. Be sure to read the comments after the article.
To Ben Caputo:
Regarding your December 2 question, I’m still working on this and some recent input from Chuck Haddix and Trucker Dennis prompts me to cast a wider net — so be patient,
Ooops!
I have been reliably informed by Trucker Dennis and Nancy Gillam that the proper spelling for ‘‘Steven Gaskin’’ in my message to John Thomas yesterday is ‘‘Stephen Gaskin.’’
Several lengthy articles on, and interviews with, Gaskin were run in the Westport Trucker from 1970 through 1973 as well as lengthy excerpts from his “Monday Night Class” (https://www.amazon.com/Monday-Night-Class-Stephen/dp/B000RB6P8S), a weekly community/spiritual event held at the Family Dog on the Great Highway in San Francisco where Dennis worked between the 1969 and 1970 Volker Park concert seasons.
Cowtown Ballroom -– Without the early Dirt Band shows it may have quickly closed and many wouldn’t ‘‘have even noticed its passing’’
Cowtown Ballroom began its three-year run of more than 100 remarkable shows in the summer of 1971, not long after the demise of Freedom Palace. In the beginning, though, area hipsters were not exactly beating down the doors to get inside and, after the first couple poorly attended weekends, Good Karma Productions and the Mother Love Tribe – Westport Trucker went all-out to promote the Dirt Band concerts of August 1 – 2.
Good Karma Production’s Stan Plesser and Mort Moriarty hit the radio stations hard, both burning up the phone lines and meeting personally with their local radio contacts in a successful effort to generate as much play time for their singles and on-air DJ chatter as possible. They were also able to put Dirt Band members to work by finagling at least two live interviews. Meanwhile, the Mother Love Tribe’s Terry Carr had been printing Cowtown’s early double-sized, full color show posters at his print shop on Troost, and Trucker Dennis, who designed them, had an extra 300 of the Dirt Band posters printed up ‘‘on Mother Love’s dime.’’ He’d been involved ‘‘in a very small way’’ in numerous concert ventures in San Francisco and ‘‘feared that if the [Nitty Gritty] shows didn’t go over big that Stan would pull the plug.’’
Trucker vendors picking up their papers at Tiny Tim’s Magic Circus on Broadway and the Trucker House were handed Milgram’s bags containing about eight or ten rolled up Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Ted Anderson posters and given a special mission. The ones selling papers downtown, Westport, and the Plaza were told to ask any buyer that looked like a high school student if they would be willing to take one and put it up back at their school, local hang-out, or some other useful spot. Those heading off to UMKC and the Penn Valley Junior College were also given pads of thumbtacks and tape picked up from Katz by a young Magic Circus lady named Sandy and instructed to put the posters up where ever they thought would do the most good.
The Trucker vendors eagerly complied and posters were known to have gone up — and even stayed up for a while — at Center and Shawnee Mission North high schools. Meanwhile, Good Karma – Cowtown people were putting up their posters at ticket outlets and their usual spots which included certain areas around Westport. An additional run of a hundred more posters was made and the weekend before the show, many of them papered the red street-level fence below the Good Karma House on Main as well as Oak Street from Oak Hill Sundries at 43rd to where 48th meets Volker Park. A banner promoting the show, reminiscent of those advertising the acts performing at the Vanguard Coffeehouse, was created by either David ‘‘Day’’ Martz or ‘‘Beagle’’ (Daniel Johnson) from a roll of ‘‘newsprint’’ paper that Trucker Dennis had obtained earlier that year and strung across the front of the Magic Circus.
The Dirt Band was already a popular and fairly well known act in Kansas City, having performed at UMKC and the Vanguard, but people first had to be aware that the shows were happening and that they were going to be, as Mort said at the time, ‘‘an event that can’t be missed.’’ It looks like many others were of a similar mind and, as Dennis wrote the following week in the Westport Trucker: ‘‘If Cowtown had folded after those [first] concerts I don’t think that many would have even noticed its passing,’’ and proclaimed that Cowtown Ballroom ‘‘finally had its real opening with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band shows.’’
From Trucker Dennis:
”. . . An additional thing about these shows was the timing. They weren’t being held on a Friday-Saturday or even a Saturday-Sunday, but on Sunday-MONDAY. This made me really nervous and after the stinko attendance on the first shows everybody was pretty shook. The over-run on the posters turned out to not be enough and that’s why I went back and had even more printed and had them practically papering Oak Street by noon Friday. And then we went over the whole length again before the Sunday park concert because, as we’d figured, about half of them had disappeared..
”Normally we didn’t make ‘commercial’ announcements at the Volker shows but Don Harthcock [of the Ewing St. Times] and I both did that day. Steve and Kathy [Davidof] put up a string of about eight or ten posters along the fence in front of the Good Karma House kind of like what you see in Europe. Normally Stan Plesser wanted to keep that front fence completely clean and crisp. He didn’t want the place to look ratty or even slightly forlorn — and had a fresh coat of paint go on it at least twice that I can remember — so I thought he might be ticked and didn’t ask before having them go up. He thought it was a nice gesture and they stayed through the Monday show — after all, it was kind of an emergency — but I don’t think posters ever went up out there again.
Cowtown’s It’s A Beautiful Day poster and Terry Carr’s exploding printing press
Unlike the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Ted Anderson poster which had more than 600 copies printed as part of an all-out push to promote the new Cowtown Ballroom, which was getting off to a dangerously slow start, there were only about 15 or 20 ‘‘good’’ copies of the It’s a Beautiful Day – Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee posters. (See the previous, Jan 11, comment here and the Jan 15 Meagan Glass post, https://www.facebook.com/meagan.glass.39, for the poster itself and additional info).
While it was being printed by ‘‘Wild Man’’ Terry Carr at his shop on Troost, there was some kind of catastrophic failure that occurred right after he got the colors ‘‘registered’’ — fitting together properly. The printing came to a dead stop.
Terry’s press was a large, black, two-color, Harris offset that towered over him (he was a short guy) and though the broken part was easily replaceable, it couldn’t be done quickly. There were only a few fully inked, tightly registered copies run off before the catastrophe and a larger batch where ‘‘the registration was close enough to get away with’‘ but the number still didn’t exceed 20 which was way short of what Trucker Dennis and the Good Karma people needed immediately. The Gods were with them, though.
Good Karma’s Stan Plesser (or was it Gary Peterson?) had a smaller version of the poster running in the Westport Trucker that was getting ready to be printed. Dennis was able to reach the printer in time to have that part of the volume 2, number 8 edition printed in a higher grade white paper instead of the regular newsprint and asked to have a 200 extra copies of the section with that page run off. The newspaper version would be smaller than the regular posters but available when needed most. Interestingly, it was the same size, 11 inches by 17 inches, as the posters produced after Dennis no longer had time to keep doing them.
The smaller version — with a white border and a Westport Trucker page on the back — was cut from the other pages and went out to record stores, ticket outlets, and elsewhere around town right on time.
Since Dennis had been tight for time when producing the poster, he showed Trucker cartoonist Daniel Johnson how to cut a Rubylith color mask for the red ink printing plate. Johnson, at the time, went by the name Beagel, and would later switch to Brookes DeSoto. The ‘‘Beageleno’’ also doubled as his driver/messenger for a couple years back then and Meagan Glass will be posting a selection of his art sometime next month.
Just found this site and I;m amazed at the memories it inspired. I was the bassist for Impulse Federation who played at Volker Fountain. There’s a video only film clip circulating that shows Impulse Federation playing at Volker with me, Tom Koob, on bass, Rick Fields on Stratocaster and Sonny Dryer on drums. I’m pretty sure this was in 1969. Our band didn’t form until the fall of ’68 and we “disbanded” in 1970. It’s possible we did play at Volker in the summer of 1970. I believe we played there 3 or 4 times. We were members of Musicians Union 34 and the Union always gave us a hard time for playing free concerts.
Most of the people commenting in this thread have much better memories than I do. But reading them has jolted some of my brain cells. Someone mentioned an incident with the police at an outdoor concert in Westport. I vaguely remember playing there and having to shut down. We tried to make a political situation out of it, but the crowd dispersed so quickly, it didn’t last long.
I also attended the Steve Miller outdoor concert at UMKC. I believe it was in May, 1970. To this day, it remains one of the most memorable concerts I have ever attended. If I recall correctly, Miller was on the patio on the north side of the Student Union Building (at that time called “the pouch”). The crowd was very close to the “stage” area and pretty much surrounded Miller’s Band. He played about three sets and then announced the police wanted to shut it down. MIller asked the audience if they wanted to continue despite the order. Of course, the crowd insisted they play on. Miller did. The audience became increasingly excited and Miller responded with at least an additional hour of excellent music. At one point something that I can now only describe as a “mosh pit” developed. A circle of people formed, dancing wildly in front of the band, moving like a single organism to Miller’s loud, throbbing rock. Eventually the night ended, without any problems. It was probably the best free-form concert I’ve ever enjoyed.
Thanks for your excellent commentary and information on those great years in Kansas City.
To Tom Koob —
Trucker Dennis believes that it was three times 1969 (which had a loooong concert season because the warm weather started very early) and once in 1970. He remembers that on your second appearance you were filling in for a band that had dropped out at the last minute. The same thing happened again and your last performance of the year was moved up one week to fill in. It is your mid-summer third 1969 show that appears in a widely viewed Volker Park video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBR5BMYOdjs. Also in the video a shirtless Trucker Dennis, sporting a Digger hat and carrying the flag that flew outside the Mother Love Free Store on 39th Street can be seen walking in the distance. And here’s an article on the Free Store in the Trucker under the paper’s original name, the Kansas City Screw, https://diggerfeed.org/2017/04/21/dennis-free-store/.
Yes, the outdoor Steve Miller band concert at UMKC was a mighty close-run thing. For those not knowing that Tom and I are talking about, see the comments above, principally those of April 26, June 24, July 25, and Sept 24.
As for the street dance on Westport Road, see the article that Dennis wrote in the June 5, 1970, edition of the Westport Trucker, ‘‘I Got Dem Big City Blues’’ which prominently features Tom and the band. It’s one of the editions available in the Westport Trucker Collection being gathered by Chuck Haddix, Greene, and Dennis Giangreco at the UMKC Library.
The Trials and Tribulations of Cowtown’s Zappa Poster
This is the final installment in the series of large-size, full-color Cowtown posters which the ballroom started off with. Previous installments were posted on Feb 8, Feb 14, and Mar 8, and a related post containing much useful background info ran on Jan 15. After these, which were done by ‘‘Trucker Dennis’’ Giangreco (today, author D. M. Giangreco), Good Karma Productions had to switch to one- and two-color posters because of money – and especially time – considerations.
Dennis, a huge fan of Zappa, had originally been introduced to him by Don Vliet (‘‘Captain Beefheart’’) in San Francisco almost exactly two years earlier. As those who have read this series may recall, Trucker Dennis was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the design and production of the complex, multi-color posters while producing the Westport Trucker and Volker concerts and had recently begun to ‘‘job out’’ portions of the lettering and some color separation work to various Trucker artists. This, in itself, said Dennis, ‘‘would not have been a problem if I was properly monitoring the production, but I wasn’t.’’ The number of ‘‘goofs’’ this led to reached their zenith on the Zappa poster.
First, the art itself was not originally going to be done locally but by San Francisco artist Martin Muller who was now signing his work ‘‘Neon Park.’’ Dennis and Martin had met before but didn’t really know each and when Frank suggested that Martin could do the poster for him (Martin had recently done the cover of Zappa’s album Weasels Ripped My Flesh), Dennis jumped at it. Unfortunately there were both structural and potential obscenity problems that could have been avoided if Dennis had given Martin more guidance, ‘‘Which I didn’t,’’ said Dennis. A sanitized version of the art was used as a subscriptions promotion which appeared, interestingly, before Zappa’s Cowtown performance.
Martin was not disturbed at all by the turn of events and would continue producing art for the Trucker from afar — and for free — over the next few years while producing album art for major recording artists. But Dennis now had to scramble to get a poster ready for Frank’s show. Screw-ups abounded during the hasty production and made it into the final printing due the admitted inattention of Trucker Dennis.
Promotional copy supplied by Good Karma called Zappa’s band the Mothers of Invention even though they’d simply been going by The Mothers for about a year — something that Dennis should have caught. He also did not check the negatives and masks used during the plating process ahead of the printing. Consequently, the wide areas across the top and bottom that were supposed to be blue like the sides had a solid yellow running across them (instead of the yellow just being printed in combination with the red lettering and part of the cow) with the result that the blue areas turned green! However, the late change of opening act from Head Over Heels to the fabulous Rich Hill group was beyond his control.
So screw-ups abounded. And what was Frank Zappa’s reaction when he saw how the poster turned out? Frank sternly looked it over, examining it very closely for what was an agonizingly long time before stating ‘‘It makes it’’ and asking if he could get a hundred more copies.
Of course there were no extras beyond the five or six Dennis held for him and the band plus a few for himself. Terry Carr, who’d done the actual printing at his Troost Avenue print shop, gleefully ran the extra copies Frank requested with Dennis overseeing the plating to ensure that all the errors in what Frank saw were retained. The posters were shipped out roughly a week after the concert but Frank may never have even seen them. He was on his way to Europe where his equipment was soon destroyed during the ‘‘Smoke On the Water’’ casino fire in Switzerland. Then he was pushed off a stage by an audience member in England leaving him wheelchair bound for most of 1972 and ended up with one leg a little shorter than the other. He returned to Cowtown in December of that year and told Dennis ‘‘I’m just glad to be breathing,’’ and referred to himself as ‘‘a gimp.’’
Some ‘‘gimp’’!
Appropriately, Cowtown’s Zappa poster can viewed in all;, it’s error-filled splendor on the Friday the 13th Facebook posting of Meagan Glass,
Meagan Glass, who has been known to post some comments here, put up this ditty of mine on her facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/meagan.glass.39) with the appropriate accompanying art.
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Neon Park’s Cowtown-Zappa poster that ‘‘didn’t happen’’
. . . . or . . . .
”Stan Plesser’s head would explode”
(This is a continuation of last week’s ‘‘The Trials and Tribulations of Cowtown’s Zappa Poster’’ which was originally — and appropriately — posted on Friday the 13th at Tommy Greene’s Kansas City Rock History Project page, http://kcrockhistory.com/…/where-did-the-name-volker-park…/….)
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‘‘If I’d seen Martin’s art even one day earlier,’’ said Trucker Dennis, ‘‘I could have thrown out what I’d designed for the Steve Miller Band -Grits show and redid it — restructured it — so that Good Karma didn’t get two posters in a row that were text-left – art-right. But now, the black and the gold on the Steve Miller poster were already printed and it had to be out a week before the [Sept 26] Beautiful Day shows. I was boxed in. No time to redo Steve Miller and Frank’s poster had to be out a week before Steve’s [Oct 8] shows.’’
”Trucker Dennis” Giangreco and Frank Zappa had first met two years earlier when he was working in San Francisco. Dennis was having an increasingly difficult time of keeping up with the demands of producing large-size, full-color posters for Good Karma Productions’ Cowtown Ballroom shows and Frank suggested that artist Martin Muller had, as Dennis recalled, ‘‘a lot of stuff on hand and could probably just pull something out.’’
Martin, who was now signing his work ‘‘Neon Park’’ and had recently done the cover of Zappa’s album Weasels Ripped My Flesh, was alerted that Dennis would be calling and described an easily cartoon-colored black and white image of a big-eyed living room chair watching a dancing girl that Dennis could build the rest of the poster around. Special Delivery shipments — Martin’s art from San Francisco and from Kansas City a packet of the first Cowtown posters plus about a half-dozen Westport Truckers with the best full-color covers — crossed in the mails.
Two problems were immediately apparent with the art, it was designed to be used exclusively on the right like the Steve Miller Band-Grits poster that was already being printed and, well, ‘‘Stan Plesser’s head would explode if I ran with it.’’
Trucker Dennis described the illustration: ‘’The bottom half of a full-figured female doing a pole dance graced the top of the art as a lecherous, overstuffed chair gazed up at her with visions of a meaty taco. She did have a bit of clothing on — the briefest of panties were visible above her ample bottom — but, really, it was barely a half-step short of X-rated.’’
Martin said that after he’d sent it he wondered if it was ‘’suitable for Kansas’’ and that he’d already made a replacement that cut the picture off just below the right knee which was bent back with its foot stretched to a point. The revised art was fine except that the image was now too wide for the text to work properly without making it spatially almost exactly the same as the Steve Miller poster. Though Martin ”offered to move the left-hand border to the right in order to buy more space for text, it still wasn’t going to work and we were rapidly running out of time to have a Zappa poster printed and out by the Steve Miller shows [Oct 8].”
‘‘With deep regret, and figuring that the debacle was going to leave some pretty pis[-]ed people in its wake,’’ said Dennis, ‘‘I thanked him for his above-and-beyond effort and explained that the clock had pretty much run out on making this work. But rather than being pis[-]ed he asked if I could use the art for anything else and said he really liked what we were doing with the Trucker! We also figured out that we’d briefly met at the Family Dog at Playland Beach a couple years earlier.’’
‘‘Anyway, I blurted out ‘Yes. Sure. Absolutely.’ Or something along those lines. Two days later a third illustration arrived by Special Delivery that was cropped a little lower at the top and had screens added to give it some depth without having to add color,” said Dennis. ”Martin continued to provide art to the Trucker for a couple more years in spite of the fact that his work was coming under increasing demand by people who could actually pay him.’’
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LEFT TO RIGHT:
— The final ‘‘sanitized’’ Neon Park art as it appeared on the back cover of the Vol 2, No 8 edition of the Westport Trucker in Sept 1971.
— A frame from Park’s ‘‘Chemical Wedding’’ which gives a taste of the excised portion of the rejected Cowtown Ballroom art and allows one to rebuild it in their imagination.
— Muller/Park’s earlier Weasels Ripped My Flesh.
NEXT WEEK:
— The Westport Trucker art of Neon Park.
CORRECTION:: Volker Park (AKA Frank A. Theis Park) was NOT named after “People’s Park” in Berkeley (with a Germanic spin). The William Volker Memorial Fountain by sculptor Carl Milles accounts for the name.
https://kcparks.org/places/volker-william-memorial-fountain-2/#:~:text=It%20was%20an%20equestrian%20figure,much%20to%20enrich%20Kansas%20City.
William Volker was also a member of the board of the Helping Hand Institute and he was helping to finance the rock quarry operation. With Volker’s and Billikopf’s support, E. T. Brigham and Leroy Halbert went together to meet Mayor T.T. Crittenden and suggested to him that the city meet the demands of the unemployed by expanding the rock quarrying operations, thereby allowing some of the unemployed to have paid work. The Mayor accepted the suggestion and announced the plan to the unemployed who were pressing for help. Volker and a Mr. Pearson were appointed to be a committee overseeing the new operation; shortly thereafter, they met and recommended to the Mayor that he enlarge the committee into a commission charged with considering the duty of the city toward helping the poor and the unemployed and to design measures to prevent, as far as possible, the spread of more poverty and unemployment.
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