We need an uprising of love for Byron
Those who love music and rural Iowa, lend me your ears: Byron Stuart needs our help. Now.
He of Byron’s Bar world fame.
“The hipness center of the universe,” is how Bruce Katz, former keyboardist with the Allman Brothers Band, described the Pomeroy haunt.
Come Todd Partridge and Todd Snider, Greg Brown and Chad Elliott. Come lawyers and doctors and hippies and misfits, Byron’s friends all.
“It’s a great venue and Byron is a lovable sweetheart,” said Malcom Holcombe, the acclaimed songwriter from North Carolina.
The city council fears that Byron’s Bar is falling down. The council demanded last week that Stuart commission an engineer to report back on the building’s structural integrity within 90 days. Otherwise, the city demands that he close so the entire downtown block can be demolished. It is out of plumb by four inches. Byron’s is the only sign of life. The remainder of the 1896 brick row is owned by Kenny Hinners, Byron said. The city council would just as soon it was all leveled before Pomeroy gets sued over a stray brick.
Byron, 71, is deflated.
“I live for the music,” he said, a day after his unpleasant meeting with the council, during a phone call that was pocked by odd periods of silence from a bartender who likes to visit. He feels untethered from his community where he grew up a farm boy. The mayor tried to assure him otherwise, but … Byron is not feeling the love.
Over the last three decades Byron offered respite to traveling minstrels and rural Iowans starved for an occasional break from monoculture. A guitarist on her way from the Twin Cities to Kansas City swings wide on Sundays down Hwy. 4 for $500, free pizza and beer, and a night at the Green Acre Motel in Rockwell City. Every single one of them talks about how they feel the love, and they call Byron to see if they can come back.
Canned Heat. Freakbass. Kinky Friedman. Sergio Webb. Joe and Vicki Price. Brothers Burn Mountain. Country and blues and folk from East Nashville, Chicago, Austin, Gilmore City and Auburn — you shoulda been there when King of the Tramps played “Bury Me Upside Down So You Can Kiss My Ass” on New Year’s Eve. You wanna talk Calhoun County, Iowa, true story from Lohrville. Every now and then some funk. Always worth $15.
“Tell all your cool friends: Live music only happens once. PEACE.” It’s the Byron’s mantra.
At 5 p.m. longhairs, goat ropers, bankers and teachers come out of the woodwork to win a door prize: A toilet plunger signed by Byron, or a back scratcher, if you’re lucky a three-way (electrical plug). The most-prized prizes are the photos by Byron’s partner, Roger Feldhans. The place is a shrine to Jerry Garcia; Byron says he wants “Friend of the Devil” played at his funeral. The old folks are home in bed at Fort Dodge or Storm Lake by 9 p.m., later if you drive from Sioux City or Des Moines as many do.
Byron brings life and a little tie-dyed fun to what can be a dull and colorless landscape.
It will close and the music will fade to silence, and we all will be poorer for it even if you’ve never been there or care to go. Byron brings people together, and we sure need that now. You don’t argue at Byron’s. In fact, he will pinch your ears if you keep talking while Amelia White is singing (she might be the final show on April 14).
Byron has no money. He can’t afford an engineer. Even if the building somehow can be salvaged, Byron has no way to pay for it.
So the call is going out: Come together in an uprising of love for the guy who keeps music alive in rural America.
We need a Byron Aid concert where musicians and fans show up to give the old boy a fighting chance to keep that spirit burning. If you could attract 1,000 people giving $100 each, that might do it. Pomeroy should help. If downtown must come down, then there must be an empty building where the Byron’s Dancers, led by Harlan Grau of Newell and Ree Irwin of Sac City, may groove along to Brother Trucker for the betterment of humanity.
There just has to be a way.
Malcom Holcombe left a message for Greg Brown. He got the message. Brown says he will do anything he can to help. That could be where it starts. The Byron’s Dancers once organized a party to fix his roof. There must be a bigger gathering, an indoor Woodstock for the benefit of starving artists and rural Iowans — we hear the Laramar Ballroom in Fort Dodge is having a revival, or maybe something could be rigged up for the Cobblestone on Storm Lake, or someplace in Des Moines. Whatever it takes.
Live music only happens once. Let’s not let it die.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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Would Byron relocate? There must be a community with a storefront begging to be put to good use. Byron has a proven track record of bringing folks to Pomeroy from miles around. There’s a Pizza Ranch empty in Pocohontas, and a cool woman who used to be in the music business in Colorado has an eatery there. Maybe they could team up?
Art, I forwarded this column to Bob Dorr, and via FB messenger to Shawn Colvin, who is buds with Greg Brown. She and Mary Chapin Carpenter have referred to Greg as "the Barry White of folk music." It's the voice :) Also to my buddy Denny McCabe, retired teacher, Fort Dodge native and local musician, whom I think you know -- he was there when we were all talking shop after your program at Hawkeye Community College.