Wichita Listening Bars — Flat Land, Long Sound — Tracks & Tales Guide
The largest city in Kansas sits where two rivers meet, under a sky that has been test-flying aircraft for a century. It has no listening bar. It has a great deal worth listening to.
By Rafi Mercer
The sky here is doing something. Wichita has built aeroplanes since before most of the world had airports — Cessna, Beech, Boeing, Learjet, the Air Capital of the World, a title that sounds like boosterism until you stand on a residential street in the late afternoon and hear something being put through its paces four thousand feet up. Flat land carries sound in a way hill country never does. There is nothing to catch it, nothing to throw it back. It simply travels out until it thins. A city that grew up beneath a working sky has a different relationship with noise than one that grew up in a valley.
Douglas Avenue runs east–west through the middle of it and functions as a spine. East of the river is downtown and Old Town, a district of brick warehouses put up for the railroads and later converted into bars, theatres and lofts — heavy nineteenth-century masonry, loading doors, the kind of buildings that hold low frequencies rather than scattering them. West across the Arkansas is Delano, once the rowdy end of a cattle town, now the stretch where you'll find the record shop. Further out, the grid dissolves into ranch houses and section roads and eventually just stops, which is a thing the plains do rather abruptly.
The band that matters most here never got famous, and that is not incidental. The Embarrassment formed in 1979 and broke up in 1983, four young men who called what they played Blister Pop because punk did not quite fit and nothing else did either. Robert Christgau later described them as a great lost American band, which is the sort of compliment that arrives too late to be useful and too early to be forgotten. There was a small circuit of people writing original songs in Wichita then, a college radio programme at KMUW pushing it along, and a bar on East 17th where all of it converged. Bands from cities without industries make records for the people already in the room. Sometimes those records travel later. Sometimes they don't. The making is the same either way.
Jazz arrived earlier and stayed better funded. The Cotillion opened on 7 December 1960 — a circular building west of town with a twenty-four-foot domed ceiling over eleven thousand square feet of floating maple, a neon band shell, and doormen in tuxedos on the first night. Armstrong played it. Ellington, Basie, Stan Kenton. Later Muddy Waters and Etta James and B.B. King, because a city Wichita's size cannot afford to specialise. The Wichita Jazz Festival started in 1972 and has run every year since, one of the longest continuous jazz festivals in the country; Clark Terry was among the founders. There is a working jazz room downtown now, Walker's, open Fridays and Saturdays, small enough that the quartet is fifteen feet from your table. And there is the Dunbar Theatre at 9th and Cleveland, opened in 1941 in the McAdams neighbourhood because the rest of Wichita's theatres would not seat Black patrons — closed for years, on the National Register since 2008, with a new marquee up and volunteers working to bring it back as a performing arts centre.
The everyday listening happens in two shops on opposite sides of the city. Spektrum Muzik has been on West Douglas in Delano since 2012, thousands of records and tapes and CDs, staff who put on listening events for a new release and mean it. The Record Ship sits at 230 North Cleveland — the same street as the Dunbar, a few blocks south — a smaller room run by a man named Les with a dollar bin and a reputation that other shop owners repeat to each other. Neither is a temple. Both do the actual work: keeping stock, knowing the stock, staying open.
The landscape does its own arguing. The Arkansas and the Little Arkansas meet at the north edge of downtown, and the Keeper of the Plains stands at the confluence — Blackbear Bosin's forty-four-foot steel figure, arms raised, put there in 1974. The rivers are shallow and slow and brown. Beyond them the land goes flat in every direction with a completeness that people from anywhere else find unsettling for about a day and then find restful. The wind is constant. Weather is visible an hour before it arrives. You develop a habit of watching the horizon, which is not so different from the habit of hearing something coming.
Patience is the local inheritance, and there is a precise date for it. On 19 July 1958, ten students from the Wichita NAACP Youth Council walked into the Dockum Drug Store at Douglas and Broadway one at a time until every seat at the whites-only lunch counter was taken. They ordered. They were not served. They came back, twice a week, then daily, well-dressed and polite, and they sat. On 11 August the manager told his staff to serve them because he was losing too much money. Every Dockum in Kansas desegregated. It was the first successful student-led sit-in in America, eighteen months before Greensboro, and almost nobody outside Kansas knows it happened. Sitting still, in a room, until something changes — this city has done that, and it worked, and it got no credit.
Nights are unpretentious. Kirby's has been on East 17th since 1972, a dive by the Wichita State campus with an indoor stage and an outdoor one and a policy of no cover, ever, which over fifty-odd years amounts to a subsidy of the local scene that no arts council ever matched. Next door is a pinball room. The Cotillion still fills two thousand people on a Saturday. Old Town does what Old Town does. Then the city goes quiet, early, and the wind picks up.
The nearest room built properly for listening — tube amps, Klipschorns, an album played through — is ESP HiFi in Denver, five hundred miles west along the same flat. That distance is the honest fact about Wichita. But every ingredient a listening bar needs is already here and has been for decades: a domed hall with a maple floor, a jazz festival older than most of the audience, two record shops that host events, a bar that has never charged a cover, and a theatre on Cleveland Street waiting to be finished.
Someone will build the room. The city has been rehearsing for it since 1958.
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Flat land, long sound, and a lunch counter that proved the point.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
