In the early ’70s, Kansas City was young, high and horny, and everyone went to the Ballroom

Mother Earth has left the building.

On a rainy night, the old hippies are being hustled out the door. It
was supposed to be a reunion party for the radicals, scenesters and
music freaks who, from 1971 to ’74, frequented the rotting, rococo,
hangarlike second floor of the El Torreon Building at 31st Street and
Gillham, back when it was the all-rockin’ Cowtown Ballroom.

A growing crowd of 100 or so people, mostly in their 60s, has come
out for the second night of festivities surrounding the premiere of the
locally produced documentary Cowtown Ballroom … Sweet
Jesus! Most of them haven’t set foot in
the place in more than 35 years.

The night before, at an advance screening at the Tivoli, many had
watched themselves onscreen, talking about the years when rock
superstars such as Alice Cooper, Van Morrison and
Frank Zappa made the Ballroom the place to be for live music in
Kansas City.

Tonight, the men who made the film invited them to return to their
toking grounds. Joe Heyen and Anthony Ladesich spent the
last two years interviewing hundreds of people and pulling together
mountains of decades-old film reels, posters and photos to piece
together their 85-minute love letter to the Kansas City of the early
’70s.

But now, about an hour into the party, a representative from the
Haddad Restaurant Group, which owns the building, arrives to shut it
down. The cross-looking woman accuses Heyen of not having insurance or
a permit or something. There’s no liquor, so people have been milling
around drinking soda while Chet Nichols strums his guitar,
amplified by a small PA. Off in the corner, a flower child in a rain
poncho twirls and pirouettes unselfconsciously through his entire
low-key performance.

The party moves to the Tower Tavern, which in some ways is an
improvement because there’s a bar. Still, people are reeling a bit from
having been kicked out of their old home away from home.

“There are a bunch of geriatric hippies celebrating something
wonderful in their lives that happened in the ’70s. That’s
threatening!” jokes Dan “Mort” Moriarty.

Moriarty was among the four founders of Good Karma Productions,
which operated the Ballroom. “We wanted this San Francisco feel,”
Moriarty told me the night before. “What happened, in a totally
miraculous way, was it had a Kansas City feel.”

At the beginning of the film, between sound bites from Black Oak
Arkansas singer Jim Dandy (who looks like he has lived about
eight and a half of his rock lives and who says the Ballroom “was a
social experiment in terror”), Michael Brewer of Brewer and
Shipley says the biggest part of the ’60s happened in the ’70s.

That was certainly true of the Midwest. People of my generation
won’t recognize the Kansas City in the film.

For years, Volker Park (now known as Theis Park) was a
mini-Woodstock every Sunday, entire hippie families filling the grounds
from the Nelson-Atkins to Brush Creek for drug-addled, music-enhanced
revelry. In Westport, head shops such as Tiny Tim’s Magic Circus were
everywhere.

Mary Ann Wynkoop, head of the American studies program at
UMKC, gives the academic perspective on free love; singer-songwriter
and ’70s survivor Howard Iceberg sums up the layman’s side: “It
was a time when people enjoyed each other.”

Why the fuck hadn’t I heard of Fanny? The California
four-piece (no pun intended) wasn’t only the first all-female rock band
signed to a major label but was also multicultural, with two members
originally from the Philippines. Fanny played the Ballroom twice, in
’73 and ’74, and Cowtown features footage of the slender,
longhaired “original godmothers of chick rock” living the teenage boy’s
rock-and-roll dream.

Handsome British bluesman Rory Gallagher guitar-gasmed for
two and a half hours on 3/24/74, and Springfield’s Ozark Mountain
Daredevils, which got its start at the Ballroom, was the original
Kings of Leon.

The film also touches on Kansas City’s racial history, tracing the
venue’s origins as one of the nation’s first integrated jazz clubs
(est. 1927), through its two midcentury decades as a roller rink, to
its zenith as the wild concert hall that hosted white bluegrassers the
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and black bluesmen B.B. King and
Danny Cox.

And there was the war. In the film’s most moving moment, local
Vietnam vet Bill Beaumont talks about being under fire in the
jungle. He reproduces, with eerie accuracy, the whistling sounds of
mortar shells and describes the false autumn of falling leaves cut by
bullets and shrapnel. After coming home, Beaumont threw himself into
the Cowtown scene and designed posters for the venue.

Critics may say the film won’t seem relevant outside Kansas City.
But I think anyone interested in the history of rock and America in the
’60s will find lots to love.

Certainly everyone in town should see it during its two-week run at
the Tivoli starting May 22. More than anything, it shows — with
humor, pride and vigor — a time more recent than the jazz era
when KC was truly wild and cool.