Two friends bring music to the Crossroads with the Tank Room

In the early afternoon hours of a sunny Tuesday, Tank Room co-owner Chadwick Veach is bent over the venue’s brand-new stage, applying primer. His business partner, Dustin Racen, watches casually, apparently unfazed that by this time the next week, the Tank Room will be a few hours from its first big booking. The bar is set to kick off the Kegs & Eggs season for KRBZ 96.5 (the Buzz) with Lucius and Ballyhoo February 19.

Veach, 29, and Racen, 31, have had their eyes on this prize since they first talked about opening the Tank Room.

“We’re fans of the Buzz, and it was kind of the plan from the beginning — before we even started building, we knew we wanted to kind of go after the Kegs & Eggs deal,” Racen says. “A lot of the stuff in here — different levels of seating, a green room — we designed with that in mind.”

Putting an ambitious live-music venue into a former Gold Exchange storefront is the latest development in the men’s decade-long friendship.

“Every guy, for the most part, wants to open a bar,” says Veach, who has bartended at various Power & Light spots over the past few years. “Me and Dustin had been in bands together, so we played in different bars and spent a lot of time talking about that. ‘Well, this bar is cool, here’s what I would do’ — that kind of thing.”

“Every time we were hanging out, we were brainstorming about what we wanted to do,” Racen says. “Finally, I was like, ‘Let’s go for it.'”

Veach adds: “We found this building, and it took us about a year to build it out. We demoed everything that was pre-existing, and me and Dustin built everything ourselves.”

The Tank Room is a study in contrasts. It’s sleek and modern, with a metallic bar and imposing oil-black paintings mounted on the walls, but there are rustic touches as well. The house mascot, a preserved and mounted caribou bust — one of Racen’s Craigslist finds — hangs above the taps, flanked by Gothic wall lamps. The rest of the surfaces are exposed brick and hardwood floors, and from the raw ceiling hang massive iron chandeliers. The whole setup is strangely inviting, like a house haunted by a very generous party host. Not bad for a couple of guys with little experience and a DIY budget.

“We had to YouTube and Google — well, not everything, we’re not completely helpless,” Veach says with a laugh. “I had never framed anything before. Never drywalled. We wanted an elegant, rugged look. That’s kind of the music we listen to, in a way, so it made sense.”

“We’re not carpenters,” Racen adds. “If something was just a little off, we’d be like, ‘Well, it’s rugged.'”

So is the house-infused bacon whiskey, which comes on tap. But the main flavors offered, the men say, will be in the music.

“We’re a live venue first,” Racen says. “We have a small occupancy — just under a hundred — but one of our goals is to get larger bands in here to do intimate shows, maybe on a night off or something.”

The two are working on a strategy to lure in those bigger headliners. It helps that Racen also runs Fountain Town Media, a video-production company a block from the Tank Room. He plans to offer concert recording and live-video streaming to bands that come through.

“We’re installing five live video cameras so that we’ll be able to switch and edit live shows,” Racen says. “If a band comes through town and they play here, we can provide them with a live DVD of their show, which is something that we’ve noticed fans like to watch and appreciate. That was the other thing that we wanted to bring to Kegs & Eggs.”

The recordings that Racen makes will be streamed on whatever website — the band’s or the Tank Room’s — is most appropriate. (The Kegs & Eggs shows stream live.)

It’s a technology that no other small music venue in Kansas City offers, and Racen and Veach hope that selling point works to their advantage. But as the partners look around their space, the smell of primer hanging in the air, they seem more excited about the future than nervous about what it will bring.

“When we signed the dotted line for the building, that was one of the no-turning-back moments,” Racen says. “Nobody wants to fail. But we’ve already taken the hardest step.”