A Sad Sad Song

Owen Hawkins is running out of time. It’s April 24, 2002, and a minimonsoon has just washed his press conference off the steps of the Liberty Memorial. He’d been planning to announce his intention to resurrect the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival, an eleven-year Kansas City institution organizers had just pronounced dead. Working on their feet, Hawkins and his publicist, a recent import from the West Coast with an impressive résumé that includes major entertainment events and stints with medical firms, concoct a makeshift solution. Hawkins, rain-ruffled but still dapper in a mouse-hued suit and pale fedora topping oil-slick curls, hurriedly addresses a score of skeptical reporters in the Union Station lobby while his counterpart distracts the building’s management.

Yes, Hawkins says, his group — the Kansas City, Kansas-based U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce — will be able to succeed where the larger, much better-connected Blues and Jazz Festival board of directors failed. Music fans will rally to save Kansas City’s showcase summer event, he predicts, and sponsors will pick up the $100,000 tab. “Our civic fathers will step up and help us out once they realize the interest is there,” he concludes.

Two months later, Hawkins is facing another race against the clock — but this time, the stakes are significantly higher. Hawkins and Steve Miller, his longtime friend who flew in from Las Vegas to help with the upstart event, are pressing ahead with plans to host a blues and jazz festival in Penn Valley Park the weekend of July 18-21, the same time and setting for the Blues and Jazz Festival the past eleven years. With three weeks left, Hawkins and Miller have no set lineup, no prominent sponsors and little on-the-record support from city officials. Their brochures for potential sponsors are amateurish, filled with clip-art graphics and typographical errors. On the plus side of the ledger, the pair boasts an eager and ample workforce of local musicians looking for a stage and desperate volunteers who are willing to help anyone put on a reasonable facsimile of Kansas City’s once-glorious event.

Perhaps still clinging to hopes of a resurrected world-class affair, many area artists have supported the efforts of Hawkins and Miller. Healthy turnouts are common at Sunday-night fund-raising auditions at the Mill Creek Brewery, where hopeful players jam and optimistic patrons buy “early-bird” festival tickets for $5. (The fact that Mill Creek has always been popular on Sunday evenings makes it difficult to gauge what percentage of the overflow crowd has actually come for the blues, though the thinly padded donation bucket and the packed second-floor pool room offer two clues.) Acts such as Danielle, Cotton Candy and Millage Gilbert have made sparkling contributions to the talent pool, and a few unknowns have sparked a buzz, standing out among the bar-band regulars and cover artists usually attracted by the open stage.

Similarly, some media outlets have greeted Hawkins and Miller with open airwaves. On June 7, Mark, Victor and Phil, hosts of the MVP Power Hour on Liberty-based KCXL 1140 (“Radio Free Liberty!”), congratulated the “Blues Brothers,” as Hawkins and Miller have dubbed themselves, for “bringing the festival back.” Upon hearing that the price of a three-day ticket would be $12, the radio personalities gushed, “That’s the price you’d be paying for one or two of these artists at the clubs.” After Hawkins explained his focus on finding “stars in our backyard,” the DJs cheered that “hometown flavor makes it more exciting.” Toward the end of the softball session, interviewers and subjects alike agreed that they felt “a lot of love in this room.”

Hawkins and Miller are an easy duo to embrace. They occasionally high-five each other while intoning their Blues Brothers nickname, and they seldom appear in public without donning the blazers and headgear sported by their big-screen counterparts. There are a few crucial differences between Hawkins and Miller and Aykroyd and Belushi, though. For one, these Brothers don’t perform; Hawkins, a guitarist, might jam with the Mill Creek crew, but Miller says he “shuffles papers off to the side.” For another, Hawkins is African-American, and Miller is ruddy-faced with a burly moustache that looks as if it’s swallowed his mouth. Interracial work relationships are hardly a novelty, but Hawkins makes this pitch: “It’s the story about how a black man and a white man became best friends. Truly amazing.”

It turns out there’s a strategic reason Hawkins is playing up this angle. Later, he admits, “We brought in Steve so people wouldn’t think this is just a black thing” (Using the same logic, Hawkins has given his newly created KC Blues Fest Inc. top billing as the event’s presenter, moving the U.S. Black Chamber to a less prominent sponsorship role.)

Miller has spent the past fourteen years in Las Vegas. While working as a general contractor for cable and fiber-optic companies, he says he observed the tourist-trap strategy he hopes to transfer to his new music-promotion career. “They have figured out how to get people from all over the world to come into their town, and when the people leave, their money stays,” he explains. In April, when Hawkins called and told him about the festival’s demise, he flew in immediately, eager to put this philosophy into practice in Kansas City.