At the beginning of Cowtown Ballroom ... Sweet Jesus! filmmaker Joe Heyen inhales deeply and just admits: "It's bad enough when other people connect you to a cultural stereotype, but when you do it yourself ...." What follows is, as we wrote in May, an "85-minute love letter to the Kansas City of the early '70s." Purportedly the history of a building — what might be considered the Fillmore Midwest or the Carnegie Hall of the Plains — is really a tale of our town. The Cowtown Ballroom's 38-month life wouldn't have been possible if the city didn't have a rich musical history — that and hippies hanging out, smoking dope, playing in fountains and falling in love on Sunday afternoons in Volker Park. In outdoor footage, Kansas City is happy and sun-dappled; in talking-head interviews, it's good to hear the older folks we see around town telling their stories from back in the day. Heyen and Anthony Ladesich, one of the film's producers and its director of photography, editor and writer, capture the vibe with trippy interstitial art, framing black-and-white photos so we can see the Kodak film — making us grateful that someone thought to take pictures. "My generation didn't end sexism, racism and war, but we tried," Heyen says at the end. For that, we thank them, and everyone else who helped Heyen put it all together for posterity.
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