In KC’s Crossroads, a weekly jam is the epicenter of the Royals’ stadium resistance
The song, a loose country shuffle performed by a dozen musicians crammed together like cattle on The Brick’s cozy stage, chugged on for about 10 minutes.
Everybody had their own verse. One by one, they stepped up to the gold-plated condenser microphone to vocalize their protests.
Mayor Quinton Lucas ain’t nothing but a coward
He won’t address the culture that will all be devoured
By the millionaire investors who’ll park in helicopters
Time to vote No and send Sherman to the showers.
(That would be John Sherman, owner of the Kansas City Royals.)
Then back, again and again, to the refrain:
Let’s go!
Vote No!
Hey, big money, leave my city alone.
So it went for three hours Monday evening at the Rural Grit Happy Hour, which over the last month has transformed from a weekly roots-music jamboree into ground zero for a grassroots resistance fervently opposed to the Royals’ plan to drop a baseball stadium on top of the city’s beloved arts district.
The Brick, at 1727 McGee, is not at risk of demolition if Jackson County votes “yes” on April 2 to repeal the current stadiums’ sales tax and replace it with a 40-year, 3/8th-cent sales tax that would help pay for a new Royals ballpark and renovations at Arrowhead Stadium.
But several independent Crossroads businesses would be in the path of the bulldozer, and the bar, which opened in 1999, is a longtime hangout among the artists, musicians and makers whose values and labor built the Crossroads into what it is today. Rural Grit, a freewheeling folk collective that has held its residency there since the mid-2000s, is in many ways the torchbearer of that scene’s bohemian spirit.
“I think a lot of us were so filled with anger when we heard about this proposal,” said Kim Stanton, the director and organizer of Rural Grit, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. “Finally, I said, we gotta let it out. We gotta let it out on stage. And through that, we thought we could organize a kind of call to action around this vote.”
Not long after the Royals rolled out their plan, Rural Grit scheduled four themed protest shows. The first was “Socioeconomic Inequality,” followed by “Political Corruption.” Each week, a rotating set of musicians prepares songs accordingly. The crowds keep growing.
“The thing you have to understand is, for a lot of musicians in this city, this is where we work — this is our job site,” said Rick Johnson, a defense attorney by day and regular performer at Rural Grit. “And they want to stick this stadium right outside the front door of all these venues: The Brick, RecordBar, The Truman. And they want to tear down other places that occasionally host music, like Chartreuse Saloon and the Pairing.”
He continued: “Which means the businesses that aren’t getting torn down will have to deal with three years of construction. The Brick would end up on a dead-end road. We would have to survive higher property values and a radical change in the demographics of the neighborhood. The plan is to turn this from a local arts community of food and music and performance into a sports and entertainment district. And we see all that as a tremendous challenge to the way we live.”
It was standing room only on Monday night, a blur of banjos and beer cans, pink-haired punks and raggedy old pickers who looked like they’d just stepped out of some old daguerreotype. The evening’s theme was “Bullies and Liars.” The songs targeted city leaders, named and unnamed, that the room agreed had been all too willing to toss their community in the grease.
A performer going by C. Woods offered some a cappella musings on the lack of financial specifics in the Royals’ plan: “No commitments made, just fake figures and sums, but the vote is on for the stadium.”
A 15-year-year old singer named Nora Bell capped a fiery performance with these lines:
Power is derived from a mandate by the masses
So take your Crossroads stadium plan
And shove it up your asses!
Singer-songwriter David Regnier, a veteran of the local roots scene, reworked the old Jimmy Reed song “Big Boss Man,” mixing in lyrics about Sherman. “Well you ain’t so big,” Regnier sang, “you just loud, that’s all.”
It wasn’t so long ago that Sherman or Lucas could have walked into a joint like The Brick and basked in the rosy glow of civic affection. Both men carried with them a great deal of goodwill when they entered the broader local consciousness in 2019 — Sherman as the friendly grandpa figure who bought his local ball team for the love of the sport, Lucas the newly elected millennial mayor who pledged to escort progressive activists into a city power structure where high-priced lawyers and developers have long run the game.
The shine is off the apple, at least among this set. On and off stage, Lucas’ middle-ground stance — he says he supports the stadium in the Crossroads now that the Royals have agreed to keep Oak Street open — earned him mockery, and Sherman has been cast as a rapacious billionaire pillaging the local tax base. The teams are seen as extorting the public. As one performer put it Monday:
Hurry up and vote don’t read the fine print
Where they don’t have to say how your taxes are spent
They said, “Give us your money or we won’t stay”
Would you give a girl a diamond if she talked that way?
The resistance intends to go full bore right up till the vote. On Wednesday, March 27, RecordBar — whose owners also oppose the Crossroads stadium — planned to host a kind of supercharged Rural Grit show, which will feature not just the usual folkies but also hip-hop, rock and punk performers alongside guest speakers sharing information about the election. (For their part, pro-stadium fans were invited to an event at Johnny’s Tavern in the Power & Light District on Wednesday night, but it was later canceled.)
And on Monday, April 1, the day before the election, Rural Grit is holding a musical rally at Ilus Davis Park, across from City Hall, at 4 p.m. Afterward, the crowd will march to The Brick for one last set of protest music.
And then? They’re hoping for a rejection of the stadium tax, and a return to good vibes.
“Three weeks ago, I wasn’t a political operative,” Johnson said. “I’d love nothing more than to get back to playing banjo and swapping tunes.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 11:54 AM.
