Given the name of Oklahoma City's newest live music venue, a toast seemed appropriate.
Given the difficulty of getting it open during a global pandemic, a few ceremonial swigs didn't seem out of line.
"The battle to get to this moment has been incredible. ... It's been pretty intense. But we're here right now, and you guys are here with us," said Chad Whitehead, operating partner and talent buyer for Beer City Music Hall, toasting the audience at the new Oklahoma City venue's first show.
"If you even knew all the pieces that it takes to make rock 'n' roll: It takes accountants, it takes builders, it is way more than just music and beer. ... We just want to raise our glass and say a toast to everyone that helped bring this to life."
After five years of planning, building and weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, the team behind Tower Theatre and Ponyboy is finally rocking its new venue. Anchoring downtown Oklahoma City's fledgling Iron Works District, Beer City is strategically placed to strengthen the city's spot on concert touring routes.
"We saw a gap in the marketplace, and we went for it. The reason we called it Beer City was we really wanted something that honored Oklahoma; we wanted to stick to our roots. And we wanted this place to be a very approachable, fan-based venue, where anybody could show up on any night of the week, pay a $15 or $25 ticket, come watch music and have a great time," Whitehead said.
"The original ghost town was a bit notorious for being rowdy back in the day, but it's where people would go to drink and dance and cut up — and that's exactly what people do at a concert venue. So, we thought that sounded just about right."
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What's in the name Beer City?
As aneager crowd gathered for the venue's first concert —a March 31 "secret show" featuring local acts Nia Moné, Swim Fan and Twiggs — the shadowy depiction of puss* Cat Nell seemed to watch over the celebrants. Pictured in a vast mural near the ceiling, the historical figure, like the new venue's name, pays homage to a real, raucous chapterin the Sooner State's past.
The panhandle hamlet of Beer City — once known as the “Sodom and Gomorrah of the Plains” — sprang up south of the Oklahoma-Kansas line in 1888 after the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad into nearby Tyrone. Since Kansas had strict prohibition laws, Beer City became a popular watering hole advertised as “the only town of its kind in the civilized world where there is absolutely no law.”
puss* Cat Nell Jones wasa savvy entrepreneur whoran the Yellow Snake Saloon & Hotel in the early days of Beer City. Her name also makes an appearance on the rotating "Frozen Things" section of the venue'sdrink menu. (Her namesake beverage mixes Pink Whitney vodka, strawberry and lemonade.)
"With Tower, we're in a room that had its own history and its own character. So, there were moments where we made decisions to honor that,"said Stephen Tyler, CEO of Tower Theatre, Ponyboy and Beer City Music Hall.
"Here, the building itself didn't have anything like that. But you could tell that life had been here before.These weren't just weird, old, dilapidated structures ... but we looked at it as a blank slate."
Where in OKC is the new music hall?
The area isn't as bustling as the Uptown 23rd District that's home to Tower and Ponyboy, but the hundreds of live music fans who lined up on a mild spring night for Beer City's soft opening weren't venturing into a ghost town, either.
A few blocks west of Western Avenue at NW 2 and Klein, a long-empty former testing laboratory and construction yard have been transformed into a little oasis for dining local, having a drink and catching a concert.
The Pivot Project, which developed Tower Theatre, Sunshine Laundry, Main Street Arcade and other local historic properties, purchased the 2-acre property at 1137 NW 2 for $1.2 million from its longtime owners, the Swatek family.
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Along with Beer City Music Hall, the area now includes Fair-Weather Friend, a small-batch brewery and taproom that also sells tasty wood-fired pizzas and Prelude Coffee Roasters beverages, and The Flycatcher Club, a new concept from Bar Arbolada owner Riley Marshall, featuring what Tyler called a "your grandpa's bar vibe" and an Alton Brown-approved "best double cheeseburger in America."
"It's a really cool little mix of people and relationships. We've already had many conversations about how we plan to work together and activate this outdoor space," Tyler said, indicating thelarge,grassy shared patio.
"I can walk five minutes to 21C or to Mary Eddy's or any place that's around the edge of the city right now. So, it's pushing the frontier a little bit over here ... and that just seemed to feel really right with the direction we were going with the brand."
What can people expect at Beer City?
While singer/guitarist Joe White III and bassist/guitarist Abbey PhilbrickWhite of Twiggs kept the new stage rocking, several attendees at Beer City's secret show bobbed their heads while holding a cold drink in one hand and a foil-wrapped burrito in the other.
"We feature as many of the great local beers as we can here to lean into that Beer City branding," Whitehead said.
The massive menu above the bar offers pints on tap from Coop Ale Works,Vanessa House, Lively Beerworks and more, along with local liquor from Guthrie's WanderFolk Spirits.
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The venue even boasts its own Beer City "Cold Beer," an Anthem Brewing pilsner sold in cans for $5. Beer City General Manager Joshua Mowarin said it pairs well with the grab-and-go mission-style Beer City Burritos stuffed with beer-braised pork, marinated chicken breast or a vegetarian mix of cauliflower, red bell pepper, onion and corn.
"We're not really looking to have people come in and sit down (and eat). This is really a music venue," Mowarin said.
"This is what you would see maybe in a bigger city like Nashville, maybe New York. ... It has all the bells and whistles. This place is literally designed for musicians and designed for the people that play in big rooms and travel the country."
Who will be playing OKC's newest concert venue?
Along with giving a soulful performance, Moné proved a fitting choice to play the first set at Beer City for another reason: She devised the new venue's wall murals by creating a collage of concert posters from Tower Theatre and Ponyboy.
"It's a lot of what we've done over the last five years here in Oklahoma City ... so it's not just art for us. It's about the history, too, and the idea is that we'll continue to add to it with posters from Beer City," Whitehead said.
"When we opened Tower Theatre, nobody had really played the market much, so it made it harder to sell tickets. It made it harder to get the numbers that the industry needs Oklahoma City to hit if we're going to continue to bring the best artists to town. As long as Tulsa is crushing it, there was not a strong argument to come here instead ... so we knew we had to be really aggressive and more strategic."
With a capacity of 500 patrons, he said Beer City supplies OKC with a much-needed midsizevenue that fits nicely between Tower Theatre's capacity of 1,000 and Ponyboy's of 150.
"Now, we can start working with an artist at the very beginning of their career and grow with them over time. This is an industry that'sstill very dependent on relationships and trust and being available," Whitehead said. "A room this size is going to allow us to push into genres that aren't the best fit for Tower. ...We want to do EDM over here, and we're really pushing for as many Latinx artists as we can."
After officially opening with Grammy-nominated country act Eli Young Band's sold-out April 2 show, Beer City's rapidly expanding lineup includes just in the next week country-rockers Lucero (April 14), hardcore punk band Knocked Loose (April 17), Mexican comedian Carlos Ballarta (April 19) and blues-rock group Andy Frasco & The U.N. (April 20).
In one of his secret show toasts, Whitehead hoped for the venueto become a vital part of the live music pipeline for local and touring talents.
"We just wanted to do something that will allow us to build bands through this town, from Ponyboy and (51st Street) Speakeasy, up to Beer City, up to Tower and on to The Criterion, in the hopes that someday everybody makes it to Paycom Center," he said.
"May this room bring so many bands to our town — and may we all be better for it."
