MUSIC | STREETSIDE
VALERO DAYS
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D AV ID HUDN A L L
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f you live or work in downtown Kansas City and you have a car, and you want to fill up that car with gasoline, there aren’t many options. There’s a gas station on West Pennway just off the ramp to Interstate 35, but it’s on downtown’s western edge, plus it’s completely automated — no convenience mart, no cashiers. There’s the Grand Slam at Sixth Street and Grand, but that’s all the way to the River Market. There’s a 7-Eleven at Linwood and Gillham, but that ain’t downtown — that’s midtown, son. For many years, the only geographically convenient option for petroleum was the Valero station at 17th Street and Grand. Poorly managed, filthy, smelly and depressing, the Valero was a necessary evil for downtown dwellers. No matter how hard you tried, sometimes there was no other option but to walk through the glass-dusted parking lot, past the vagrants and drunks hanging around outside, draw a deep breath, open the doors, and do your business. Who was above a trip to the Valero? All of us and none of us. It closed in September. It will reopen later this month with a Phillips 66 sign out front, and the neighborhood will be the better for it. Nobody will miss the old Valero, with its fried-chicken-and-cigarettes stench and its wet trash bags hanging off chronically out-of-order pumps. The place was an abomination, utterly clothes and know exactly where you’d been.” dysfunctional, a magnet for degenerates. Charles Ferruzza (food critic): “I stopped in OK, maybe we’ll miss it a little bit. one night, and a homeless guy had burst into The Valero was two short blocks from us the place, knocked over all the snack-cake here at The Pitch. We’ve got history together. displays on purpose, and run out. The people Call us old-fashioned, but that counts for working were furious.” He adds, “I’d go in something in our book. In honor of the Big there once a week for lottery tickets. I like to do V’s closing, members of The Pitch staff, past the Powerball with the Power Play. Power Play and present, share with you some of our fondis a dollar extra, but you win way more. They est memories. could never figure out how to sell me a Power Jonathan Bender (Fat City blogger, Web Play, never, not once.” editor): “It’s the only place Justin Kendall (managI’ve ever seen a man try to ing editor): “For a while, it buy a single slice of cheese “When you opened was the only place in Kanfrom the cashier.” Was there the door, you were sas City where you could a deli slicer running in there buy Faygo, which is the at the time or something? enveloped in a rolling official soft drink of Jugga“No. He wanted one from fog of the friedlos.” (Kendall says he is not the package of Kraft singles chicken grease you a Juggalo.) in the cooler. It was crazy.” Valero was also a vendor Chris Packham (former could see condensed of hard-to-find Rap Snacks, art critic): “If you were doon the windows.” a company that gave famous ing some kind of ingestiblerappers their own potatotoxins scavenger hunt, and chip flavors — for example, your list included a bottle of Yung Joc Sweet n’ Hot Cheese Curls. In 2008, 5-Hour Energy, a pack of cherry blunts, and a former Pitch blogger Owen Morris wrote a tribpaper basket of fried chicken with clawed feet ute to the brand based on his experiences at and beaks sticking out of it, the Valero would Valero. It’s called “A Rap to My Rap Snacks”: instantly put you up by three.” (The Valero So there I was talking with Dimitry at the was also home to a Chester’s fried chicken, Valero/Said I need a snack that's tasty but not an in-store franchise.) Packham recalls the odor: “When you opened the door, you were much dinero/Dimitry says, ‘Owen there's only enveloped in a rolling fog of the fried-chicken one way to go/And that's with the Rap Snacks grease you could see condensed on the win- by Lil’ Romeo’. (It goes on for about eight more bars.) dows. The air was incredibly thick in that Nadia Pf laum (former staff writer): place. You were just swimming in it. Back at the office, people would smell it in your “Once, a guy at the counter gave me a pair of 22
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shamrock-shaped Kanye glasses. (It was near St. Patrick’s Day.)” Ben Palosaari (staff writer): “Didn’t a bomb go off there a few years ago?” (Yes, in the summer of 2010, a bum loitering outside the gas station dropped an unidentified item into the clothing donation box in Valero’s parking lot, and an explosion followed shortly thereafter. Authorities were called. No one was injured.) Peter Rugg (former staff writer) on Valero’s “No Single Beers” sign and policy: “I’ve never thought about taking one bottle of Miller High Life and trying to barter for it, but it happens so often at this gas station, they needed to write declarations,” Rugg wrote in a 2009 blog post. He asked the cashier how often customers attempt to haggle over single beers. “All the time,” she said. “They pull one beer out of a six-pack and bring it up and try to pay for it. Even with the signs up, they try to do it, and we keep telling them no.” Berry Anderson (Filter editor): “I thought their ‘no single beer’ policy was a bunch of horseshit. Sometimes, a tallboy was all I needed for inspiration at work. I suppose the rule was in place to keep the creeps, crackheads and other assorted ne’er-do-wells from loitering in the parking lot, but really, it didn’t work. I hope the new owners are more sensitive to the needs of the working stiffs, like me, in the community.” Your move, Phillips 66. We welcome you to the community and await your policy on tallboy cans.
E-mail david.hudnall@pitch.com pitch.com
here’s not a huge amount of overt Beatle worship going on in our local scene these days. You’re more likely to recognize the influence of acts — David Bowie, R.E.M., Big Star, Wilco — that borrowed inspiration from the Beatles. But occasionally, a group gets all primary-source on you, and that’s what’s going on with the new, self-titled three-song EP from Gentleman Savage. Particularly so on opening track “Overlord”: With its fuzzy jangle and druggy-high harmonies, it’s a dead ringer for something off Rubber Soul or Revolver. “That’s actually a song that was written for, but never really used in, our old band,” says Nick Talley, drummer. “When we started working on Gentleman Savage, it seemed like it fit in with the sound we were going for.” That previous act was called Mother Culture, and when it disbanded a few years ago, Talley, guitarist and primary songwriter Holden Simpson, and bassist Kyle Anthony regrouped and started hammering out some new song ideas in Talley’s basement. (David Kelly joined later on keys.) They played their first show as Gentleman Savage about a year ago, at the Roost, an art space in the West Bottoms. On Friday, Gentleman Savage celebrates the release of the EP with a show at the Riot Room. The other two songs on Gentleman Savage up the psych ante a bit: The electronic piano on “Open Eyes” has a distinctly Zombies-like bounce, and “Death in the Springtime” traffics in dark, sweeping atmospherics. Talley says the group has the wheels rolling on a 7-inch that it’ll record this winter, with a full-length planned beyond that. Same ’60s-pop vibe? “Yeah, pretty much,” Talley says. “We’ve got some varying tastes. Our bassist likes more rock type of stuff. He likes ZZ Top. I like Motown — the Four Tops are one of my faves. Holden likes more psychedelic stuff, and then also the Beach Boys, Beatles. I mean, yeah — we all really like the Beatles.”
— DAVID HUDNALL Gentleman Savage performs Friday, October 12, at the Riot Room. With FM Pilots, Bears and Company, and Le Grand. M O N T H X X–X X , 2 0 0 X
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