Thrill of the stage keeps longtime Wichita bands going (VIDEO)

Between them, the three members of Wichita bar band the Sleepy Truckers have almost 100 years of on-stage experience.

They’ve either built relationships or burned bridges with nearly every bar and venue manager in town.

They’ve played hours and hours worth of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Steve Miller tunes in front of thousands of faces – some familiar, some strange.

They’ve performed in dozens of other bands with a long list of different musicians, and they take a Wichita stage at least once a week – even when they’re tired from long weeks at their other jobs.

Such is the life of a Wichita rock star, and there are plenty of them. Fans of live music on any given night can find local bands performing on stages all over town. Many of them are made up of musicians in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s – musicians who once had dreams of making it big but have found artistic fulfillment and a few extra dollars performing for Wichita audiences – again and again and again.

“It’s all about nailing that song with the guys in the band,” said Vinnie Mourning, who was one of the founders of the Sleepy Truckers two decades ago. “There’s just that feeling. It’s electric every time.”

Sleepy Truckers is just one name on a list of Wichita bands that have been filling bar venues for decades. There’s Lotus, the granddaddy of local bands, which has been playing since the early 1970s and is the house band at Margarita’s Cantina, 3109 E. Douglas. And there are several granddaddies-in-training who’ve been together 10 years or more. The Source. Blue Eyed Soul. Ten Day Wish. The Funtones. Band of Oz. Monterey Jack. 3 Ring Circus. Mumblin’ Jones. The Benders. Ophil.

Most are cover bands, and the musicians who populate them spend their weekend and evening hours rehearsing, booking, planning, setting up, tearing down and performing recognizable hits from their set lists, each time hoping they’ll draw a big crowd that likes to dance.

They’re not in it for the money. An excellent payday for a local gig would be $800 – split up among all the band members. Most say they’re in it for the music and the artistic high they get from sharing their talent and getting instant, positive feedback for it.

Diana Dobbins is the longtime manager and sound technician for Blue Eyed Soul, an eight-piece party band that has a horn section and has been around for nearly 15 years. Her husband, Dave Dobbins, is one of the group’s founders and plays the saxophone and flute. The group has worked up a set list of nearly 150 soul, R&B and rock ’n’ roll covers, from Pat Benatar to the Blues Brothers. They are regulars on the patio at YaYa’s EuroBistro and perform at weddings and fundraisers throughout the year. They play summer concert series, Trinity High School’s homecoming and the St. Thomas Aquinas church St. Patrick’s Day Dance.

The group is made up of men and women – including female drummer Kim Garey Trujillo – and almost all of them have day jobs. Many of them perform in other bands, too. Versatile keyboardist Ben Ornelas, for example, also plays in Fly By Night. Rob Simon, who sings and plays African drums, also is a musician for his church. Guitar player Alex Nordine plays with Emily Strom. Dave Dobbins and trumpet player Gray Bishop are members of the Music Theatre Wichita orchestra. Vocalist Lalanea Chastain also sings with Yale St. Players. Over the years, the band has had at least four different drummers, four different guitar players and several keyboardists.

Making all those schedules mesh is the band’s biggest challenge, Dobbins said, and several substitutes are ready to fill in when needed.

“We have a lot of schedules to coordinate, but we have wonderful musicians, and over the years we have tried to make sure that we are working with really nice people,” she said. “I think that has made a big difference for our band. It’s a real family kind of feel.”

Blue Eyed Soul members frequently have to give up weekend activities to make their gigs, but that’s just part of the deal, Dobbins said. The musicians thrive on the feeling they get when their music lifts a big crowd of people onto their feet. That’s what keeps the members going, year after year, gig after gig.

“It’s the enjoyment of entertaining and being a musician,” she said. “It’s the camaraderie of being in a group. It’s the enjoyment factor. It’s not fame or fortune.”

Fame and fortune were Monterey Jack bass player Paul Drace’s dreams when he first started playing in high school. He admired his guitar player friend Alan Craddock and wanted to be part of that crowd. The two formed a band called Some Weird Sin in 1992 and enjoyed success on bar stages around Wichita.

But then life happened. Both got married and started families, and four years after forming, Drace and Craddock put the band on hold.

But they missed it. In 2000, they decided to form a new band – a less serious band – that focused on pop covers and on-stage energy. They’d play Beastie Boys and Guns N’ Roses. It was the cheesiest idea they’d ever had, they decided, so they named the band Monterey Jack.

The group is now a regular on The Brickyard stage, and the wild antics of charismatic singer Alex Thomas make Monterey Jack a crowd favorite. The band’s signature song is a cover of House of Pain’s “Jump Around,” and they recently introduced a cover of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” that the audience is loving.

All four members of the band would rather play music than do most anything else, and all four are in other groups. Drummer Doug Van Es plays with a long list of other local bands. Drace also plays in Bucko, and Craddock performs with his wife as the The Erin Alan Project. Thomas, in addition to owning several bars that double as music venues, also sings for Ophil.

Pretty early in the game, the band members realized that local fame and fortune might be more their speed than international fame and fortune, Drace said. And he’s more than fine with that.

“There’s something to be said for looking out in the crowd and seeing everybody going crazy and having a little bit of a taste of what it would be like,” he said. “But then you have the security and normalcy of your job and family and house, and you’re not traveling all of the time. You get to play rock star a little bit.”

Mourning of Sleepy Truckers says he feels like a rock star every time he takes the stage. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the band, though the members – which also include bassist and vocalist Andrew Coss, drummer T-Roy Tayrien and sound engineer Gus Ruiz – all have been involved with music for much longer. Mourning was also a member of former longtime Wichita band Pretty Ugly, and Mourning and Coss were members of a band called Shock Opera.

Mourning calls the Truckers a “Jurassic rock band.” It covers classic rock acts like Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. Zeppelin is the band’s specialty. The Truckers aren’t much for Old Town and instead play less glitzy bars like The Stadium at 620 W. Maple, The Rack at 1602 S. Meridian and the Main Street Sports Bar in Mulvane.

The group has had 12 to 15 musicians float in and out of its lineup over the years, Mourning said, but he loves the current incarnation. Even though he’s been playing for decades, he said, he feels that he and his band mates get better all the time. Many other local musicians mentioned the Sleepy Truckers as their favorite longtime local band.

“I get such a charge when I get up there on stage,” Mourning said. “The first song is an ice breaker, and if people are screaming or yelling before that song, that’s like a bolt of lightning. That’s my job, and I do it well.”

This story was originally published July 17, 2015 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Thrill of the stage keeps longtime Wichita bands going (VIDEO)."