Wichita’s Kirby’s Beer Store celebrates 50 years of live music, cold beer, tight quarters
It’s not quite a college bar but not quite a local bar.
It’s one of Wichita’s hottest venues for live music even though a typical band would take up about 15% of the building’s legal capacity.
It’s a veritable time capsule, with every wall and even the ceiling plastered with nicotine-stained band posters, yellowing customer artwork, bumper stickers and undergarments collected and tacked up by generations worth of regulars.
And somehow, Kirby’s Beer Store — the legendary 600-square-foot joint that sits adjacent to the Wichita State University campus at 17th and Holyoke — has managed to survive for 50 years.
This weekend, the owners of Kirby’s will launch a series of concerts meant to honor the iconic Wichita bar, which despite its extra tight quarters has long been one of the city’s top draws for anti-establishment types, music and art lovers, and (interestingly) faculty from WSU’s geology department.
By their calculations — and by the memory of bar founder Jim Kirby — Kirby’s turns 50 this year, and owners Alex Thomas and Ryan and Tanisha Bell are marking the milestone by inviting local bands who got their starts on Kirby’s corner stage to return. The shows start on Friday with an appearance by Easy Killer and continue weekly through the summer, culminating in a big all-day party with 12 bands on July 23. Among the already-announced acts who will appear as part of the “Half Century Concert Series,” which will take place on the bar’s recently upgraded patio: Scroat Belly, The Travel Guide and Josue Estrada Band.
Though the bar has adopted many personalities over the years, it has always been a place where Wichitans could hang out and enjoy a cold beer and a conversation, said Thomas, who owns several entertainment venues in town including The Cotillion and Lava & Tonic.
It’s also always been a place where people could see live music, a trend that started when founder Kirby would put singer/songwriters on stage with their acoustic guitars and that has continued to the present day, when the bar offers live music from all genres almost nightly. The owners say as many 75 acts a month perform at Kirby’s.
“It is absolutely the epicenter,” Thomas said. “If people haven’t visited Kirby’s to see a band, they’re really not a music fan. And if you’re in a band that hasn’t played at Kirby’s, you really haven’t paid your dues. And that’s just the way it is.”
‘A big family’
Jim Kirby was in his mid-20s, he says, when a tavern near the WSU campus came up for sale. He’d become a fan of neighborhood bars owned by people like Gary Cocking, the longtime owner of Harry’s Uptown Bar & Grill who also had places like The Embers and Nirt & Girty’s. Some of Kirby’s favorites were places such as A Blackout at 2930 E. 21st St. and The Office Lounge at 1710 E. Morris.
He bought the tiny bar and quickly drew a diverse crowd, he said.
“The interesting thing about that place was you had neighborhood people that would drop in, students that would drop in and professors who came in,” he said. “Some came once a day. Some came twice a day. Some people would come and stay all day if they lived in the neighborhood.”
Kirby took out silly ads in The Sunflower, the campus newspaper, to promote the bar, and the college crowd grew. Kirby’s was especially popular with professors and students from the English, psychology and geology departments at WSU. Kirby remembers finding some graffiti on the bathroom wall that read, “My gosh, what am I doing in here? I should be studying for finals.” Underneath it was another scrawling: “What about me? I should be grading papers.”
He instituted a trivia night and entered a softball team made up of regulars into the local “beer leagues.” He offered free lunch on Saturdays and sold “what do you expect for a dime?” coffee.
In 1979, Kirby decided to move to Seattle, where his father had a job with Boeing. Kirby is 75 now and still lives there, but he says he still has fond memories of Kirby’s. He visited when he was back in town a few years ago and found it mostly unchanged.
“It was a really great crowd. It was diverse, but they all got along. It was like a big family,” he said. “It was a nice place that was comfortable to be in, and you never knew what to expect.”
Kirby sold the bar to a group of geology professors that included John McKinley, and they ran the place until Wichita artist Richard Davies and his partner Mark Munzinger bought it in 1984.
Davies remembers that when he took over Kirby’s, it needed some deep cleaning. By that time, the tradition of covering every surface with posters and other decor had taken hold, and he carefully pulled down years worth of nicotine-stained posters, scrubbed the ceiling and then returned the important posters to their places. Some of them are still there today.
Local promoter Jake Euker, who died in 2012, took over the musical bookings while Davies had the bar, he said, and Euker managed to bring in big-name acts — bands like Yo La Tengo, Cherubs, Steel Pole Bath Tub, The Mekons and Ethyl Meatplow. Davies remembers that one Wednesday night, a band called Superchunk played at Kirby’s, and on Friday of that week, he saw them on “The David Letterman Show.”
Back then, Davies said, the bar would offer bands $35, free beer all night and whatever was collected in a tip bucket that was passed around during the shows. Kirby’s earned a reputation among musicians, most of whom considered this a good deal.
“Once you get one amazing band, then other amazing bands talk to each other and say, ‘Oh, you went there?’ It’s great,’” Davies said.
In 1993, Davies sold the bar to Steve Schroeder, who kept Kirby’s going — preserving its quirky character and reputation for live music — until his death in 2008. The bar closed briefly, and regulars panicked. Several potential owners wanted to buy the place, but Thomas got it later that year.
The bar was special to Thomas, whose band O’Phil had made the bar’s stage its home base during the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of the other bidders for the bar was Ryan Bell, a longtime devotee of alternative music who had discovered Kirby’s by accident when one of his favorite bands was playing there. He had no idea the bar existed before but fell in love with the place.
When Thomas got bogged down with his new businesses in 2018, he brought on Ryan and Tanisha as partners. Now, Ryan handles the day-to-day operation of the bar.
The more things change...
Kirby’s is so special, Thomas said, that several years ago, he was inspired to start gathering footage for a documentary about the place. He’s so far collected hours of footage of regulars talking about what the bar has meant to them and to Wichita, and he was able to film Jim Kirby’s remembrances, too.
COVID-19 interrupted the project, but Thomas still plans to finish it and will include footage taken by photographer and Kirby’s regular Randall Parker in the 1970s of beer league softball games and a wild Halloween party inside the bar.
Preserving the spirit of Kirby’s is also important to Thomas, and he said he quickly learned how important it was to his customers. Longtime Kirby-ites, as they’re known, don’t like changes and aren’t afraid to let him know.
But a few changes were necessitated by COVID-19, which was a tough time for Kirby’s. The bar was shut down for months because of mandated closures, though customers continued to stop in for beer to go.
Even once the shutdowns were over, though, it took a while for Kirby’s — the Wichita bar where social distancing is probably the least possible — to adjust. Indoor shows were stopped entirely for a while, and the owners started to rely more on the bar’s outdoor stage, which was added onto a section of parking lot up the stairs from Kirby’s entrance after Wichita adopted a smoking ban in 2010.
The most dramatic move the owners made post-COVID, though, was adding a retractable garage door to the front of the bar to help with air circulation. They carefully removed the longtime front window, which over the years had become completely covered with band stickers, and installed it behind the stage on the outdoor bar. The new door floods the once dark room with light.
Bell said he loves running the bar and is proud of the fact that Kirby’s is such an integral part of Wichita’s culture. He loves to tell about the time Red Hot Chili Peppers member Anthony Kiedis gave Kirby’s a shout out from the stage when performing at Intrust Bank Arena in 2017, saying he once played on the Kirby’s stage when he was just starting out.
The bar is still a place where local bands can learn to play in front of an audience, and the owners say they like watching musicians eventually grow out of the venue. Among the local legends that graced Kirby’s stage during their early days are bands like Split Lip Rayfield, The Calamity Cubes, Carrie Nation and the Speakeasy, and Spirit of the Stairs, Thomas said.
“The thing about this place is that it is kind of genre agnostic and is a place for bands to cut their teeth and learn how to play in front of people,” Thomas said. “And this is the place that will accept a lot of bands that other places won’t.”
Some bands, Thomas said, draw weeknight crowds of eight people — but because the room is so small, it doesn’t feel empty. Some bands will draw crowds big enough that it’s impossible to move inside the bar and the tables will have to be relocated to the parking lot. It’s a running joke at Kirby’s that the tables being moved means a show is a success.
Some bands arrive at Kirby’s and are visibly shocked by how small it is, Ryan Bell said, but most get over it once the crowd shows up. They say they feel like they’re playing in their living rooms, and they’ll often stay after the gig to have a beer with audience members.
Many music fans also say they love the proximity they can get to the musicians, Bell said.
“Where else can you get this close?” he said. “There’s not a lot between you and the band. If you love bands and music, you don’t want to be 500 feet away from the band. You want to be five feet from the band. That’s what I love about this place.”
This story was originally published May 19, 2022 at 11:59 AM.
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