A photo of the back door to the Western Jubilee Theater provided the cover for the CD “Warehouse Tracks: Ten Years.”
Covert warehouse became perfect place to host hush-hush concerts by renowned cowboy musicians
By BILL REED
2008-02-17 01:25:00
THE GAZETTE
It all begins with the Thursday-night ritual.
There’s no rush, they’ve been at this for nearly 15 years. Scott O’Malley and his pal Don Kallaus tug on beers as O’Malley burns one cigarette after another, the smoke drifting lazily around him.
“Where’d we leave off last week?” O’Malley asks finally, and both men look around to jog their memories. In the silence, a train whistle blows long and lonely.
They’re looking at a centuryold railroad storage warehouse built on a spur near the Denver & Santa Fe Railway Co. depot and freight yard. When they found it, it was little more than a windbreak for hobos.
Slowly, painstakingly, Thursday night by Thursday night, they’ve transformed a pile of weathered wood into the Western Jubilee Warehouse Theater — occupancy 168 — and carved out space for one of the most delightful and worst-kept secrets in Colorado Springs.
Every few months, music fans descend on Cucharras Street where it dead ends into the railroad tracks, slipping through an open gate and down a dark alleyway. Just past a 1949 flatbed truck, they duck into an unmarked door and disappear into this storehouse of musical memories.
The warehouse is connected to O’Malley’s real work, the offices for Scott O’Malley & Associates artist representation and Western Jubilee Recording Co. That’s where he tends the business for names such as guitar legend Norman Blake and Flash Cadillac, and sells albums for cowboy artists such as Don Edwards and Waddie Mitchell.
But the warehouse is not his office, it is his clubhouse. And it is a treasure trove of Americana and arcana, filled to the rafters with cultural artifacts.
Edwards (if you’re not a Western music fan, you might know his face from the role of Smokey in “The Horse Whisperer”) inspired him to turn the warehouse into a concert hall.
“Don was here and he came out here and started singing. And I thought, ‘this room sounds good,’” O’Malley said. “When Norman (Blake) came out here and he loved the sound, too, I knew we were on to something, because he’s ‘The Ear.’”
Edwards performed the first show in the Warehouse on May 13, 1996. Since then, there have been more than 75 invitationonly concerts, mostly by artists on O’Malley’s roster who stop in for fun, friendship and gas money as they pass through.
The Warehouse has also hosted recording sessions for several great albums, artists craving its ambience and acoustics.
O’Malley is a compact man, his face framed by longish white hair and a white beard. He is a sly poet, a man who is quiet but not shy, allowing room for others to prove themselves friend or fool. He’s the perfect guy to sit on a good secret.
But after a decade of hushhush concerts, O’Malley’s gone and let the word out with his latest album on the Western Jubilee label, “Warehouse Tracks: Ten Years.”
“Thanks for comin’. This is our secret concert series,” O’Malley said to the crowd on a cold January night, warmth emanating from glowing space heaters on the ceiling.
He introduced the sold-out show by Cowboy Celtic and the motto of his clubhouse: “It’s all about friends playing music for friends.”
Listeners provide their own beer or wine with plastic cups, tucking coolers beneath the plush theater seats. One fan delivered his home-brew to the green room.
The setting seemed to tear down the wall between the artists and the audience.
Cowboy Celtic filled the cozy room with a bonanza of string sounds from the harp, mandolin, guitar and fiddle, the band connecting the dots of the long, strange trip of Irish melodies as they migrated to the American West and acquired lyrics about coyotes and tumbleweed.
“We just love this place and we love coming down here,” Cowboy Celtic lead singer Denise Withnell gushed from the stage.
The Western Jubilee Warehouse worked its usual magic.
“When somebody discovers it, they want to tell their best friend about it,” said Kathleen Fox Collins, O’Malley’s business partner and longtime local champion of symphonic, operatic and cowboy music. “No matter how much of a secret it is, we always see new faces. It’s music by friends for friends . . . and friends of friends.”
“We come all the time,” said Glenn Swan of Colorado Springs. “It’s like having a jam session in your own living room. I think the artists let their guard down a little bit.”
A.T. Tapper started coming to concerts with her husband, Red, who heard about the Western Jubilee Warehouse from a friend at a Western clothing store.
“If you were going to do something the cowboy way, I think this is the way you’d do it,” said Tapper of Chipita Park. “(Red) wasn’t a fan of the Pikes Peak Center, but this was just his speed.”
Her husband died a few months ago, but she still comes to the Warehouse. She’s not just keeping her husband’s memory alive, but the music and lifestyle he cherished.
“I admire Scott for trying to keep alive the old cowboy music and traditions,” she said. “Though he has his finger in many pies, I think that’s his major contribution.”
Crowds at the Western Jubilee Warehouse come face to face with roots-music history.
They’ve seen cowboy singer Don Edwards and bluegrasser Peter Rowan together, about the time they came to the Warehouse to record “High Lonesome Cowboy,” a collaboration nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.
They’ve seen John McEuen and Jim Ibbotson several times, two parts of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Their 1972 roots project, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” sold millions of copies and introduced country rockers to their forefathers.
And one of the elite players on that album was Norman Blake, another frequent visitor to the Western Jubilee Warehouse. Part of June Carter’s road band, in the house band on Johnny Cash’s TV show, and on Bob Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” album, Blake is a guitarist who has impressed anyone who knows anything.
He was part of the roots revival in the 1970s with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and then a generation later as one of the main collaborators on the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack.
“Norman is a true hero,” music producer T Bone Burnett told Acoustic Guitar magazine. “He’s one of a handful of the best acoustic guitar players in the world.”
His music doesn’t change much, but it seems the rest of the world stops by his front porch to listen in every now and again. Or they stop by the Western Jubilee Warehouse.
The Western Jubilee Warehouse Theater is unlike any venue you’ve walked into. The floor is jammed full of 1950s seats from a movie theater in Florence — well-aged bubble gum still stuck to the bottoms.
The wall behind the stage is covered by quilts, with yellowed college pennants hanging overhead that look as if they might turn to dust and rain down. Cast-off guitars, mandolins and autoharps hang on the walls, their yawning mouths looking hungry for their long-lost strings. And old metal signs run the distance of the place, advertising everything from burlesque shows to Dad’s Root Beer.
Kallaus and O’Malley built an extension they call the Santa Fe Room, an homage to the history of this place, with a ticket counter they saved from an 1887 Kansas train depot hours before the wrecking ball arrived. Out of sight are drawers stuffed with O’Malley’s many collections, a room dedicated to his grandpa’s train set, and a workshop that holds audio master tapes next to old baseball gloves.
“The only thing new that I buy is my food,” O’Malley said. “I try to never do anything current or popular.”
O’Malley doesn’t know when his desire to save things started. His brother is a historian. His mother collects antiques, and he was allowed to handle her treasures at a young age because he always valued old things.
“It’s a disease, you know,” he said. “That’s a disease I’ve had my whole life, collecting things. And I don’t necessarily recommend it.”
But music is his passion and he was doing it professionally at an age when most kids are shuffling through high school hallways. He started off singing The Everly Brothers and folk tunes as a teenager in Indiana, slept on the beach at the Newport Folk Festival the year Bob Dylan went electric, and ended up founding the Buffalo Brothers Wild West Show.
After the rigors of national touring, the three lead singers found themselves single men again. So they left their 12-piece band behind, headed west to Colorado Springs in 1975, and founded a sound that O’Malley describes as “mountain man meets cowboy, and gospel, and folk, and country, and rock ’n’ roll.”
They started selling out local clubs, played the 4th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival, toured with Pure Prairie League, got signed to the Stone County artist roster, and ended up touring nationally supporting The Dillards and John Hartford and once opening for Bob Hope. When the run finally ended, O’Malley headed back to the Springs.
O’Malley is that rare performer who made a graceful transition from being onstage to being behind the stage. He became an agent for Stone County, representing the likes of Blake, Flash Cadillac, New Grass Revival, Hot Rize, Hartford and Bryan Bowers.
“Now I wasn’t having to sell myself, but I was representing my heroes. It was like a dream come true,” he said. “I’m really content being in the fine print at the back of the deal.”
He also got a second chance at being a family man, remarried, had three kids and settled in.
After Stone County left Colorado, he worked awhile for Windham Hill artists such as George Winston.
But his heart wasn’t in the New Age, so he started Scott O’Malley & Associates in 1982 to focus on the old age, and longtime partners such as Blake, Flash Cadillac and Bowers came with him. His speciality is finding successful niches for artists who aren’t eager to swim in the mainstream.
It was the early ’90s when O’Malley got into the cowboymusic scene. He was a willing ear when a few cowboys waltzed into his life; and they were drawn to his reputation as a straight shooter.
Cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell called O’Malley to tell him he was signed with Warner Bros. Records and he wasn’t happy. O’Malley flew to Santa Rosa, Calif., to see him perform. Mitchell showed up with friends Edwards and the Sons of the San Joaquin.
“I heard this marvelous package of Western music and I fell for it big time,” O’Malley said. “We just decided we’d shake hands and grow old together.”
He’s still in love. He created the Western Jubilee Recording Co. as a platform for his cowboys. O’Malley and Collins are even partners in founding the Ride for the Brand Ranch Rodeo, an old-fashioned rodeo for full-time working cowboys that Mitchell emcees on horseback each July.
“We try to capture the magic as opposed to creating the magic. That only works if you have guys good enough that you don’t have to stack it, and track it, and gloss it,” O’Malley said.
Western Jubilee has quickly become a leader in the traditional cowboy sound, capturing two Grammy nominations and seven Wrangler Awards — given out by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, it is the most coveted award in the genre.
“It’s forever. The music is forever,” O’Malley said.
And the Western Jubilee Warehouse, where his artists record albums and play gigs, just happens to be the perfect place for all the stuff he collects. To preserve forever.
O’Malley carries cards in his wallet with tiny numbers aligned in neat rows — his cheat sheets for the numbers he needs to complete his 1950s baseball card sets, or his 1910 T-29 animal cards, or his ’50s and ’60s exhibit cards, or his rare book series. A $100 bill is folded between the cards because he can’t bear the thought of finding a treasure and not having cash to buy it.
“Anything that’s numbered in a series and old, I just . . .” O’Malley trails off. The end of that sentence is made obvious by the contents of his wallet.
His pal Kallaus defends his impulses. “It’s America being discarded,” he said. “There is so much culture in this stuff.”
It goes a little deeper than just collecting stuff. Besides being a teller of tales and a maker of music, O’Malley is a saver of endangered things.
Here O’Malley is, in a city that is seeing its traditions disappear beneath the New West. He looks out his window and mourns as they tear up railroad track for salvage.
“This was an important hub in the early history of Colorado Springs,” he said. “I watched the end of an era out my window.”
He has saved an old railroad warehouse and filled it with cool old stuff headed for the scrap heap. And he uses it to save a dying way of life and the cowboy music that gives it its rhythm.
Once the applause has died away, and the crowd is gone, and the lights are turned off, the warehouse turns back into a private clubhouse. O’Malley and Kallaus maintain the Thursday night ritual that built this place.
“We’ve pretty much pounded every nail in this building together, and we’re probably not done,” O’Malley said.
Kallaus takes another sip of beer. “I hope not.”
ALBUMS RECORDED AT THE THEATER
- “Warehouse Tracks: Ten Years,” various artists
- “Moonlight and Skies,” Don Edwards (half the tracks), 2006 Wrangler Award for Outstanding Traditional Western Recording
- “Christmas Trail,” various artists
- “High Lonesome Cowboy,” Peter Rowan and Don Edwards, Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Folk Album
- “Sing One for the Cowboy,” Sons of the San Joaquin, 2001 Wrangler Award for Outstanding Original Composition
- “Waddie Live,” Waddie Mitchell
- “Be Ready Boys,” Norman Blake and Rich O’Brien
- “Last of the Troubadours: Saddle Songs II,” Don Edwards, 2003 Wrangler Award, Outstanding Original Composition
- “Cowboy Girl,” Katy Moffatt
- “The Morning Glory Ramblers,” Norman and Nancy Blake, 2004 Grammy nomination Best Traditional Folk Album
- “Back Home in Sulphur Springs,” Norman and Nancy Blake
- “Mason & Hundt,” John-Alex Mason
- “Malcolm Lucard,” Malcolm Lucard |
