Up close and personal, they way music should be.

By Randy Mason

“We’ve been friends forever,” Steve Tulipana says of his recordBar co-owner, Shawn Sherrill.

Both are veterans of bands including Shiner, Season to Risk and Roman Numerals that flirted with major label success on tours that took them to venues across the country.

“There was always a place that you couldn’t wait to get to because you knew they were going to take care of you. And they were all local joints. Like, the owner was bartending,” Shawn recalls. “We wanted to be that place in Kansas City.”

RecordBar opened its first iteration in 2005 in a strip mall on the edge of the Westport Entertainment District. 

The club served a mix of indie rock, metal and surprisingly good food well into the wee hours. Soon, promoters began to take notice, booking rising stars like The National, Mumford & Sons, St. Vincent and Lizzo into its crowded confines.

“We wanted to be artist-centric,” Shawn explains, noting that in music circles, “if you treat a band well … they get back to their booking agent and he knows he can send his other bands through KC.”

When their lease expired in 2015, the duo moved recordBar downtown, just a block from T-Mobile Center.

Apartment towers and new condos began popping up around them and the neighborhood was growing quickly. Then COVID arrived, wreaking havoc throughout the music industry.

Difficult as it was, Steve says the pandemic “actually gave us time to reassess what our strengths were and how to stay in business.”

Adversity also spurred recordBar to help create a new outdoor venue, Lemonade Park. In fact, its genesis reveals a great deal about the close-knit nature of KC’s music scene.

Wes Gartner worked at the original recordBar and played in local bands. He now owns Voltaire, a restaurant in the West Bottoms. In 2020, Wes proposed transforming a vacant lot behind Voltaire into a place where socially distanced audiences could gather safely to hear live music.

Steve brought the sound gear and his booking acumen, the city gave its blessing, groups played and people came. Now, Lemonade Park is poised to enter its fourth year as a concert venue.

There’s one other part of this musical equation: miniBar in Midtown. Shawn and Steve added it to their portfolio in 2012. Opened as a low-key lounge featuring craft cocktails, miniBar has focused more and more on music. Punk rock shows upstairs have been particularly attractive to bands from near and far.

“The KC region is perfectly placed,” Steve insists. “We’re right in the middle of the country, so it’s easy to route tours through here.”

MiniBar’s second floor only seats 100 people, and while recordBar is considerably bigger, the mission of both, they say, is much the same. As Steve puts it, “You might see the same band in New York or Chicago with seven times as many people.”

Shawn adds, “Any time you walk in, you’re going to see something different and something curated. Whether it’s hip hop or comedy or whatever, we try to keep things at a certain level of quality.”