The Kent Stage: Ten Years After
Venerable music venue celebrates 10th anniversary
By David Budin
The late-’60s British blues-rock band Ten Years After hasn’t played the Kent Stage, but many of their contemporaries have — along with a lot of other nationally and internationally known blues, rock and, especially, folk artists. The Kent Stage, in Kent, Ohio, is a great place to see a show and a great place to perform. I’ve done both there.
The 642-seat former Vaudeville house, built in 1927, which then served as a movie theater for decades, now offers mostly music, much of it folk or folk-related, but also rock and other genres.
The list of more than 200 national acts who have played the Kent Stage includes Travis Tritt, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, the Avett Brothers, The Wailers, Stephen Stills , Rosanne Cash, Ani DiFranco, Arlo Guthrie, Bo Diddley, Glen Campbell, Judy Collins, Leon Russell, Marty Stuart, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lisa Loeb, Little Feat, Livingston Taylor, Loudon Wainwright III, Steve Earle, the Shirelles, the Coasters, Peter and Gordon, and Chad and Jeremy.
This month the venue celebrates its 10th anniversary as the Kent Stage. Operated by the Western Reserve Folk Arts Association, the Kent Stage has injected more than $8.5 million dollars into the local economy of Kent and surrounding communities. According to the Kent Stage website, area hotels, restaurants, bars and retail stores report significant increases on evenings of concerts at the Kent Stage, and more than 10 major businesses and developments have either opened or are underway in that area, including West River Medical Center, the McKay Bricker/Black Squirrel Gallery, the Kent State Art Gallery, Acorn Alley, KSU Hotel & Conference Center, PARTA Multi-Model, and the Portage County Court.
We recently talked to the Kent Stage’s Tom Simpson about the venue, highlights from the past 10 years, and his vision for the future.
Cool Cleveland: Let’s start at the beginning, with an obvious question: How did it begin?
Tom Simpson: We started the Western Reserve Folk Arts Association back in 2000. We had already done a couple of folk festivals at Case-Barlow Farm in Hudson.
Why did you start the organization in the first place?
We were involved with the student-run Kent State Folk Festival and most of the people who got together with Western Reserve [Folk Arts Alliance] had been Kent State alums, and a couple others were just into folk music and saw an opportunity to do some other folk activities in Northeast Ohio during the summer.
The Folk Festival at Kent State had evolved and de-evolved and changed and was becoming something different. So we took it in another direction, started doing some different things. The funding of the Folk Festival had shifted from student activity fees to WKSU running it, and they started doing the Kent State Folk Festival in Akron and Cleveland and other places and had one activity at Kent State, but none in town.
The Community Development Director [of Kent] got to know me and we hooked up with the people who ran this theater – it was running as a dollar theater at that time, and about to go out of business. They wanted out and they convinced us and a few other people that there should be activities in Kent and we decided we could do some folky stuff here.
You’ve said “we” a few times. Who else was involved?
Mike O’Neal, Andy Malitz, Greg Janneck, those are who I started out with. And there was a whole gang of other people who were supporting and helping out and making things happen – you know how the folk community is – like Richele Charlton, who happens to be my wife; she and I run the day-to-day here, still. Too many people think that it’s all me. I might be the guy who books shows and organizes things, but there are a whole lot of other folks who make it happen.
And are there volunteers who help out, too?
There are. Quite a few. There are probably 20 in our core group. They come from all over.
What do they do?
They do everything. They work the concessions and bar. And some nights that’s what pays the bill. They keep everything clean, they fix seats when they break. There’s one guy who spends every Sunday here changing the marquee – I used to be the marquee guy, and he’s my favorite volunteer. They fix toilets, work on the roof, paint, take out the recycling. A couple of weeks ago we turned an old storage room into a production office. And under the stage was an empty room that we turned into a catering space. All with volunteers.
So, did this whole project start with you just being a folk music fan, or was it something else?
When I worked at Kent State, I was the advisor for the student group that put on the Folk Festival, so I was quite involved with that. And also, music had become so screwed up, homogenized, commercialized. You know what popular music had become – somewhere between disgusting and pathetic. And it seemed like folk music was still real music. There weren’t harmonizers and pitch-correctors and auto tune. We got together and decided to do a folk festival, or two.
So you had this theater. Did it need a lot of work before you could put on shows there?
Well, when we walked in, it was a functioning movie theater – we were here for the last night of the movies …
What was the last movie?
It was The Buena Vista Social Club. And we had [regional musician] John Mosey out in the lobby playing folk music, as a transitioning kind of thing. And about 10 people came, which was about normal for a movie night here. Except for Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is what kept the place alive for years and years.
It was two theaters when we got it, and after consulting with a few of the [artists’] agents I know, we decided that we needed to have one big room, rather than two small rooms. So we had to tear down the wall between the theaters, take out a bunch of seats, put seats back in. The air-handling units were all sitting on the stage and we had to relocate all of that, and put new electric in. The dressing rooms had been used for storage for about 50 or 60 or 70 years, so we had to do a ton of work there, just to get the backstage functioning. And there were no curtains on stage, no sound, no lights, the stage was too small. So we did an awful lot of work in 30 days.
Where did the funding come from? The city?
No, the city didn’t give us any money. The former lease-holders gave us a donation, which is what we used to make the changeover.
What was their interest in it?
They had a long-term lease with the building, and they also owned, and still own, Kent Cinemas and Plaza Cinemas, so they wanted to consolidate their movie facilities into one place and upgrade that and get out of this one, which was costing them lots of money. So that was their motivation. Plus they liked the concept.
Who owns the building now?
It’s owned by a group of us called Kent Stage Properties.
What was the first event you held when you reopened the place?
It was Merle Mollenkopf, a Kent poet; Hal Walker [a Kent-based folk musician]; and Lucy Kaplansky [a nationally known singer-songwriter]. That was on March 21st in 2002.
Did people show up for that?
Yes, they did. We did okay.
Enough to make you want to keep going.
Yeah. And we had a multi-year lease. You make a commitment and you’ve got to do your best to make it happen. It’s still a struggle, to this day.
Have there been worse times and better times?
Oh, sure. We’re doing way better now than ever. The last three years have been our best three years, and each has been progressively better. The first year we did about 40 shows, this year we’ll do 150 or 160 shows this year. It’s like, “Well, hell, we’ve got this place; we might as well be open and doing stuff.”
And it takes time, I guess, for word to spread – and especially since you’re not in the middle of some place like Cleveland Heights, where there are already a lot of folk fans. People [from the Cleveland area] just have to go to Kent once to see that it’s not really that far away, and then they’ll keep going, theoretically.
Well, back when I was a young fella, in the ’70s, Kent had quite the music scene. That’s when you’d go see Devo play, and [Joe] Walsh play with the Measles, and those kinds of things. And back then it was not uncommon for people to come from other towns to hear music. Today, Kent’s still kind of far away for some people, but in reality, it’s easier to get to now than it ever was, with all the Interstates.
And people do come from all over. People have come here from about 38 states, and different countries. We had this group YOSO here – members of Yes and Toto – and there were two women who flew from Japan to come to the show. When you present unique shows – things that aren’t playing every day of the week somewhere – people will travel to see them.
Plus, two blocks away is the university – with 25,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff members. So we might not be in Cleveland Heights, but we’re in the middle of a whole lot of people.
So, speaking of the students, I know you’ve diversified lately, musically, but do a lot of students come to the Kent Stage?
Well, that’s part of our goal. We never excluded anyone from coming to the Kent Stage, intentionally; we just picked folk and other kinds of music because that’s how we got started. Certain folk acts would always bring students in, like Greg Brown, and Donna the Buffalo, but for a lot of others, hardly any students would come. So we sat down and took a look at things and realized that there are 25,000 students two blocks away and if we could have events that appealed to more than 50 of them, that would be a smart thing to do. And we started to do that. Like, Ralphy May, the comedian, is coming here.
I know the Kent Stage hosts various benefits for groups. What else happens there?
There are also outside groups who come in and rent the theater for concerts, so not everything you see happening here is Western Reserve Folk Arts Association.
But you benefit from it.
Yes, those are some of the things that help keep the place alive.
And there’s the Kent State Folk Festival – you’ve been involved with that since you opened, right?
Yes. The Folk Festival was the impetus for us to open the Kent Stage.
And now a lot of the Folk Festival events happen on the Kent Stage.
Most of the Festival’s main events are put on by the Western Reserve Folk Arts Association – funded and produced by us, working in partnership with the Folk Festival in promoting them.
And, by the way, one of the other things that we thought was important when we started out is that WKSU is right up the street from us, with their tremendous history of playing folk music. And that became an informal partnership, where we have worked together to make things happen.
For the past few years, you’ve been booking more rock, and all kinds of things, other than folk, like the ‘60s rock groups. Are there more changes on the horizon? What does the future look like there?
The future that we envision at the Kent Stage is a nice mixture of all different kinds of folk music and bluegrass music and Americana, for everybody from 8 to 80. We do the Blues Festival, and we’ll throw some rock acts in once in a while, some older rock groups, and continue to appeal to the students.
I’m guessing that someone who was in on this with you at the beginning was a performer at one time, because the backstage area is probably the nicest I’ve ever seen – and I’ve been performing for a very long time.
No, no performers.
Oh, well, maybe that’s why – it was people who didn’t really know what normal backstages are like – how terrible they usually are: cold and dirty and bare, an empty room with a couple of folding chairs.
No – I’d been in a lot of backstages, and I hated how most of them were.
Yours has comfortable chairs and couches, a nice rug, snacks, all kinds of tea, actual dressing rooms, a bathroom…
We had a few dollars one day, early on, because Ani DiFranco had played here, and we found a sale and bought those couches. We try to make it as nice as it can be.
Well, it makes a difference when you’re performing. And it’s not just that it’s more comfortable, physically, but it shows that the venue actually cares about the performers.
Yes. We try to do the best we can because we know our limitations. And we’re still trying to improve everything.
The Kent Stage is located at 175 East Main Street in downtown Kent, Ohio. There is free parking behind the theater and on all city streets. Tickets are available at http://TheKentStage.com or 888-718-4253. For more information, email wrfaa@yahoo.com or call 330-677-5005.
David Budin is a freelance writer and a folk and rock musician, whose folk group, Long Road, performs occasionally. He is a former editor of Northern Ohio Live and Cleveland Magazine. His writing focuses on the arts and pop culture, focusing on pop music history and food. He is currently writing a music history and food book titled Kitchen Counter Culture.Kent, OH 44240