How a neglected alley became Kalamazoo’s midweek party

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Curtain Call — your front-row seat to the unique, lively, and memorable performances shaping Kalamazoo’s arts scene. Supported by the I.S. Gilmore Foundation, this series highlights the creativity and community that make each show something special.

It’s Kalamazoo’s alley, now.

Everyone’s invited to Beats on Bates, every Wednesday evening, from June to the end of September.

The youths of the Kalamazoo Academy of Rock were featured for BoB’s last Wednesday of July. KAR’s biggest fans, mostly parents and family, had their folding chairs set in front of the stage to support their budding musicians rocking the oldies. 

The patios near the stage were full, too. It was right at the start, 5:30 p.m.; surely I could find a spot, I’d thought. But I had to nab the remaining patio table at the HighDive, near the end of the alley, far from the stage.

KAR, a Kalamazoo institution since 2009 that teaches kids eight to 18 how to be a band, had three groups up that evening. (Read Second Wave’s December story on KAR.)

My wife and friends with normal jobs had yet to arrive, so I had to greedily hold that table and couldn’t leave. But I was hearing metal, thrashing metal, rocking metal coming from the first KAR band.

Is that “Enter Sandman” by Metallica? The vocals got growly — I couldn’t see the stage, but was picturing a 10-year-old releasing his inner metal demons. (Later, KAR director Jay Gavan says that one of their band directors, Jeff Hale, was on vocals. “This summer we had loads of musicians, 80, but not enough singers.”)

KAR covers the classics, dominated by the 20th Century, recognizable sounds for Boomers and Gen-Xers and aging Millennials. A variety, from the Rolling Stones to Prince.

But Beats on Bates’ weekly acts cover a wider variety, from the drag troupe Kzoo Kittens back in June, to Kalamazoo/Nashville country star Kyle Jennings this Aug. 5. Kandace DC Lavender will bring the hip-hop Aug. 16. MexiCuba will merge the traditions of Mexico and Cuba Sept. 16. There will be smooth R&B sax from SaxFifth Sept. 9, and blues from Out of Favor Boys Sept. 23. Kalamazoo institution, The Skeletones, will bring the funk and the party for the last Beats Sept. 30.

Latin, funk, blues, reggae, country, rock — BoB has had it, or will have it. (See the full schedule.” 

Build it, and they will come, for the party

The gang arrives; we order drinks and dinner. 

Friend Liz Barney talks about what used to be. Before BoB, there was Mixer on the Mall. A Wednesday after-work gathering with bands on the Kalamazoo Mall. She used to be a regular. 

The crowd was mainly Downtown professionals. Barney got tired of that scene. She repeatedly uses words like “lame” and “white-bread” to describe Mixer. Seems there were too many guys in ties.

“Can I quote you on that?” I ask.

“You can quote me!” Barney exclaims, stabbing her finger in the air.

BoB has a distinctly different party vibe. There aren’t just Downtown office workers here. People are coming in from the surrounding neighborhoods, Northside, Vine, Edison.

I leave the table, try to mingle. I see many faces I know. 

I ran into Eduardo Osorio and Roxanne Barry.

“We live in the neighborhood, so it’s nice to walk here,” Osorio says. 

“We walk everywhere,” Barry adds.

“It’s a nice way to celebrate getting through half the week,” she says

“The vibe is cool,” he says. And BoB seems to have spawned “an incredible growth in patios!” 

“This year, for some reason, it exploded,” Barry says. “It’s always been popular, but, like,” she gestures at the growing crowd, “it’s a party!”

BoB is a result of Downtown Kalamazoo’s placemaking efforts. 

Way back in 1959 when the Kalamazoo Mall opened, Kalamazoo was a pioneer in what is now a hip new urbanist trend of turning streets into low-traffic or no-traffic, people-centered places. As urbanist Fred Kent said, “If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places.” 

Bates used to be a dingy service alley, home to dumpsters and loading zones, a cut-through for drivers who wanted to get between Edwards and Portage Streets. The City put down a couple of bollards, a wavy blue paint job on the pavement, strung up lights, and erected a stage. It proved that if you build it, they will come, for the party.

Mayor of Downtown Entertainment

I move on to try to find Kimberly Guess. She’s the person in charge, I’m told. Finally, through a series of texts, she finds me back at the table, stuffing the HighDive’s salmon BLT into my face.

Mayor David Anderson has called her “the Mayor of Downtown Entertainment,” Guess says, but her official title is Coordinator of Downtown Kalamazoo Events and Programming.

Beats on Bates is now in its eighth year. This is Guess’ third year of running the event. 

She estimates the attendance has increased around 35% in the past few years. “It’s always a hodgepodge of people; you never know who you’re gonna get. And typically, on average, we’re getting about 800 to 900 people a week that kind of filter through the alley on Wednesdays. So it’s been really great for the community.”

Guess is a proud Kalamazooan. She grew up in the Northside Neighborhood, now lives Downtown. She co-founded The Xperience on Farmer’s Alley, an event center that also hosts public hip-hop, old-school funk and R&B nights. Guess is also director of Caribbean Fest. 

She started The Xperience in 2022 because “one of the biggest things that I saw was people that may or may not have felt comfortable enough coming Downtown, or feeling like they didn’t have anything, didn’t have a space.”

In the past, Guess occasionally attended BoB, mainly when reggae group Zion Lion played.  There wasn’t a lot of variety in the musical acts, nor in the cultures on the stage. When she got in charge, Guess brought in more genres out of Black, Latin, and other cultures, and added DJs to every BoB event.  She synced acts with that weekend’s festivals — LGBTQ during Pride, blues during Blues Fest, reggae for Caribbean Fest.

She noticed that people got into the BoB habit, coming down no matter what the band. 

KAR was playing a variety of rock that evening, she points out — “To see the same people come out this week that I saw last week for a funk band — to me, that’s just a beautiful sight to see. Where you see these people saying, ‘we don’t care what’s happening on Beats on Bates, we’re going.'”

Ultimately, it’s kinda boring when the same handful of genres, the same bands, are playing. “And when it’s boring, people don’t spend money, either. So the biggest thing that I’ve seen with the growth in Beats on Bates is the growth in revenue that these bars have on these Wednesdays. They increase 20% to 30%.” 

Guess notes that the only patio going at BoB’s start was that of Kalamazoo’s venerable The Green Top. Then others built patio decks on the alley. New bar/grills, Locals and Alley Cat, arrived. Benny DiCarta’s began selling giant pizza slices from their deck. Sit and Stay Winery built a deck for the vino enjoyers.

Guess feels that BoB has helped revitalize a new bar/dining scene in the area — it helped to normalize going Downtown on a weekday night.

And everybody was coming out to enjoy Downtown. “I have a heart for the city. And once I moved Downtown, I had a heart for Downtown to make sure that everybody’s voices were heard, everybody had a representation, everybody felt like they had somewhere to go,” she says.

“Cuz I mean — I love Downtown! I think it’s beautiful down here, to see people come down, with their kids… just feeling very comfortable to come and listen, to any and everybody,” she says.

“This is Kalamazoo”

Mixer on the Mall used to end by 7 p.m. Beats on Bates runs to 8:30 p.m., so as the sun dipped behind buildings, the crowd only grew, and grew into a festival-type atmosphere. The decks were full, but servers delivered drinks and food to people who carried it all to their lawn chairs set on the parking lot around the stage.

DJ Straka Flakka kept people moving between KAR bands. For the final KAR group, The 20th Century Band, the party got electrified as they covered Prince and the Revolution’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” with guitarist Alex Velo wailing on that final electric solo. 

Wow, “Crazy” was Prince’s breakthrough hit, back when I got my driver’s license in 1984. I think about how, when I was in the high school concert band, we’d often cover 1940s big band classics. So, “Same as it ever was,” as David Byrne once sang.

The 20th Century Band then went back further. Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, deep dives into the stax o’ wax.

High school girls singing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect?” That got older Black ladies in the audience up and moving. Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” had a grey-beard biker nodding. 

They covered The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the glorious girl-group slice of innocence and yearning from 1963. Two young men in the audience unabashedly danced as a couple, one giving the other an awkward twirl. 

“This is Kalamazoo,” Guess says. “If you wanna know what Kalamazoo looks like, this is what it looks like. On a Wednesday!”