Reported by Bill Kelly, STATEWIDE Correspondent


Nothing distinctive about the Zoo Bar from the street. It's like a thousand other downtown bars around the Midwest. It is, of course, the music that made this dark and narrow hall a legend. On a good night, it can be very soulful. It can be electric. And it can get kind of wild.
[Larry Boehmer] "A good night is when we've got 150 people or so. Nice crowd. The band is at their peak. There's an interchange of energy between the performer and the audience. That's when it's really happening. When an audience is really glued into what the band is doing and vice versa. There's a magic. There's a kind of magic to the whole event."
Larry Boehmer presides over the bar he created 25 years ago, near record longevity in a business famous for its blazing fads and fast burnouts. You didn't think you would make it 25 years.
[Boehmer] "Oh, no. No, not at all. I didn't plan to be here this long."
What kept you here this long?
[Boehmer] "I think I'm having fun doing this. You know, I like what I'm doing. I just didn't think it would last this long."
The musicians who play the Zoo, the ones out on the circuit like Kenny Neal, understand that having a blues bar survive and come as close to prosperity as the genre allows is a remarkable thing.
[Kenny Neal] "Having a blues bar that long and surviving is pretty good. I mean, you know, having seen a lot of them come and go across the country and for him to still be there, he's got my support."
[Boehmer] "It's not difficult to keep music in here every night of the week. It's difficult to find the right bands that are going to draw people every night of the week. You know, it really only took maybe a year of booking some national acts before we were on the map."
Before getting on the map, the Zoo started out with nothing more than a really good jukebox. Larry Boehmer, still a graduate art student at the University of Nebraska, talked the owners at the time into putting records he liked into the jukebox in exchange for bringing in his friends regularly. Later he booked a band for the Zoo's owners and then another. Well, the second wasn't quite an honest to goodness booking. A soon-to-be blues legend named Luther Allison was performing on campus but it was an exclusive contract that kept Luther from playing anywhere else in town that weekend.
[Boehmer] "So I went to the show and wandered back into the dressing room and there was Luther. Nobody stopped me. I introduced myself and said, what are you doing tomorrow night? Nothing. I got a little club two blocks from where we are right now. You want to play?"
Snuck him in the back door.
[Boehmer] "Just like that."
Once Larry Boehmer took over the Zoo Bar, word got around among musicians that this artist in Nebraska ran a very cool place to play the blues.
[Boehmer] "You book one Chicago band, they come out and have a great band. They go back and tell the other blues musicians in Chicago and they start calling. It's not like we have to search for bands. What we have to do is turn down a lot of the bands that aren't going to work for us."
The Zoo became something of a shrine.
[Boehmer] "Actually there's some Chicago ones here. There's Magic Slim and Lonnie Brooks. Bob Riedy, one of the first blues bands we ever brought in."
A place where blues players didn't just want to play. It was someplace where they had to play.
[Boehmer] "Musicians walked into a place like the Zoo and they look around at the old posters, they see the performers that have been here in the past and for one, it kind of gives them a mark that they have to try to attain. If they see that Gate Mouth Brown has played here and Son Seals and Buddy Guy, it's like wow, I'm going to have to play well."
It really makes a difference?
[Boehmer] "Sure, sure. You go into a venue that doesn't have any of these posters up, that maybe is just starting blues, there's no standard. Your show, it probably doesn't matter how well you play. It's going to be new to that particular audience and you can fool them."
[Lil' Ed] "You walk in and go I'm going to have some fun here tonight."
Lil' Ed echoes what's felt by a lot of musicians.
[Lil' Ed] "That place has a feel for the blues. The more blues he put in there, t the better it's going to feel every time you go in there."
It is not a simple thing to get a booking at the Zoo. First of all Larry Boehmer has to like your music. After that --
What do you listen for?
[Boehmer] "The sound. I listen to see if it's played properly and secondly, the showmanship. I mean it takes more than just a sound to draw a crowd. If a band is really visual as well as being good players, then that's what I look for."
Sonny Rhodes is a good example. As fine a steel guitar player as you will find anywhere but also unforgettable in costume jewelry, orange shirt, bright purple jacket, and turban on top.
[Sonny Rhodes] "The turbine is nonreligious, nonpolitical. Since I am a self-proclaimed disciple of the blues, I said to myself one day, now what would a disciple of the blues look like and this was my idea."
A colorful performer, a solid player and even Sonny Rhodes found it tough to get booked in Lincoln, Nebraska.
[Rhodes] "I had known about the Zoo Bar when I lived out in California, and I tried very unsuccessfully there for about 20 years to get to play out there. 20 some years later, we got this opportunity to play one night at the Zoo Bar and apparently everybody was overwhelmed just as much as we were to be able to get there after all these many years. That was a lot of fun. All the people said where have you been?"
There is something else you commonly hear from performers who have a good night at the Zoo. This audience, this Nebraska state capital audience of college professors, bureaucrats, artists, a few random bar flies, this is a remarkably sophisticated audience.
[Boehmer] "Like James Harman once said, it doesn't matter what they think of my songs in L.A. or New York, he says the Zoo Bar in Lincoln has a whole different standard. If it flies at the Zoo, then I know I've got a good song."
But James Harman has played at the Zoo enough to know the reason people have returned to the Zoo for a quarter century is because of one man.
[James Harman] "Larry Boehmer is a very special guy. That's why the Zoo is such a special place. He is one of those kind of guys that says here's what I like, here's what I'd like to hear, there's nowhere to hear it, I will just make it happen. We need more guys like that. Instead of sitting back, oh, I wish there was a place to go hear some blues."
Have you found it easier over the years to separate the good from the bad?
[Boehmer] "Not really."
You still make mistakes?
[Boehmer] "We tend to book about four months out so I don't really know when I'm booking what's going to be happening four months away?"
It can change that fast?
[Boehmer] "Well, yeah, it does."
And that makes some wonder if the Zoo has a future. After all some long time blues players like James Harman argue that even if a lot of bands claim they play the blues, the real blues seem in short supply.
[Harman] "Who are these people? Well, they're all rock bands that just got a haircut and bought a bowling shirt and blue jeans. That's fine. Come on in, hope you enjoy yourself. But listen to it and learn about it and study it a little bit and figure out what it's about. It's not just because it's three chords. It's got to be coming from here."
And a lot of the great players are simply dying off. Just last year Luther Allison, the first national act to play at the Zoo, died after playing his last recorded performance on that very same stage.
[Boehmer] "We're losing them hand over fist now."
Is that going to make it hard for the place in the coming years?
[Boehmer] "Well, there's new players coming up at all times. It's just we feel bad every time we lose one of the greats. Those people are at the age right now that we lost a lot last year. We probably lost half a dozen major blues artists. This year will be the same. Quite frankly, they're at that age where we're going to lose a lot of them. But there's new players coming up at all times."
In the meantime, Larry Boehmer and those who take the time to really listen, hear something special on a good night at the Zoo.
[Boehmer] "It takes these people getting to the real heart of the blues. When they really get there, when they're pouring out their souls, it's moving me, you know, they're being moved, hopefully the audience is being moved but it certainly gets to me."