Beneath Lee’s Summit Skies, Pat Metheny in Kansas City
Carolyn Glenn Brewer's biography of young Pat Metheny recently was published. (Photo courtesy: Carolyn Glenn Brewer).
In February 1964, an estimated 73 million Americans watched the Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
An unknown number of young people watching immediately resolved to start their own bands. Among them was a Lee’s Summit nine-year-old named Pat Metheny, who formed a group with friends and began performing garage band hits of the 1960s, such as “Hang On Sloopy.” Over time, while many of his peers eventually put down their guitars, Metheny did not.
Further, his musical tastes evolved as he discovered jazz guitar. Today, more than 50 years later, it’s easy to assume that Metheny’s international reputation and many music industry awards were easily won. But, as detailed by Metheny biographer Carolyn Glenn Brewer, they were instead the result of his personal resolve and determination over many years - and maybe Lee’s Summit unique musical heritage.
“Beneath Missouri Skies: Pat Metheny in Kansas City, 1964-1972,” recently published, is Brewer’s latest book devoted to Jackson County stories. Brewer grew up in south Kansas City’s Ruskin Heights district and has published two books - “Caught In The Path” and “Caught Ever After” - detailing the devastating impact of the 1957 tornado that struck that area.
A longtime area music instructor, Brewer also has published “Changing the Tune: The Kansas Women’s Jazz Festival 1978-1985.”
By Carolyn Glenn Brewer
Twenty-time Grammy-winning guitarist and Lee’s Summit native Pat Metheny has always felt his Jackson County upbringing gave him the perfect setting to develop his talent. “I’ve often theorized about the midwestern geography affecting an aesthetic, the sheer amount of space that exists, that leaves lots of room for things to happen, and for people to dream up stuff.”
The world has been the beneficiary of Pat’s musical dreams since he began by playing with other local jazz musicians in the late 1960s. Beginning with after-school pizza parlor gigs in his early teens and culminating with a solo spot on the Kansas City Jazz Festival a few months before he left home for college, Pat’s signature style reflects those experiences and the musicians who mentored him. At a 2008 Pat Metheny Trio concert at Unity Village, Pat told the audience, “Everything that has happened in my musical life began in Lee’s Summit.”
The opening chords of that musical awakening sounded right in the Metheny living room the night the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. Like millions of other Baby Boomers, Pat felt an instant connection to the Fab Four and their music. The start of Pat’s ongoing love affair with the guitar began with that performance. He was nine years old.
That Beatles segment might have been the first time the sound of guitars had entered the Metheny household. They were a family of trumpet players, a lineage that included Pat. Pat’s brother Mike, a freshman in high school at the time, was already making his reputation as a trumpet soloist in bands and orchestras throughout the region. The boys’ father, Dave, and their maternal grandfather were both trumpet players. But for Pat, the trumpet was not a love match. “I was a truly, absolutely, excruciatingly horrible trumpet player. When I practiced my mom’s flowers withered in the vases. It was that bad,” he remembers.
Pat Metheny first began developing his jazz guitar skills as a teenager in Lee's Summit. (Photo courtesy Carolyn Glenn Brewer).
The electric guitar would give him his own voice, not just the echo of others in the family. That alone made it attractive, but it was more than that. It had become the instrument of rebellion for the Baby Boomer generation. It represented a cultural shift. Pat realized early on that “The guitar was ushering in this new feeling in the universe. I was right in the midst of that.”
His parents had a different view. Their musical taste favored big band swing and classical music. Having a loud electric guitar in the house that would attract other loud electric guitars was unthinkable. Pat tells what happened next. “I told my parents, ‘I think I want to get a guitar.’ They said, ‘No, you’re not. You’re not going to play electric guitar.’ So that made me really want to do it.”
Pat continued to play trumpet in the school band where he learned not only basic musical skills, but how a rehearsal is run and the importance of an ensemble sound. He also kept working the guitar angle. By the Christmas he was 11 years old he had worn his parents down. He didn’t get a guitar under the tree, but he did get permission from his parents to use his paper route money to buy a guitar himself.
Pat and his dad found a Gibson ES-140 three-quarter-sized guitar in the Kansas City Star classifieds for $75. Pat only had $60. Dave Metheny, the owner of Lee’s Summit’s Burton Motors Dodge dealership, was an astute businessman so he did a little haggling, and Pat got his first guitar for $60. He quickly learned to play “Peter Gunn” and “The Girl From Ipanema,” and soon joined with some school friends to form a garage band called the Beat Bombs.
They played tunes like “Hang on Sloopy” and “Little Latin Lupe Lu.” But the deal was he would continue to play in band, with the concession that he could switch to French horn.
Then his brother, Mike, brought home the new Miles Davis album Four & More, setting a course that changed music history forever. “Within the first five seconds of the needle touching that vinyl, my life was a different life.” Pat remembers the sensation akin to an electric shock of awareness as he heard Tony Williams’s ride cymbal, the lines of Herbie Hancock’s piano solos, and Miles’ sonority. His ears were already tuned to the trumpet, and that familiar timbre and range opened up a world of how ideas manifest into music. “I just loved the sound of it, and I loved the spirit of it. It was a very visceral thing for me.”
Mike pointed the way to other players he felt Pat should know about, and serious listening began. Next, he discovered legendary guitarist Wes Montgomery. “The Wes thing is one hundred times more for me than any other guitar player. I just wanted to listen to the tunes five thousand times in a row, and after about two thousand times, I’d have them memorized.”
While Wes continued to get under Pat’s fingers, Miles Davis was always in his head. “Once I started really listening, Miles became my favorite musician, and I would have to trace every early attraction to wanting to understand what jazz is to something in the Miles Quintet.” Pat speculates that he was the only kid at Boy Scout camp who missed his Miles Davis records.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Lee’s Summit was the quintessential American small town. Paper routes and Boy Scout camp were very much a part of a young boy’s life, as was riding a bike to school or to the drug store soda fountain and the latest comic book. The Vogue Theater showed a gamut of monster movies and, toward the end of its time, ran A Hard Day’s Night long enough for Pat to see it five or six times. Mike Metheny reflects, “Pat and I were lucky to have caught the tail end of Lee’s Summit’s time as a genuine small town. Those times were like Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, and Ozzie and Harriet all rolled into one.”
The Unity Band, shown here in either 1969 or 1970, organized by Unity (then known as the Unity School of Christianity), was part of the Lee's Summit area's unique musical heritage. Siblings Pat and Mike Metheny, as well as their father Dave, performed in the band. (Photo courtesy: Unity Archives, Unity Village, Mo.)
What set Lee’s Summit apart from other mid-century American small towns was its music. Civic pride allows boasting about all town bands, but few have had as much far-reaching influence as the Unity Band. This 80-piece summer band became an institution not only for Lee’s Summit musicians but for those from surrounding areas. Dave Metheny played in the trumpet section for decades. Mike was the group’s trumpet soloist. Even though Pat only played French horn in it for one year, it had a profound effect on his initial musical upbringing. He named the Grammy-winning 2012 iteration of his group, Unity Band.
The summer band had been there almost as long as the Unity School of Christianity. The church leaders felt strongly that quality music enhanced a community’s spiritual life and should be shared. A stage was built on Unity Village grounds, white-painted, wooden benches were anchored on the terrace with plenty of room for family picnic blankets on either side, and in 1922 the Unity Band was born. On any Sunday evening between June and late August, people from all over the Kansas City metropolitan area came to hear band transcriptions of orchestral works, show tunes, and marches. Housewives and business leaders such as Dave Metheny, teachers, and students played in this band year after year creating a perpetual 50-year mentoring system. In a changing cultural world, the Unity Band was something to count on.
In 1966 Keith House, Director of Bands for the Lee’s Summit School District, took over the Unity Band conducting duties as well. As Mike’s band director and private trumpet teacher, “Mr. House” was confident that Mike was ready to take on the position of solo trumpet in the group. None of this was lost on 12-year-old Pat. As much as he didn’t like playing trumpet, he recognized the value of House’s example. He says, “Mr. House had the ability to communicate his own joy and enthusiasm about music to us, a bunch of rag-tag, beginning, fifth-grade band students, in a way that is the greatest gift a teacher can ever give a student.” French horn didn’t make it as Pat’s favorite instrument either — Mike says that for Pat the French horn was more like a prop so he could be in the band — but he never forgot Mr. House’s motto: “Play your best as the standard, not the exception.” But sometimes that meant that Pat was playing way outside the norm. He says he couldn’t help himself from what he saw as improving the band’s music. “I used to experiment adding tension notes to the final major and minor chords of pieces, which Mr. House did not appreciate at all.”
Mike Metheny (left) with long-time Lee's Summit music educator Keith House. Inset photo: House conducting during the years he worked with students Mike and Pat Metheny. (Photo courtesy: Mike Metheny).
Pat recognized very early on that the kind of connection with and absorption of the music he wanted to play would only happen if he committed to intense and persistent practice. Driven by the goal of playing with the best players, his motivation was unwavering. “When I look back on my early ‘fanatical’ period of practice, it wasn’t that I was that interested in practicing per se, it was that I had a lot to do, a lot to digest, and I really practically and functionally needed to get it together.”
He practiced most of his waking hours and extended those hours well into the night. He was so deeply into learning the guitar to the exclusion of everything else that at one point his parents took the guitar away from him for one academic quarter of school so he could get caught up with his classwork. Pat says in retrospect that period was very beneficial. “I had to find a way to continue to practice without the instrument. I had to develop this way of visualizing the geography of the instrument.”
Listening to and playing along with records was another form of practice.
This was decades before Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, and years before even CDs or cassette tapes. Local radio jazz shows were spotty and usually late at night. At a time when most high schools in the area did not have jazz bands (including Lee’s Summit High) records were a 14-year-old boy’s best source for jazz education. Pat learned the tunes and artists’ styles of playing by studying these records. By writing out parts from the record tracks, then analyzing these tunes as compositions, he absorbed jazz theory. All of it led to amazing ear training.
It didn’t take long to find other young musicians interested in learning jazz. Pat and his best friend, Kevin Clements, started playing guitar about the same time and quickly decided they wanted to form a band. That meant they’d need to find a bass player and drummer. After a brief conversation they decided that since Pat was the better guitar player, Kevin would switch to bass. Then Pat met drummer Dru Rachaner at Park College band camp, and the three boys formed the New Sounds Trio. The summer Pat turned 14 the three boys spent most of each day in the Metheny’s basement learning tunes from the records Mike told them they should listen to. Pat had met another budding jazzer, trumpeter Dave Scott, who frequently joined them, and sometimes brought his friend, trombonist Dave Glenn, with him.
When Pat’s neighbor, pianist John McKee, joined them he introduced the boys to the music of Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. Recently out of college, John was somewhat of a jazz sage. He was anxious to share his jazz knowledge, and even better, his extensive record collection with the younger players. Following John’s example, everyone contributed to the growing list of jazz artists they had discovered. They traded records so they could copy solos and write out tunes they wanted the group to try.
Pat and John picked up an after-school pizza parlor gig in Lee’s Summit, and The New Sounds Trio found a variety of gigs too. Their first was in the Rachaners’ basement for a party Dru’s sister gave. Pat’s mother, Lois, talked the group up to her friends and soon the boys were playing at other parties. They once played in the basement of a Lee’s Summit bank (Dru says they were always playing in basements) for a local politician’s rally. Kevin remembers, “They didn’t pay us, but we got all the leftover sheet cake.”
With the help of Pat’s older friends who could drive, he began going to jam sessions in Kansas City and surrounding areas. It didn’t take long for word to spread that there was a young guitarist on the scene with braces on his teeth and genius in his fingers. When he began sitting in at clubs, it was clear to players, audiences, and club owners alike what the Pat Metheny buzz was all about.
Throughout the 1960s, forward-looking jazz musicians and open-minded club owners sought to update the legendary Kansas City jazz scene of the 1920s and 1930s. The evolution of modern jazz, in evidence on both coasts, excited local players and some of their potential employers who knew there was comparable talent here. They were ready for something new.
There was no shortage of jazz musicians in town each with their own followings. Husband-and-wife duos Bettye Miller and Milt Abel, and Tommy Ruskin and Julie Turner were popular in both clubs and concert halls. Pete Eye and John Elliot each had piano trios with faithful followings. Marilyn Maye and her then-husband Sammy Tucker could be heard most nights at the Colony Steak House. The big bands of Steve Miller, Warren Durrett, and Vince Bilardo played every weekend, first the dinner crowd, then the dance crowd, at area country clubs.
Performing at Union Station's Landmark Restaurant in 1971, from left: David Belove, Pat Metheny, Brooks Wright, Paul Smith. (Photo courtesy: Carolyn Glenn Brewer).
The musical year culminated for all of these players at the annual Kansas City Jazz Incorporated Festival, held in April at the Municipal Auditorium. For nine hours local players alternated with national jazz groups and frequently played together. As far as Pat and his friends were concerned, the Jazz Festival was better than Christmas. For Pat, this was especially true in 1968 when he got to meet his guitar hero, Wes Montgomery. “Wes was standing backstage talking to Clark Terry, holding the headstock of his guitar with his hands while the body was resting on his foot. He was golden. Literally, it seemed to me that there was golden light coming off him. He was very nice. I asked for his autograph, and he gave it to me, and he asked me if I was a guitar player. I still have it.”
Pat’s first experience of leading a band in front of a large audience in an auditorium setting came unexpectedly at the 1972 Jazz Festival. He was already playing in Gary Sivils’ band and featured with Warren Durrett’s Jazz Orchestra that day, but when Gene Harris and his band missed a flight, Pat, along with drummer Neal Stone and bassist John Hatton, were asked to fill Gene’s spot. Pat started this impromptu Pat Metheny Trio off with the tried and true Thelonious Monk tune “Straight, No Chaser.” He then paid homage to his original guitar mentor by announcing that the next tune, “Bumpin’ on Sunset,” would be dedicated to the memory of Wes Montgomery who had died in 1968. The trio finished off the set with “All the Things You Are.”
Any jazz fans in attendance who hadn’t heard of Pat before that evening were certainly talking about him the next day. They had heard him play solidly as a sideman with Gary Sivils’ quintet. As the featured soloist with the Warren Durrett Orchestra, he dazzled the audience with his technique and creativity. Plus, he had shown amazing musical maturity and showmanship under pressure with his impromptu trio. All of this at the age of 17. As the applause died down the festival’s announcer reminded the audience that Pat had to get home. He had school the next morning.
During his last months before leaving Kansas City, Pat experienced many musical firsts. He first played electric bass in public in an early production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and then at Starlight for Cabaret and Sweet Charity. He played his first loud and fast solo behind the trapeze artist of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. “I took it really out, and I really liked it,” he remembers. His first time in a recording studio was at Cavern Studio where he recorded an original tune he wrote with singer Carol Comer. When the Gary Sivils Group was hired to play a concert with the Summer Symphony Pat had his first experience writing for orchestral strings. His first fan club spontaneously originated at the Independence Ramada Inn, where he played every Friday and Saturday night with Gary Sivils, Paul Smith, David Belove, and Brooks Wright.
One of the people who came to hear Pat at the Ramada in the spring of 1972 was Dr. Bill Lee, then dean of the school of music at the University of Miami. Dr. Lee came up with the solution to a problem that had caused much contention in the Metheny household.
Pat Metheny's senior year photo in the 1972 Lee's Summit High School yearbook.
Pat, then a senior at Lee’s Summit High School, had an uncertain academic future. His grade point average was abysmal. As he puts it, “I faked my way through everything except Spanish and typing.” Because he practiced several hours a day and played as many gigs as he could, he hadn’t done his schoolwork. The only reason he was allowed to graduate was that his band director, Keith House, gave him extra credit work. Some of Pat’s earliest compositions were arrangements of pop and rock tunes for the school pep band.
When Pat bombed his Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), all hope for college was lost. Pat wasn’t worried. All he wanted to do was play, but his parents really felt he needed a degree to fall back on, in case the playing didn’t work out. “The freak-out level at home was increasing,” Pat said.
Dr. Lee solved the situation by offering Pat a full scholarship to major in electric guitar. His grades didn’t matter. Dr. Lee told Pat’s parents that he was in a position to bring in a small number of students who were players to bolster the new program no matter their academic level. Pat was enrolled in this program for one semester. After that, he was asked to join the teaching staff.
Pat’s trademark playing style, founded in rhythmic and harmonic exploration and a manner of articulation influenced by his early days as a horn player, redefined the sound of the guitar in the late twentieth century. His development and application of technological advances in instrument creation have taken him and his music well into the twenty-first. Through it all, he has never lost touch with his Missouri sky.
Carolyn Glenn Brewer with Pat Metheny. (Photo courtesy: Carolyn Glenn Brewer).