BB’s Jazz, Blues and Soups has expanded. That means: more room! Better views of the stage! And best of all: less smoke. A good thing gets even better
By Steve Pick
Photograph by Jennifer Hengst
Seated at the edge of the brand-spanking-new balcony on the second floor of the much beloved BB’s Jazz, Blues and Soups, you can look right down on the stage for an unprecedented view of the performers. On this particular night, the band is called Root Doctor, from Lansing, Mich.
You can watch the fingers of the Hammond organ player as he deftly plays swirling, meaty chords with one hand and nifty melodic runs with the other. You can study the licks of the guitarist as he bends the strings on his Stratocaster. You can see the tops of the drums as they are pummeled by the drummer, and you can see the sweat beading the top of the singer’s head.
Sure, only a couple of dozen people, those who grab the tables at the rim of the balcony, get this chance to study the musicians so closely. But there are plenty of other options the old BB’s never offered. TV cameras feed pictures of the offerings onstage to closed-circuit monitors at both ends of the second floor. A staircase comes down directly in front of the stage, providing a small oasis of standing room that wasn’t previously available. And if you want a respite from the music, there’s a new outdoor balcony overlooking the nascent Musical Milestones plaza of fame down below.
The building at 700 S. Broadway began its life in 1848 as a French town house, but by the time Mark O’Shaughnessy discovered it in 1976, it had become a transient hotel.
“Bob Burkhardt and I started hanging out at Phil’s Hotel Number 2,” O’Shaughnessy explains. “We both liked the cheap beers and cheap drinks. We got to know Sam D’Agostino, the guy who was running the place. A couple of times, guys would come downstairs and start swinging on their gals, and Burkhardt and I would go, ‘Aw, come on, knock that stuff off. Leave that lady alone.’”
This was enough to convince D’Agostino he had potential sublease clients for his fading business. Burkhardt had experience opening bars such as Rusty Springs and Muddy Waters, and he and the young O’Shaughnessy were ready to learn the ropes of a new kind of room.
“We took the place over, and it lasted about a year, a year and a half before we went belly up,” O’Shaughnessy says. “We didn’t know much about the bar business or the restaurant business at all, and we weren’t fast learners.
“During that time, we had guys like Oliver Sain working every Monday down here, bringing a real diverse crowd from the Central West End. At that time, people were really kind of uptight in St. Louis. They didn’t like places where black people and white people mixed. We got a lot of threatening phone calls from people who didn’t like us dancing together, listening to the same kind of music.”
Befriending blues musician Henry Townsend and jazz musician J.D. Parran led O’Shaughnessy into booking many of the best and brightest players in both those genres. But business wasn’t good enough, and the building needed work. Burkhardt moved on to open the Broadway Oyster Bar, and O’Shaughnessy took out a mortgage on 700 S. Broadway.
“After the ’70s, I came to realize the building was really a challenge,” he explains. “It hadn’t really been dealt with structurally or upgraded in years. So I thought it was better to shut down and find the particulars about how you could fix the place up so it doesn’t always get shut down by inspectors.”
Reopening in 1981, with a design which has remained remarkably similar ever since, O’Shaughnessy still wasn’t able to make the business work. After subleasing the bar to a business called Heartbreak Hotel for three years, O’Shaughnessy left the room empty till the time was right for reinvention in 1996.
John May, who had met O’Shaughnessy when the two worked at the old J.B. Hutto’s club in West County, came onboard as the new entertainment booker and all-around organization man. From the beginning of this incarnation, BB’s has been one of the most successful bars in town, with a solid reputation for excellence in local and national blues acts.
Business did go down while streets were closed for ballpark construction—standing outside BB’s, you can’t miss the new Busch Stadium, just a long block away—but May and O’Shaughnessy used this time to plan and perform expansion for their club. An outdoor plaza, plus remodeling former hotel space into a second floor bar with the balcony above the stage, took a couple of years before being completed in August.
“People used to suggest going to BB’s,” says May, “but somebody would say it’s either too crowded or too smoky. With the new ventilation system and the expansion, last weekend we had a record business, and there was plenty of room to move. There were people all over, but it did not feel crowded at all. We were in the worst of summer, and it was very cool and chilly in here.”
Which, by the way, means the sweat on the singer’s forehead mentioned above came from exertion, not extreme heat.
BB’s offers shows seven nights a week; visit bbsjazzbluessoups.com, or call 314-436-5222.
