The walls and doorways of downtown Lawrence have known the taste of countless fliers. The neon papers jockey for attention with loud fonts begging passersby to take notice.

 But behind the miles of sticky tape lies more than mere brick and mortar. These walls have held up the ambitions of generations of musicians hoping to one day trade their fliers for billboards and maybe even fame. Some have prospered and are still remembered. Others are long forgotten.

 This cycle continues today. Old names have been exchanged for new and the music keeps flowing steadily out the doors on Mass Street. Lawrence is still the most essential music town between Denver and Chicago, but it isn’t as easy as it once was for local bands to make it here. 

 The economic downturn has made audiences less eager to pay for tickets to see local bands, and has left some venues struggling.

Social media sites like Myspace, Youtube and Facebook have made the need for self-promotion even greater. Musicians without the know-how or want to promote themselves online to drive audiences to local clubs have found it increasingly harder to get bookings. 

 What Lawrence still has, of course, are multiple venues, several talent buyers and eager performers forging a fertile music community. Discussions with band members and others highlight some of the challenges Lawrence has offered over the years. 

A MUSICAL HOTBED

 It is bands like The Get Up Kids that helped Lawrence earn its reputation as a prime city for musicians. The group, which has done extensive national and international touring, helped inspire an entire subset of American music. Often described as spanning the genres of indie, emo and alternative rock, The Get Up Kids are well acquainted with all that Lawrence has offered musicians over the years and the cycle its communities and venues fall into. 

 The band’s drummer, Ryan Pope, currently lives in Lawrence but grew up in nearby Olathe. Before The Get Up Kids, Pope was just another music lover who would often make the pilgrimage to Mass Street to go record shopping. Lawrence represented a musical hotbed, and even as a teenager he grabbed the city by its horns.

In fact, one of Pope’s earliest performances was at The Bottleneck’s open mic night as a 13-year-old.

 For The Get Up Kids and many other budding bands, Lawrence was a source of inspiration. For music lovers rooted in small towns, Lawrence’s first gift came in the form of nationally touring acts passing through.

 Lawrence let devoted fans see acts they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. This feeling went full circle for The Get Up Kids in the 1990s when they became the band locals were lucky to see. 

 Brett Mossiman has owned The Bottleneck for the past 25 years. He was around when the band began to hit its stride and became a national force. “They prospered from being around at a time when word spread quick,” Mossiman says. “They became very big, very quickly. In the scheme of things they might be the largest band to come out of Lawrence.”

 In 1992 when The Get Up Kids returned to Lawrence on a national tour, The Replay Lounge allowed the band to capitalize on their popularity with an all ages show. Pope remembers being slated to play and having the show get called off right as they were about to go on.

Not wanting to forgo the appearance, the band moved the concert to a house three blocks away and the show went on.

 Today, a local band can seldom create a draw big enough to sell out The Bottleneck. The shift has been hard on the local music scene. In part, this is due to a trend that many bands playing today see in audiences nationwide. It seems, thanks to advents in technology like Facebook, Myspace and the ease of home recording, people are simply less focused on live performances. playing today see in audiences nationwide.

 The DIY attitude that allowed The Get Up Kids to successfully pick up and move its show to a nearby house was something that the venues themselves couldn’t offer musicians in Lawrence. It was rooted in a communal determination of the fans and the bands to simply play music no matter how it had to happen.

 However, even back then, the community in Lawrence wasn’t always so enthusiastic. Pope says when his band started out there was an unwelcome sense of competition. This conflicted with the view of Lawrence as a near idyllic place for musicians. It wasn’t until The Get Up Kids forged a tight-knit community with bands like The Appleseed Cast and The Anniversary that things began to turn around.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

 Cowboy Indian Bear is one of the more prominent acts in Lawrence today. The band has been written about in local publications like The Pitch and INK magazine and in the past year has played with nationally known acts like Peter Bjorn and John, Republic of Tigers and The Appleseed Cast, as well as performing at Austin’s South By Southwest Music festival.

 It was Lawrence’s fabled music scene that drew the band members of Cowboy Indian Bear here from their hometown of Topeka in August 2007. “Knowing that Lawrence had the history in place and regularly touring musicians and acts coming through, we recognized it as a hub for all of that,” says band member Marty Hillard. 

 But the band expected the music community to be more embracing and less competitive than what they found when they arrived, says guitarist CJ Calhoun. As a result, the group members kept an eye out for artists who reflected their passion for music and who saw the same flaws in the community. The Noise FM was one of those bands.

Though musically and stylistically different, the two bands formed a kinship. What began as a “band friendship” soon turned to a firmer relationship that may have been the key to the success of both groups.

The two know if they share the marquee, it’s easier to get people in the door. However, the bands also recognize that the number and nature of Lawrence’s music clubs and operators provide the springboard for most successful bands. Over the last two decades, Lawrence has had four-to-six national buyers bringing in hot acts and nearly a dozen live music clubs in an eight-block strip of downtown playing local and national bands. ­

 “The venues are great,” Hillard says. “You have to pay to play even in St. Louis, a community that’s four to five hours away. You get presale, and you have to sell your amount of tickets or you don’t make any money on the show.” But for many local bands, filling venues is still a problem, even on a national level. “A lot went away as the Internet become more impactful for bands,” Hillard says. “We hit Lawrence at a time when all the stuff we grew up seeing here in town was really waning.”

 Although Cowboy Indian Bear takes advantage of social media, which is almost a prerequisite for any band with the hopes of getting its name out nationally, the members take pride in the fact that what they value most is putting on a good show.

 By urging musicians to support each other, members of Cowboy Indian Bear hope to inspire a new community like the one they remember growing up with. “We try to step up creatively and be recognized as the suc cessors of what we grew up seeing. We want to be counted among that,” Hillard says.

A NEW ERA

 Formed from the ashes of a previous group, OhOk is a trio best described as toiling in funk rock. Consisting of guitarist Ross Stewart, bassist Peter Longofono and drummer Cameron Pestinger, the relatively new group is no stranger to playing gigs in Lawrence. However, since adopting a new name and honing their style they’ve been forced to start from scratch.

 “We did a lot of benefit shows for a while.

And a lot of them had a really bad turn out. At one of them we were playing for kids,” Stewart says. “We’re a rock band, we’re not an easy- listening soft pop group. To play gigs like that and have people come out and say ‘Could you turn the volume down a little bit?’ is difficult.”

 Members have spent years developing their craft and musicianship, but have also found their efforts less than rewarded. Though Longofono is a former student of the KU Jazz department, he’s found that knowledge less valuable than he hoped in terms of building an audience.

 OhOk has found difficulties drawing big audiences because the band’s style is different from the modern indie rock mold that has pervaded the scene here and elsewhere. The group also has an aversion toward what it considers shameless over promotion and unlike some bands, does not want to go so far as to extend individual invitations to people before every gig to get them to come out.

 “I find it harder to be successful in a niche style that isn’t popular. I don’t want to play gigs [if] I have to change stylistically. It’s all in the statement,” Stewart says. What would that statement be? “Probably sex and disappointment. You have the pure enjoyment of playing but the disappointment of small turnouts,” he says.

 Mossiman knows better than most how the changes in technology have affected Lawrence. “This last five-to-10 years has been really hard for local bands to find strong fan bases. Sometimes people spend their energy putting up websites, which can’t be as gratifying of an experience as being on stage with a bunch of girls singing their songs.”

 For OhOk that’s been exactly the case. “Every time I try to set up a Myspace, it sucks. I don’t want to set up a Myspace. I want to play guitar!” Stewart says.

 OhOk members, much like The Get Up Kids and Cowboy Indian Bear, remember a time when audiences were more engaged with live music, when the only way to get your fix was to actually leave your computer and go to a show.

 Mossiman is optimistic that Lawrence will continue to value and support aspiring and accomplished musicians. “The live concert can never go away,” he says. “There are those magic nights when 800 people are sweating at Liberty Hall and you’re talking about it in class the next day.”