Denny Mintle was having a hard time figuring out why Duke Ellington had sent him a Christmas card. In the spring.
As manager of the Little Bear Saloon in Evergreen, Mintle had booked the legendary jazz composer and his big band at the modest venue six years earlier — back when it was a franchise of the Red Ram nightclub. Mintle had sat in his office above the bar with Ellington, later noting the remarkable change between the jazzman’s haggard appearance that afternoon and his show that evening.
“He was very tired looking and his hair was messed up when he got there,” Mintle, 69, remembered. “Of course, when he started to play later, every hair was perfect.”
But in the spring of 1974, Mintle was still puzzling over the unmistakable scribble of Ellington’s handwriting in the ridiculously out-of-season greeting card. It all made sense a few weeks later when Mintle heard news of Ellington’s death at age 75.
“He had sent Christmas cards out to people before he died,” Mintle said. “He knew it was coming.”
Anecdotes like this might not sound out of place in jazz epicenters like Chicago, St. Louis or New York. Ellington’s inestimable influence on American music probably runs deeper than most of us realize.
But in a mountain town such as Evergreen (approximate population 10,000) and at a venue like the Little Bear, which comfortably fits just over 200 people, it’s downright bizarre.
The 2008 Evergreen Jazz Festival, which kicks off today and continues through Sunday at various venues in town — including the Little Bear — offers a window into the Little Bear’s lesser-known past.
Front Range and high-country music lovers know it as a rowdy venue that has welcomed everyone from John Lee Hooker Jr. to Leon Russell. Buffalo steaks and draft beer are often the special, and the stage is so close to the bar you can feel the breeze from a windmill guitar riff.
Few people know the extent of the Little Bear’s history, or the number of legendary musicians who have visited it over the past few decades.
St. Mark’s-in-the-Wilderness Episcopal Church built the structure in 1875, and the building later became Prince McCracken’s Drugstore, behind which bootleggers reportedly cooked up booze during Prohibition. Rumors also persist that it once housed a brothel.
A long past
“It’s a remarkable old building that’s just been worn and worn from all those people and all that action,” said Ross Grimes, 81, who bought the building in 1964. “It has a personality, and I think we all like to see new things cookin’ there.”
The building also housed the Round Up Dance Hall and an auto parts store, but it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that its reputation for raucous live music began to form.
Grimes purchased the property — one of a few available in a town controlled by estate trusts — and later realized an unintentional loophole. Since it had originally been a church, it was exempt from the alcohol regulations that the trusts stipulated.
Alcohol allowed
“That’s the reason it was the only bar in town,” Grimes said.
But it took Denny Mintle and his family’s hard work to turn it into a Red Ram franchise, the precursor to the modern Little Bear, in July 1966.
“All the franchises had to have a balcony,” Mintle recalled. “We had to remodel, take the ceiling out, cut a hole in the roof and put in a restaurant.”
Mintle, who also played music in the Evergreen Dixie- landers, grabbed wood from Commerce City scrap yards and hauled it to Evergreen piece by piece in his El Camino to construct the requisite balcony.
Once the live music portion of the saloon was finished, Mintle began to receive improbable offers for bands from a booker friend in Chicago. Count Basie’s band was passing through Denver and wanted a gig but needed $5,000 for it. Out of the question for the modest venue, Mintle said, so the booker eventually settled on $1,500.
“I had to build a stage and get a grand piano and have it tuned,” Mintle said. “I remember Count Basie walking in the front doors and standing there by himself, looking around the room. He just kind of shook his head. But he was really nice, and the show was spectacular. When you’re sitting in front of a row of six saxophones so close like that, it sends chills up your spine.”
In addition to Ellington and Basie’s big bands, Mintle also signed contracts with drummer Buddy Rich and his band, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and jazz clarinetist Buddy DeFranco from Glenn Miller’s band. The squeezed environs, mix of hippies and cowboys and financial uncertainty (Mintle often just broke even) made for a wild atmosphere that still echoes through the building today.
“My wife and I used to sit at the bar and would turn around on our bar stools, and the leaders of these bands were within 4 feet of our faces,” Grimes said. “It was like you were in the band. I don’t know if any of those bands played in that small of a venue before or after.”
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com
2008 Evergreen Jazz Festival
Live jazz. Various locations in Evergreen. Today-Sunday. Starting at noon today; 11 a.m. Saturday; 9:15 a.m. Sunday. $45-$90. 303-697-5467 or .
