Adam Kindred and the Case for the Open Mic

Every scene needs a room where a nervous person can play three songs to strangers and not die. In Ames, one of those rooms is Alluvial's monthly open mic, and the person holding the door open is Adam Kindred — Ames singer-songwriter, front of the wonderfully-named band Morning Sex & Good Weed, and, more importantly on open-mic night, host, hype man, and safety net.

Kindred was profiled this week, on July 29, in a piece about building community through art, and the numbers in it tell you something real: the open mic's sixth edition, earlier this month on July 8, drew 13 performers. Thirteen people who signed up to play in front of a taproom crowd, some of them surely for the first time. That's not a headliner's draw. It's better than a headliner's draw, because it's thirteen people deciding they're the kind of person who gets on stage — and that decision is where every local music scene actually begins.

The open mic sits inside Alluvial's larger identity as the engine of the Ames scene. The same taproom that books touring Grammy winners and Wisconsin string bands also, once a month, hands the stage to whoever signs up. That combination is not common and it is not an accident. A venue that only books touring acts imports its culture; a venue that also runs an open mic grows its own. Ames gets both under one roof, and Kindred is a big reason the homegrown side keeps its warmth.

It helps that he's not the only one carrying it. The open-mic ecosystem in Ames runs on regulars — songwriters like Steve Veysey, prolific local folk players like Casey Joe Collins turning up on the Wheatsfield deck one week and an open mic the next. These are the people who form the connective tissue between the free park shows, the taproom bills, and whatever the M-Shop does when the students return. They're the reason a touring act can walk into Alluvial and find an actual audience of music people instead of a room of strangers.

Why does an open mic matter to the health of the scene? Because talent needs reps, and reps need a low-stakes stage. Not everyone who plays those thirteen slots is going to make records. But some of them will, and all of them become audience members, house-show hosts, band-mates, and the people who buy the ten-dollar ticket that keeps a venue's lights on. Kill the open mic and you don't just lose a Tuesday — you lose the pipeline. A scene with no on-ramp eventually runs out of new drivers.

There's a bittersweet edge here too. In a town that lost its dedicated rock club when DG's went dark, the informal, community-run stuff — the open mics, the deck concerts, the park series — is doing more of the load-bearing than it used to. That's a lot to ask of a monthly signup sheet and a host with a guitar. Kindred and company make it look easy, which is exactly how you can tell it isn't.

So the next time Alluvial's open mic rolls around, go — not as a favor, but because it's genuinely one of the truest nights of music in Ames. Sit close. Clap loud for the shaky ones. That's how a scene tells its next generation to keep going.

Sources: Open mic and sharing community through art; Alluvial Brewing events calendar