RIBCO Quietly Marks Its 25th Anniversary

The Carmody boys didn't plan to get into the bar business when they bought the building at 1815 Second Avenue in Rock Island. The family - patriarch John and his sons Dan and Jerry - wanted to renovate the building and lease it out, but when two tenants fell through, they opened the Rock Island Brewing Company in 1979. Each member of the family brought a different area of expertise, and when they hired Jerry Ludden as food manager (he later became a partner), all the elements were in place for what became - and remains - the Quad Cities' premier club for live music.

Twenty-five years later, the venue known as RIBCO is still going strong under the stewardship of Terry Tilka and his wife Debbie.

"RIBCO is the place you always knew that you were going to see great live music," said Bill Douglas, a local musician and a former employee.

"They had national touring acts almost every week," said Nan Losasso, who said she went to the bar almost weekly from the outset. "Just phenomenal shows."

The club was the "only place to be," said Judy Thoma, who began going to the club 20 years ago and managed the bar's account at radio station KFMH. She particularly remembers shows by the alternative polka band The Wallets, Robert Cray, and Tracy Chapman.

Dan Carmody, who now runs Renaissance Rock Island, said that 25 years in the music-club business is the equivalent of a century for companies in other fields. "I'm surprised when any live-music club survives 25 years," he said.

That was echoed by Terry Tilka. "To last 25 years in this business is unheard of," he said, noting that the average lifespan for a bar is three to five years.

RIBCO's longevity probably stems from several factors, including the Carmody vision for it and Tilka's experience in the bar business, as well as his insistence on a friendly staff and a clean, professional facility.

"It's always been a fun place that ties together the Irish saloon-keeping tradition," Carmody said. "Good hospitality combined with good music."

"RIBCO's always been home," said John Horvath, a bartender at the club for 18 years, and without a doubt the public face of the bar. Tilka calls him "Mr. RIBCO": "John's as much RIBCO as anybody else," he said.

Tilka said he has no plans at this point to commemorate RIBCO's quarter-century birthday, but he doesn't rule out the possibility; he said that time has simply gotten away from the staff.

RIBCO has had three owners in its lifetime, but it remains amazingly close to the original vision that the Carmodys set for it: a tavern atmosphere with good food, imported beers in a glass cooler, and entertainment.

Now, of course, RIBCO has live music at least three nights a week, and Tilka's team books bands for all the festivals in The District of Rock Island. During a summer month, RIBCO is often securing the services of 50 to 60 bands.

At first, "entertainment" at RIBCO involved only records, but it didn't take long for the Carmodys to realize that live music could play a crucial role in the club's success. In 1979, RIBCO organized the first outdoor concert on the newly built plaza as part of that year's Summerfest. "We were quite frankly astounded at what happened that night," Carmody said. "We were six deep at the bar all night long."

The first indoor concert at RIBCO was the local Stillwater Blues Band, and live music became a weekly staple of the club in fall 1979. By 1980, RIBCO featured live music every Friday and Saturday, Carmody said, including 10 to 12 outdoor concerts a summer beyond Summerfest.

That was the heyday of country rock, and most of the acts that played at RIBCO fell into that genre and, later, R&B. Notables performing during that time included John Sebastian, Asleep at the Wheel, Delbert McClinton, and Pat MacDonald & The Essentials - in its last show before becoming Timbuk 3 (of "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" fame).

RIBCO quit hosting live music for about six months in 1983-4, Carmody said, but quickly resumed. "We realized we needed to be a nightclub to survive there," he said. The organization that would become the Mississippi Valley Blues Society formed shortly thereafter, and the bar became a host for many of its shows.

The Carmodys took RIBCO through a pair of expansions - in 1981 and 1985 - and "the space is more or less the same configuration it was in 1985," Carmody said.

But family and debt prompted the Carmody clan to sell RIBCO. The bar was a template for the Carmodys, and they opened similar clubs in Muscatine (1981), Davenport (1982), Galesburg (1984), Clinton (1984), and Iowa City (1985). Those last three bars overextended the family, Carmody said. "We were undercapitalized, and we needed to retreat," he said.

"Dan's biggest problem was that he was 20 years ahead of everybody else," Tilka said, referring to the microbrew craze of the late 1990s.

After the Carmodys sold RIBCO in 1987 - to Steve and Cheryl Lane, who sold it to Tilka in 1990 - the family only owned the Galesburg bar. In 1988, Dan Carmody started working for the Development Association of Rock Island.

Carmody's memories from RIBCO mostly involve drunkenness, except for the September 1, 1985, closing-time armed robbery with "13 people stuffed in a walk-in cooler along with a nine-member reggae band."

Several people, including Carmody, were struck in the head with a sawed-off shotgun, but nobody was seriously injured. KFMH DJ Kerry Peace followed the robbers out of the club and got in a brawl with them, and the shotgun broke apart.

Carmody also remembers blues guitarist Roy Buchanan pulling a knife at an after-hours party because his hat disappeared. And the man who passed out at the bar being carried out to a bench on the plaza, and his artificial leg falling off.

There's a clear difference between Carmody's attitude toward RIBCO and Tilka's. The original owner was young and working with $18,000 that had been left to him. While Carmody remembers the funny stories, Tilka says his best memory was the first night he hit the band's guarantee at the cash register.

Tilka came from the bar business, and he demands professionalism. Although many people expect the bar and band business to be fun and games, Tilka expects a lot out of his employees and musicians. "I've always wanted to keep this the 'A' room in town," he said. RIBCO has built a reputation among bands for being clean and courteous, as well as having great sound.

Douglas is one of the leaders of the power-pop band Einstein's Sister, which has played venues from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to Chicago. "I never had a better stage mix than the RIBCO stage," he said. Douglas also worked on the music-business side of RIBCO for five years, from 1997 to 2001. The club, he said, has the best sound between Omaha and the Windy City.

Tilka said his formula is simple: RIBCO owns its equipment instead of leasing it. "That's the difference," he said. "We maintain our equipment" and replace things when they're worn out.

"It's always been about quality," Douglas said. "It's never been anything less than that." He noted that RIBCO is excellent at everything it does, from music to food to service: "There's no weak link in the chain."

Tilka notes that many of his servers have college degrees, and that he has very little turnover on his staff of roughly 20 people.

Tilka's involvement started with a call from Carmody, who told him the new mayor of Rock Island - Mark Schwiebert - wanted to talk to him about a bar that was for sale. Because he wasn't from this area, Tilka didn't know who the new mayor was.

RIBCO presented unique challenges in the Quad Cities, Tilka said, because of its square footage, its live-entertainment focus, and the work it needed when he bought it.

Tilka seems proud of all the bands his club has hosted over the years. "We hit a lot of bands on their way up," he said, including the Barenaked Ladies and the Wallflowers. The club has also hosted luminaries such as Mick Taylor and Cray, and Tilka notes that Jude Cole played at the club the week between his appearances on Jay Leno's and David Letterman's shows. And then there was the Black Flag concert. "Kids 20 years later still talk about that show," he said.

That's one of a handful Douglas mentions, along with Matthew Sweet, David Gray, Junior Wells, and Mojo Nixon. "The crowd was at a fever pitch," he said. "Mojo just had them in the palm of his hand."

In the early 1990s, NRBQ had so many people and so much equipment - including a rented grand piano - that some of it was hanging off the stage and being propped up by beer kegs. The stage was so packed that RIBCO hired Douglas and his Einstein's Sister bandmate Kerry Tucker to open, because there was only room for two people.

But Douglas was sure he was forgetting dozens of shows. "I could name three and I'd forget 30 that kicked my ass harder," he said.

The walls of RIBCO are covered in autographed photos, and all but three or four of those acts (Bootsy Collins and Phil Collins are among those exceptions) have played at the club, Tilka noted. It's an impressive array of talent.

But the public's tastes change, and it's difficult to stay ahead of the latest trends. Moreover, there's a disconnect between what would please music purists and what makes money.

Carmody noted how difficult it is to survive with live music. "It takes a big population base to support live music," he said.

Tilka is unapologetic about the proliferation of cover bands at RIBCO in the past few years. "We didn't do cover bands a couple years ago," he said. But that's the trend in the concert industry, and that's what draws the biggest crowd right now, he said: "It's still a business, and you've got to run it like a business."