Oskar Blues’ music man is retiring after 18 years

By Quentin Young

In the late 1990s, Oskar Blues was a brand new company just starting to find its identity. The restaurant and beer operation at its original Lyons location was one piece of it. The other was music — the “blues” in Oskar Blues.

From its earliest years, Oskar’s musical personality was largely the expression of one person, Dave McIntyre, who began booking the Grill & Brew 18 years ago after offering his services to owner Dale Katechis, and turned the Lyons venue and, later, the Oskar Blues restaurant-venues that opened in Longmont, into one of the main stops for many artists on the Front Range club circuit.

Oskar Blues helped Lyons evolve into a music town, and McIntyre’s influence on Boulder County music, by the local and touring talent he presented and the artists he helped move to bigger stages, is deep. He’s the reason you think of music, not just beer, when you think of Oskar Blues.

“It really helped form the brand and concept of Oskar Blues,” Katechis said. “He certainly became a very important thread in the Oskar Blues fabric.”

The company is patching that fabric, now that McIntryre is retiring.

A McIntyre send-off party, which is open to the public, is planned for 3-6 p.m. on Sunday, July 26, at the Grill & Brew in Lyons. The main attraction is lots of music — the lineup features Boa & the Constrictors, Danny Shafer, David Booker & Ronnie Shellist, Sean McIntyre, Bonnie & Taylor Simms, Dan Treanor’s Afrosippi, Chris K & Friends and Neil McIntyre. Then there’s a 6-9 p.m. set by Boston-based Twisted Pine.

Also on the agenda that day: Katechis plans to unveil a bronze bust of McIntyre that he commissioned Lafayette sculptor J. Lucas Loeffler to create and which he plans to install at the Oskar Blues entrance in Lyons. How many retired talent buyers have people made bronze busts of?

“It’s a way of letting Dave live on,” said Katechis, who, in another indication of his appreciation, bought McIntyre a new Subaru Forester.

For his part, McIntyre is thankful for the opportunities Oskar Blues gave him.

“I spent the last years feeling and playing and listening to great music,” he said. “I feel very blessed.”

McIntyre’s presence in Colorado music extends beyond his work at Oskar Blues. He founded the Colorado Blues Society, and he was instrumental in getting the Greeley Blues Jam off the ground. He hosts a radio music program on KGNU. Son Neil was a member of popular Denver hip-hop jazz group Yo, Flaco!, and son Sean plays guitar in Denver rock band Debauchery Tomorrow.

McIntyre hired North Carolina bluegrass band Steep Canyon Rangers to play Oskar Blues in the band’s very early days. He worked with one of Lyons’ most successful exports, the all-female old-time band Uncle Earl, which once played Oskar Blues with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on mandolin. Top national names McIntyre has presented include Peter Rowan, Pinetop Perkins and Rebirth Brass Band. He was an early supporter of Spring Creek, a defunct quartet that in 2007 became the first band to win both the Telluride and Rockygrass bluegrass festival band competitions.

For Katechis, some of McIntyre’s hits were shows by former Muddy Waters sideman “Steady Rollin'” Bob Margolin, New Orleans guitarist Walter “Wolfman” Washington and Guitar Shorty.

“Those were musicians he turned me on to that in my wildest dreams I wouldn’t imagine would play Lyons, Colorado,” Katechis said.

McIntyre, 67, grew up in New Jersey. In the early 1960s, he said, he went to see a show at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village by Joan Baez, who said during her set, “I found this kid on the street last week, and I want him to come over and play for you,” and then the kid, whose name was Bob Dylan, got up and played some songs.

McIntyre came to Colorado “sight unseen” in 1974 with his then-wife and another couple, and he hasn’t left. Before joining Oskar Blues, he owned a refrigeration and equipment store in Boulder for 15 years, and his other past jobs include stints as an elementary school teacher and court stenographer in New Jersey.

The booking duties at Oskar Blues now fall to Hunt Frye, a Louisville resident who has worked on the business side of the Denver-area music scene for the past 10 years, particularly as a show promoter with Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom and as owner of The Frye Agency, according to an Oskar Blues press release.

“The sky is the limit for the potential of music at the Oskar Blues venues,” Frye says in the press release. “We’re rolling up our sleeves and digging in to expand on the strong local and national music scene here in the Front Range of Colorado.”

Maybe Frye will find himself booking McIntyre. Several years ago, McIntyre picked up a guitar that had been sitting in a closet at his Lyons home for 25 years, and now he’s in a band. He sings, though he says he’s the “rookie” in the group. They play mostly covers — Tom Waits, The Band, Dylan, of course. They’re called Complete Unknowns. Look for them at Oskar Blues.

Quentin Young: quentin@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/qpyoungnews