Back where it all began

Bob Walkenhorst, a Kansas City musician with longstanding ties to Maryville and a string of successful albums that remain especially popular in Europe, will return to his roots Saturday, Jan. 23, when the acoustic duo Walkenhorst and Porter performs at the Java Joint, 314 N. Main.

The show begins at 8 p.m., and admission is $12. Tickets are on sale now at the Java Joint and will be sold at the door if any remain on the night of the show. Seating is limited.

These days, Walkenhorst lives near the Plaza in Kansas City, where he paints and plays music and spends as much time as possible with his family. But back in the 1980s as a member of The Rainmakers — a raucous roots band that released several solid-selling albums for Mercury Records — he was, well, a rock star.

And before hitting the road with The Rainmakers from 1983-1990, Walkenhorst, who grew up in Norborne, Mo., studied art at Northwest Missouri State University, where he graduated in 1978.

In an interview with the Daily Forum this week, Walkenhorst said he has fond memories of Maryville and called it the place "where I first got focused on songwriting."

Though studying art, "music was equally big," he said, and the budding rocker recorded much of his early work — some of which he still performs — in a home studio a couple of blocks from the Northwest campus.

"I wrote lots and lots of song living in Maryville," Walkenhorst said. "That was where I really started feeling like I was getting a grip on what makes a good song. Maryville has always been a touchstone. I spent a lot of time dwelling on the art form there."

Walkenhorst's last extended visit to Maryville, however, had to do with painting, not music. He was commissioned this fall by Citizens for Community Action to create a mural of the historic Forsyth House on the south exterior wall of Maryville Florists, 214 N. Main.

The week or so it took to paint the mural was nostalgic, Walkenhorst said, adding that he was flattered when a number of people brought him old Rainmaker albums to autograph.

As a Rainmaker, Walkenhorst had an atypically successful and happy run in the music business making albums and touring throughout the United States and Europe. He said it was anything but the sort of sordid rock-star horror story repeatedly told by VH1 documentaries.

"It went well, and we had a blast," he said. "No one screwed us over, and we had a really good time. But times change."

Eventually Walkenhorst said he tired of the road and set new priorities outside of music.

"There are things like family and a real job and a sense of certain responsibilities that you don't want to mess up with the insanity of music," he said.

So Walkenhorst married and had two daughters, one now married herself and expecting her second child, and one in college. He essentially quit playing music for several years but kept writing songs, which has always been his strong suit.

Gradually the itch to play returned, so, in 2003, he teamed up with fellow Kansas City musician Jeff Porter, a guitar ace and keyboardist, and started doing acoustic sets. The two music veterans have recently released their first CD, No Abandon, a collection of  songs about "that immortal subject for mortals, mortality."

“We thought of calling the CD 'Death’, but thought that might sound too commercial,” said Walkenhorst, who described the effort as a series of "observations about being more than half-way through the journey, not regretting a second, and being determined to pay attention and squeeze every drop from what you have left."