House Of The Rising Sun

New venue offers fresh entertainment experience

Adam Hood
Adam Hood

Don Nelms will tell you he doesn't have a strong relationship with the local music scene. Sure, he has musician friends and respects what they do, but he wouldn't consider himself among Northwest Arkansas' music influencers. That may be about to change, though, with the opening of the Sunrise Stage music venue, connected to the Sunrise Guitar shop.

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Billy Joe Shaver

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Carolyn Wonderland

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NWA Democrat-Gazette/ANDY SHUPE Adventure Subaru and Sunrise Guitars/Sunrise Stage owner Don Nelms discusses the great care given to the acoustics of the new Sunrise Stage music venue in Fayetteville during a tour.

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Courtesy Photo

The new Sunrise Stage music venue in Fayetteville.

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Ian Moore

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The Nighthawks

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Shake Russell and Michael Hearne

"I have a real passion for this location, having it in our family since 1971," Nelms says of the former Subaru and Honda dealership on College Avenue in Fayetteville.

"I'm standing out there in the floor of that guitar store, and I can remember 40 years ago people walking in and what happened," he goes on. "But I just didn't want to see that building end up something that wasn't really cool. I've gone a long way to getting that to happen -- let's hope all the rest of the people enjoy it as much as I hope they do."

The Sunrise Guitar store came to be when Nelms -- with partners David Nelms and Roy Shorter -- bought one of the area's oldest music stores, the Ben Jack's Arkansas Music business on Drake Street. During the dealership's vacancy, several interested parties contacted Nelms about leasing the property, but it was never anything that "suited" him -- until his new hobby of playing guitar led him right to the solution.

"I thought, 'Well, that's the answer. I'm going to buy this store and redo the building on 71 and move over there.' I said, 'I'm going to build a performance area and a guitar store,'" Nelms recalls. "The general idea was that I wanted a performance area that was a really good place to play. I mean, a really special place to play and for people to listen."

In other words, Nelms says, the acoustics and the physical environment of the venue was priority one. Where the overhead doors of the auto body shop used to be, slanted walls now reflect the high pitches of the music back toward the stage. Bass traps along the walls keep the bass from accumulating as it travels to the back of the room. Custom-built egg-crate diffusers at the ceiling further disperse the sound, keeping it the same from the row in front of the stage to the back of the venue.

"This is the first room in Fayetteville that's built purely as a showcase venue, the first and foremost focus being on good sound," says Darren Novotny with Springdale Acoustics Inc. One of the sound engineers on the project, as well as a musician himself, Novotny uses experience to consider the sound on the stage and in the audience.

"As a result, we've done a couple things on stage that you don't see many places," Novotny suggests of the suspended custom diffusers. "Everybody has a good seat; the sound is even. And that's a function of the acoustical treatment of the space in conjunction with the loudspeaker system we chose and the way it's installed. The SLS loudspeakers in there, in my opinion, are the finest on the planet. They just sound silky smooth -- very natural. They don't sound like amplifiers; they just sound like the music that is naturally there."

So the new stage was designed from the ground up by professional sound engineers -- Novotny and J.T. Huff of JTH Productions -- who can also speak to the musician's experience. When it came time to start booking acts, a few more music heavy-hitters stepped in to help Nelms get a music series off the ground.

"Brian Crowne and John McIntosh met with me very early on. They saw what we were going to do and they were very excited about it and thought it would be a very special venue," Nelms says.

McIntosh (with 64.6 Downtown in Fort Smith) pitched the idea of a program modeled after the successful Artist, Audience & Community Live! series he founded in that community. Crowne (known as the proprietor of George's Majestic Lounge and booker for the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion) offered to assist in booking the talent for the first lineup. And after a sold-out soft opening with international guitar duo Loren and Mark (arranged by still another Arkansas music legend, Mike Shirkey), the Sunrise Stage Concert Series welcomes a season full of nationally touring and beloved folk, Americana, singer/songwriter and acoustic artists.

"It's going to be a good place to come. This thing is not designed to maximize profitability," Nelms says. "We wanted to share in the community as a whole, but done in a quality way, and I think it's going to give people in this community an opportunity to have a very different venue. It's very different than a bar setting or something like that because the emphasis here is placed on the experience of the music."

As for the name of the new venue, that was easy for Nelms. A fine art photographer, Nelms goes onto the back porch of his Jasper home every morning -- OK, most mornings -- and takes photos of the sunrise coming up over the Ozark Mountains. With thousands of images of sunrises in his collection in all different colors, he felt the images were the perfect metaphor for the fresh venue.

"When you think about sunrise, what does it mean? It's a new beginning for every day," Nelms muses. Besides being part of the logo of the guitar store, Nelms' sunrises are on display throughout the venue, adding color, but also a feeling of optimism for the building's new purpose.

"There are genres out there that are very different from what we've put in [the series] so far, and we'd like to see them utilize the space also. I want it to be a place that's very special for the performers to have and to the audience to join in them. Music is not a one-way street -- it's the musicians putting music out, and on the other side, you've got people enjoying it. A real strong connection between [musicians] and the audience: that's what I told them that I wanted to produce, and they accomplished that."

NAN What's Up on 03/24/2017

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