Night Clubs of Winchester: Part Two

Entertainment venues in Winchester face sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges.  Assembling all the ele­ments for a suc­cess­ful night club requires access to cap­i­tal.  A size­able invest­ment must be made to acquire and out­fit a bar, restau­rant and live enter­tain­ment space.  Then, con­tin­u­al out­lays are need­ed to finance oper­a­tions.  Earning a return on invest­ment requires a steady stream of cus­tomers.  Due to the small size of our com­mu­ni­ty, suc­ceed­ing with a club in Winchester requires draw­ing crowds from Lexington and sur­round­ing areas. 

Dixie Land Night Club

The Dixie Land Night Club opened with much promise in the spring of 1984.  Orville Shouse and son Bobby, new­com­ers to the club scene in Winchester, bought the build­ing on Venable Road that had housed the Barn Dinner Theater and Charlie Brown’s restau­rant.  They report­ed­ly invest­ed “bet­ter than a half mil­lion dol­lars” to turn the struc­ture into a mas­sive 400- to 500-seat night club.  The Shouses were in the coal busi­ness in Eastern Kentucky and hoped to draw cus­tomers from the mountains.

For house musi­cians, they secured the Bandit Band, a coun­try-rock group who had been on tour in the Midwest and Canada, and most recent­ly had been play­ing at Cowboy’s in Lexington.  Two of the mem­bers, Jessie Blevins of Nicholasville and John Joslin of Lexington, were hired to man­age the club, and Steve Redmon of Winchester designed the light and sound sys­tems.  They played their own orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al writ­ten by Joslin and cov­ered oth­er artists with their own arrange­ments.  The club planned to book out­side tal­ent on a reg­u­lar basis, begin­ning with pop­u­lar coun­try singer Earl Thomas Conley.

The Bandit Band per­formed five nights a week for almost three years, but by the spring of 1987 they had moved on to become the reg­u­lar band at Rhinestones on Athens-Boonesboro Road.  Due to Lexington com­pe­ti­tion and dwin­dling crowds, the club could no longer afford a house band.  After that date, the club was referred to as the “Dixieland Lounge” and oper­at­ed until 1996 when the name changed to Chances Lounge.  That busi­ness car­ried on for anoth­er decade. 

It should be not­ed that the lounge busi­ness is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from a night club.  Lounges are usu­al­ly bars offer­ing occa­sion­al live music.  Winchester has host­ed many such lounges.

In 1998 Orville Shouse deed­ed the Venable Road prop­er­ty to his two sons, Bobby and Gary Shouse.  I was unable to find when the broth­ers dis­posed of their inter­ests.  The prop­er­ty has changed hands sev­er­al times since the club closed.  The site has since been home to Scott-Gross (indus­tri­al gas­es); GenCanna (hemp prod­ucts); Catalent (phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals); and is cur­rent­ly held by the City of Winchester on a spe­cial war­ran­ty deed.

Gator’s Night Club

In 1992, the Shouses leased out part of the space in their club on Venable Road to Cliff Hagan’s Time Out Lounge.  In January 1994, Time Out moved to the Steak House on Lexington Avenue, and Gator’s Night Club opened in the vacat­ed space.

Weldon Harrison and his son Wallace “Gator” Harrison oper­at­ed the new night club.  Wallace got his nick­name in junior high when he was called “Wally Gator,” which even­tu­al­ly got short­ened to “Gator.”  During his senior year at George Rogers Clark, his start-up band Stryker got to open for The Exiles.  Stryker was then booked by a Florida tal­ent agency, and the band toured through­out the south.  Their most mem­o­rable event:  open­ing for Charlie Daniels at the leg­endary Flora-Bama, a beach bar on the Gulf Coast. 

Back in Winchester, Gator formed a band, Unfinished Business, that per­formed at the club three nights a week.  The band includ­ed Gator on lead vocals and bass, Gary Sloan on gui­tar and key­board, Kenny Stephens and Kevin Hull played gui­tar, with Rodney Hull on drums.  In 1995, Gator formed a new band, Warehouse X, which was fea­tured at the club.  In 1997, Gator’s Night Club moved to Shoppers Drive in Winchester, where they con­tin­ued for eight more years. 

The Academy of Local Musicians induct­ed Gator into their Hall of Fame in 2022.  The Lexington Music Awards rec­og­nized him as the best live sound engi­neer for six of the last ten years and hon­ored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021.  With his com­pa­ny, Gator Music Productions, Wallace is still involved in the local scene as a music pro­duc­er and sound technician. 

To be continued.

Thanks to Shanda Pulliam (now Crosby) for her excel­lent piece on Dixie Land in the Winchester Sun, and to Bob Tabor, Ed Burtner, Randy Patrick, and Wallace “Gator” Harrison.