Look, I still miss Shipping & Receiving. I don’t have the space here to tell you all the ways in which I do, but I did not take its post-COVID transition to Distribution Bar well. I’ve since gotten over it, and I enjoy dropping in to drink a beer, sink into the past for the time it takes to drink said beer, then get out of there before my brain starts living in the summer of 2015 again.
At some point in the near-ish future, however, Distribution Bar will turn into something new again, and for this change, I am very much stoked. Its owners, a group of investors headed by real estate professional Jason Jones and musician/songwriter/producer Robert Ellis, may not have the anything-goes intentions for the space that developer Eddie Vanston did when he opened the bar in 2014, but their aspirations for the room and adjacent areas are novel, sophisticated, and music-centric.
“One [goal] was to make it look like it doesn’t look like somebody’s bar in their garage,” Ellis said, “but also, let’s work towards, like, doing something big, because I really don’t think you can go back in time. … You just can’t make this Shipping again.”
Ellis said that around the time he and Jones bought the bar, “jazz listening spots started popping up globally. … We really loved that concept, but also what I didn’t love about it was that a lot of those places are, you know, it’s kind of like a library and stuffy.”
“Yeah, kind of pretentious,” agreed Jones seated nearby. “And we kind of wanted not that part of it, but we wanted the hi-fi, like, pure audio part of it.”
“So,” Ellis said, “we kind of put our heads together and said, ‘Hey, look, let’s do a high-fi vinyl bar, but … it’s just a music bar, just like a place to fucking hang out. It’s not necessarily a venue, but we want the option to have friends that are coming through town to do shows. Basically, if you like music, it would be a great place to hang out regardless of what’s going on.”
Jones kept most of the technical specs and details confidential, but he and Ellis are doing what he said will be Fort Worth’s first hi-fi vinyl bar, though Ellis reiterated the hi-fi-vinyl-bar aspect is more a draw to get people hanging out.
“I like records,” Ellis said. “Jason likes records, but we just don’t want it to be, like, fucking nerdy, you know? Where it’s just a lot of dudes.”
“Yeah,” Jones said. “I don’t want, like, seven dudes in here listening to like, you know, headphones by themselves.”
The other big change to Distribution Bar will be the name. “Distribution Bar” was an homage to “Shipping & Receiving,” and in a similar vein, Jones and Ellis are paying tribute to another of Fort Worth’s favorite venues.
“Caravan Club is what we landed on,” Jones said, referring to Caravan of Dreams. The epicenter of Fort Worth’s music culture from the club’s founding in 1983 until it closed in the fall of 2001, Caravan hosted performances by a variety of 20th-century greats, including avant-jazz wizard and Fort Worth native Ornette Coleman to thrash-metal heavies Testament.
What happens to the outdoor stage at Caravan Club is to be determined.
“I love [former owner Vanston], and I love the way that it all was, but,” Jones began, “that stage out there … like, you can’t hang light arrays from it, you know what I mean? Like, from a liability standpoint, I think a lot of work needs to go into that space to make it the thing that we want it to be.”
It will be a while before Distribution Bar becomes Caravan Club, but that’s because Jones and Ellis want to do it right.
“There’s just a lot of work we gotta do,” Ellis said, “but our idea really was, ‘Hey, can we bring it back to something cool?’ We want to make this building special again.” — Steve Steward
