Boots to the Moon performs at ABG's in November 2023. Raina Douris/WXPN
Picture your favorite music venue. The place you're thinking of is probably either a bar or it has a bar somewhere in it. You show your ticket, head inside and maybe grab a beer before the show starts. In Provo, there is only one venue where you can do that.
Only one music venue with a liquor license in a place famously strict when it comes to selling alcohol. Billed as the "only proper bar in the city limits," ABG's has shows every Friday night — and it was on one of those Friday nights back in November that World Cafe stopped by to talk to the man who books the bands at ABG's, JR Boyce.
"Living in Provo is like is like being in a David Lynch movie," Boyce says. "It's very wholesome Americana, but you got a lot of guys here that used to be Eagle Scouts and missionaries that sometimes become meth heads and pyromaniacs and things like that. ... There's something a little bit nutty about people who choose to live here, especially people who choose to live here and be a part of, like, the arts community."
JR Boyce books the bands that perform at ABG's. Kimberly Junod/WXPN
After his time as a Mormon missionary, Boyce came to Provo to study at Brigham Young University and to get married, but after arriving, his perspective started to shift.
"There's something about, especially for Mormons anywhere outside of Utah, where you come in and you see: This is the experiment. This is the Mormon experiment. This is Mormonism in its most concentrated form," Boyce says. "For some people, that's great, and this is exactly what they wanted. For some people, it's not the community that they expected or were promised."
You might think that a religion with strict rules might inhibit the proliferation of a music scene, but as you'll hear in this dispatch from our Sense of Place: Provo series, that's not the case here. Boyce explains why music is core to life in Provo, how hard it is to attain a liquor license in the city, and more on the "weird side" of Provo.
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.
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