Doors at 8pm. Show at 9pm. $5. 21+

River Kittens
“Vogler grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and when in 2011 her application to Americorps was accepted, she learned that she’d been assigned to St. Louis, a city she’d never visited before. She’d been a street performer in Little Rock, so when she got here she started going to open mics to play her songs and meet people.

Martha Mehring, who had just returned to St. Louis from a stint in Colorado as a guide on rafting trips and was working in a restaurant in town. She had the travel bug and was trying to decide whether to stick around or hit the road, and had just started singing at open mics a couple months earlier. “We had a mutual friend who was like, ‘Come to this open mic,’” said Mehring in a recent interview. “She was there to see Allie, and I came. I didn’t even know how to play guitar, I wasn’t really — I wasn’t playing music out.”

That night decided Mehring’s path. She saw Vogler play, and, “My friend’s like, ‘Get up there, you should sing too,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘I can’t play anything,’ so I just went and sang an a cappella song. And Allie was like: ‘We should sing together.’ She was so about it. She said, ‘We need to start a band together. Or just come over and jam!’”

That was roughly two years ago, and that was the beginning of River Kittens. “I came over to your house,” says Mehring to Vogler, “and I remember I was so nervous. I had never gone over to, like, jam with anybody before. We wrote a song.”

“That first fuckin’ time!” says Vogler, sounding still surprised. “We wrote a song about Jack White.”

“I was so — it felt pretty good,” recalls Mehring. “I’d never written a song before.”

“First time hanging out together, just writing a song,” says Vogler with a smile.

From there, it was on: River Kittens started playing around town at open mics, bars, wherever they could find a spot to fit in. Local musician Neil C. Luke was beginning to document the city’s rowdy bar-based music scene in his STL Here & Now project (still ongoing), and captured some of those early River Kittens performances as a duo. Their voices blend naturally, Mehring high and Vogler below, on songs like “Praise Be,” as they captivate an audience of fellow musicians who join in on the chorus refrain. Mehring started playing guitar, and Vogler included the occasional banjo in their sets.

They ran as a two-piece for about a year until, sure enough, another open mic delivered the next piece of the puzzle. “God, that was also a very serendipitous day,” says Mehring, turning to Vogler. “I’m on my way home from work and she’s like, ‘Come to the Crow’s Nest!’” She showed up, they played a couple songs, and caught their first glimpse of Maddie Schell, a bad-ass bartender who worked there but had just gotten off for the night.

“I was jamming with my friend Jason Scroggins,” says Schell. “He’s mainly a bluegrass musician. And I was playing my mandolin, and they showed up to play, and they sang a couple songs and I was like, ‘Oh, these girls are good.’ And then I stepped in to just pee or something cos we were all drinkin out there cos Doug kept buying shots for everyone —”

“Oh yeah!” go the other two at once.

“— and then they cornered me.”

Mehring jumps in. “This was how we knew she was the one: she was playing the mandolin with a cigarette in her mouth, singing Bob Dylan. And I was like, ‘This chick!’ We’d been thinking about adding a third member for a while. Not just anybody, it had to be somebody who shares our views, with our snarky female empowerment songs that we do. It’s gotta be a rough and tumble, down and dirty chick!”

“Yeah, they were like, ‘You should be in our band, we’re gonna practice tomorrow night,” says Schell. “You know, a lot of times when musicians are like, ‘Yeah, totally, we should jam sometime,’ then you never fuckin’ do it? Well I actually showed up the next night to their house.”

Which is where she got a surprise. “They started the night by writing — they wrote a song for me the day they met me. Called ‘Maddie.’”

“And how we wanted her to be in our band!” says Mehring. “We’re like, if she can handle this weird song we just wrote about her being in our band…” Vogler jumps into the lyrics, followed by Mehring: “Maddieeee / One day your PMS / will sync with mine and Marty’s, we’ll be a mess.”

“A real hot mess!,” they finish in unison.

“So that sealed the deal,” says Schell.

w/ Clay and The Wildwoods