13 stops at famous Zoo Bar in 1997

Lincoln, Nebraska’s Zoo Bar is one of America’s great hole-in-the-wall blues dives. Since 1973, the Zoo Bar has been a port in the storm for blues musicians crossing the country’s vast Midwest prairies. James Harman wrote a song about it; Magic Slim had such a love affair with the Zoo that in 1994 he and his family moved there from Chicago. (Slim also released several albums recorded at the club.)

It’s no surprise, then, that 13 featuring Lester Butler would stop in at the Zoo during its 1997 U.S. tour.

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L. Kent Wolgamott previewed 13’s Tuesday, July 29, 1997, gig at the Zoo Bar in a Lincoln Journal Star story a couple of days earlier.

While he passionately sells a band that wouldn’t be playing that week (the U.S. touring 13 was Eddie Clark on drums, Mike Hightower on bass and Enrico Crivellaro on guitar), Wolgamott does an accurate job describing the “menace and drive” of Lester Butler’s band.

The night before, 13 played about an hour up I-80 at the 18th Amendment Saloon in Omaha, Nebraska, as this ad in the Monday, July 28, 1997, Omaha World Herald confirms.

(For our international readers, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution made the production, transport and sale of liquor illegal in 1919. That prohibition would be repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933.)

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Top photo: Zoo Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska, mid-1990s, via zoobar.com.