Moonlighting Musicians
Business by day, Rock after dark Barkelew’s musical life: Business whiz is back in the band
Every Tuesday after work, the members of rock and blues cover band Primitive Soul amble into Bruce Barkelew’s spacious home in southeast Columbia.
The first to arrive at Mansion Studio is singer Dan “Jake” Jacobs, a graphic artist with the Columbia Missourian, and right behind him is bass player Doug Whitworth, a cost analyst for Emery Sapp & Sons who, at age 37, is known as the baby in the group of 50-somethings.
Soon, percussionist Rod Southard, who works with a state agency regulating child care, is warming up. Roofer Jim “Quiz” Quisenberry is tuning his guitar strings. Tom Weislocher, a financial planner and wicked keyboard player, rounds out the rowdy ensemble.
No one can hear the doorbell over the blaring licks of Barkelew’s amplified guitar, but they notice the warning barks of two old guard dogs with very little bite left in them.
It sounds like a bunch of prodigious teenagers covering the songs, but inside, the jokes during beer breaks about the good ol’ days and, of course, the gray hair, show the band’s age.
Barkelew, 53, and his group are not a rock stars—at least not by normal standards. But Barkelew was the equivalent of a rock star in the local business community after he founded the communications-software company Datastorm. After selling the company, Barkelew followed his passion for cars and guitars in creating RaceWerX and GuitarWerX. His love of music has been a constant in his life.
“Music has been there through all my endeavors and really is linked to each of them,” Barkelew said. “If you think about it, computer programming is as much an art as it is a science. And all music is numbers and math.”
It started with a love for the Beatles and the British Invasion. Picking up drumsticks at age 8 and a guitar at 10, Barkelew was always the young one in the band. When he was in middle school, his Mexico, Mo., group would travel to the University of Missouri-Columbia to play at fraternity parties. After high school, he hit the road nationwide with the group Slaughterhouse.
“We got as close as you can get without actually getting there,” he said.
After eight years, however, uncontrollable circumstances broke up the band. At age 26, Barkelew decided to return home and finally go to college. “I had promised my parents that I would go; I just had to live out my music dream first,” he said.
On placement tests, he scored very well on verbal skills and bleakly on the math sections, causing counselors to encourage him to pursue an English degree. Barkelew looked at different criteria for his decision.
“Money has never been a factor, with possibly the exception of when I chose a degree in computer science,” he said. “I needed a ‘real job’ and had read about all the openings in the field. So I thought ‘Oh, I can make money this way,’ but it was still always more for the love of a gear-head.”
In December 1984, at 30, Barkelew graduated from MU with several job offers and the future program ProComm already in the works. He joined fellow MU programmer Tom Smith in San Francisco at Impell, a service company for nuclear plants. But he couldn’t go for the daily grind, so he formed a partnership with Smith and moved back to Columbia after just 11 months.
The dynamic duo incorporated Datastorm on April 1, 1986, with no seed capital. By 1992, the company’s revenue had reached $24.7 million, and Datastorm was named on the Inc. 500 Index. The company grew to 300 employees and became known for its fun atmosphere and great parties.
Music was more than a pastime for Barkelew, however; it was a lifestyle code. “In a band, it’s one for all and all for one,” he said. “On the stage you might have a leader, but you have to stay equals. Partnerships in business are very rarely 50-50, and when I took Tom as my partner, I was advised against it—even to make it 51-49. But I wouldn’t do that. That’s not how bands did it.”
At the Datastorm office there was always a guitar or two on a stand nearby. With a fast-growing business, there was no time to play in a band, but there was always time to play. Guitars kept things real.
After only 10 years, Barkelew and Smith sold the company to California-based Quarterdeck at made millions. At 41, he could retire.
But, as Barkelew put it, “I was never the ‘go fish’ retirement type.”
He did have more time to pick up his instruments, and he reunited with past band members. Always interested in cars and racing (he had taken his parent’s Ford Mustang out for a drag race as soon as he had a driver’s license), he founded Mid-Missouri’s RaceWerX Motorsports. His team, initially known as Datastorm Racing, participated in the Sports Car Club of America series.
“Never won a championship, but we were second in the standings three years running,” he proudly joked.
When a key sponsor pulled out in 2000, it was the end to Team Datastorm, and besides the occasional custom car that still comes out of the shop, Barkelew started on a new—or was it old?—path.
For three years, he prototyped and designed guitars for his new company GuitarWerX.
It never got off the ground, though, and the only guitar to ever get out was for Cheryl Crow. The rest hang in his 24-foot-tall living room or sit on stands to be picked up by friends and band members.
Mansion Studio, his current music production business, was actually started for personal use.
“I’ve been writing music since I could play it, and I wanted to get some of it down on tape,” he said. Then he did some recording for his son’s band and for friends, and the studio business picked up. “I don’t even get to do my own stuff now.”
When he does get to play, he does it with Primitive Soul. The band, as it is now, debuted live in August 2006. Barkelew knew Jacobs in his previous band and has played alongside “Quiz” since high school. When the band needed a player at the last minute, they called up Barkelew, and the group has been together ever since.
“I was never actually asked to join the band, come to think of it,” he said. “I just saw my name on the CoMoMusic Web site and thought, ‘Cool, I guess I’m a band member.’ ”
Always ready to dive in and get hands on in projects, whether cars or guitars, Barkelew is quick to pick up and play. “It keeps me young; it keeps us all young,” he said. “Even with 20-hour days and working hard, you can’t get any better than this.”