Reared in tiny Seven Mile, Ohio, Stev Guyer had his whole world altered with one mind-blowing gift: a transistor radio.

For the 13 years leading up to that transformative moment, his entire worldviewzq had been shaped within the walls of the church, his life soundtracked by liturgical and classical music.

Under the bedcovers one night in 1967, the Beatles, the Doors and Jimi Hendrix presented themselves to him like some electrified late night vision, and a new portal opened at his feet. It was as if he started growing his signature ponytail on the spot.

More than four decades later, Guyer is the chief figure responsible for the success of Shadowbox Live, now bigger and better than ever in its downtown space.

Along the way, he played in a touring rock band, wrote an opera about Merlin and threw midnight raves, all wonderful entries in one of the most fascinating road journals this side of Jack Kerouac.

You grew up in a bunch of places, including somewhere called Seven Mile. With all due respect, what the hell is that?

(Laughs) Very small town, very small school. No lie, we had all 12 grades in one building. The graduating class the year I was graduating was 19. It was incredibly formative and really beautiful. I loved everything about it, man, it was fantastic.

You once were charged with opening for Muddy Waters, but then ended up playing with Muddy Waters. That’s not something everyone can claim.

His keyboard player was sick. Muddy’s guys came up and said, “Muddy wants to know if you wanna play keys …” I’m like, “I don’t know any of your music!” He said, “Dude, it’s the blues …” It was one of those challenges where you can’t say no. I said, “When the chord changes come up, you tell them to me and I’ll play ’em.” It was one of the most terrifying and enjoyable experiences of my life. It was a great time. And then, disco happened. Everyone started spinning records and live music died right there. I didn’t want to play the Holiday Inn circuit, so I went off and tried the world of business in about 12 different ways. I was a landscaper for a while, I sold insurance.

How did that turn out? Predictably?

It was bizarre, the insurance thing; I was a super salesman. It was ridiculous. I made so much money it was stupid. I had a Porsche, a Jeep … it was crazy. But, I hated it. I hated everything about it. In later years, I was able to look back and realized I had always been an actor. When I walked into someone’s home, it wasn’t difficult to assess whom I was talking to, create the correct persona and become friends with that person and sell something to them. It was easy for me. It taught me a helluva lot about acting, and about me and about managing.

Some musicians are derailed by drink or do too many drugs … and some sell insurance.

(Laughs) I grew up as a super-straight kid, and I never stopped being super-straight. I never drank, I never did drugs – I never did a damn thing. It’s ridiculous how straight I am … on those subjects (laughs). It also meant that I had to manage the band … everyone else was so hammered. I learned all these skills that I use every day with Shadowbox.

What’s with the name? As somebody with a difficult-to-pronounce surname, I’ve got to ask you about …

The stupid spelling? (laughs) You can say it. Well, I discovered rock and roll at 13, and at the same time, I discovered rock and roll stars. It was Hendrix. He was so f**king far out in left field and it blew my mind and I thought, ‘Wow, I hope, I pray that someday I can do something that interesting, that revolutionary.’ And so I kind of got into Jimi and I’m looking at the way he’s spelling his name, and one day I’m like, ‘You know, I’m gonna spell my name different, too.’ So I did.

Of course, Jimi had a little chemical assistance getting that far out. So, you never drank, never did any drugs? Ever even smoked a cigarette?

Nope.

Interesting. For this industry, that’s so rare, to not have a vice …

Bizarre, is the right word really. Well, I’m not saying I don’t have a vice, but those aren’t my vices. My vice, I think, as anybody will tell you, is beautiful women.

That’s not a bad vice.

That’s my vice. I’ve been blessed to have beautiful women in my life. I’ve learned to cook; it’s also been a big part of my life. And part of that process has been, “OK, if you love cooking so much, surely you love wine.” So I tried the wine, and I’m like, “Oh God, this is awful!” And somebody says, “No, no, what you’re trying just isn’t good enough, try this,” and I say, “Oh, God that might be even worse!” (laughs) So it turns out, I don’t have the taste for it even if I had the desire. I’ll tell you, too, spending the time on the road, it was not difficult for me to look at the people around me and say, ‘Yeah, I don’t think I want to achieve that state.’ I think I’m pretty happy being where I am. I’ve never had any real challenge going a million miles out in a far distant direction if I just chose to; I didn’t require anything to go there. That state of thinking the unthinkable, that’s kind of my normal state.

One would assume that, for the kid from tiny Seven Mile who discovered Jimi Hendrix at 13, spirituality and religion started to tail away from each other.

As I grew up, as I said, I was going to church constantly, and my mother loved to tell the story of when I was six years old and I asked to meet with our pastor.

How old?

Six.

Six … to discuss your beliefs? Priceless.

So, I sit down with this guy and I ask him these questions, which have to do with issues that I have with Bible stories, and overall the whole thing, and it just goes to this really, really fcked up place. Eventually, he says, “Listen, Stev, God will explain all of this to you when you get to heaven.” And I’m not kidding, I swear to God – and I get the irony – that was the moment when I said, ‘Wow, this is all bullsht.’

It sounds like that a pretty significant moment of your youth.

That was the exercise that kind of pushed me all the way in the other direction. The beautiful thing about it was, as soon as I was able to kind of make that little leap, then a sense of personal responsibility grew immensely. It was incredible the sort of space that I had reserved for religion, and once I was able to fill that with my own sense of responsibility and my own sense of potential, a lot of really, really incredibly positive things happened. As I tell people here all the time, “I don’t care what you believe, that’s very personal; do what’s right for you, man. It doesn’t matter to me, but, whatever your belief system, I’m going to encourage you to maximize your own potential.” That’s really kind of the logic. And it’s worked very well. Just blending all those philosophies.

Tell me about the early Shadowbox days. It’s probably nice to look back on them fondly and smile, since I assume there were a few of those moments when you were probably like, ‘What the f*ck were we doing?’

A lot of those moments, bro. Twenty-three years ago we got together – in the fall of 1988. I had written, in very loose terms, an opera … about Merlin (laughs). My girlfriend at the time said I needed to stage the thing here in Columbus before we moved to New York – that was the plan at the time. So we staged Dawn of Infinite Dreams the following fall at what is now the Athenaeum, but it was the Masonic temple back then. And we talked a bunch of people into helping us out. Why they all got involved probably has more to do with Becky Gentile, who was my partner at that time, personally as well as where Shadowbox was concerned. She’s definitely the co-founder. Just a stupendously beautiful, incredibly persuasive, very clever person who convinced these people that they should help us out. So they did … and the show sucked. The concept that I had created for this piece was just stupid. Basically, it was going to be just musicians and singers, and we were going to be the actors, too. I played Merlin while playing the guitar, walking around this massive stage. It was just so stupid it was hard to believe.

There’s something so awesome about how terrible that sounds.

It was like watching a train wreck. You know, you couldn’t turn your head away from it. Like, ‘My God, that’s horrible …’

Too bad it was 1988. Today, that’d have 36 million hits on YouTube – you, in your ponytail, walking around with your guitar as Merlin …

And I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t have a full ponytail at that time because I had spent several years as a working model, so at that point I was into the mullet phase. Oh, it was nasty.

Mulleted Merlin?

Yup (laughs). Walking around, playing guitar. At the end of it, a tremendous number of people came up and said, “You know what? This was a really cool idea. And you’re a talented songwriter. You need to keep doing something.” Seriously? I thought, because this sucked. So I went back and I rewrote the piece, and this time I actually wrote it. I composed the whole damn thing. And then wrote it all out. Taught myself to read and write music, so I could write the whole thing out. And the next year was a dramatically superior show.

Guyer and his crew eventually moved into part of a space they had outfitted for an artist friend at the Buggyworks, holding shows for crowds of 12-15 people every once in awhile to keep their chops fresh for the yearly opera they were now putting on. After several conversations about how bad Saturday Night Live “sucked,” at the time, they elected to forge into live comedy, writing, rehearsing and performing original shows every week beginning in the fall of 1991. While in production for their second opera, and with Dawn of Infinite Dreams on tour in Pennsylvania, Guyer recalls being informed that their artist friend was delinquent on several months of rent.

We suddenly have a lot of back rent to make up if we want to be able to keep this space. So what the hell could we possibly do? So we decided to have late-night raves, of course. That’s the solution to everything! (laughs) So we do a show on Friday nights, tear out the curtains, tear out the little stage that we built, bring in a DJ, get a temporary license to sell some beer, and we open the doors and have a rave from midnight to 5 a.m. And we were cool, so our rave was called 2XMo – two times a month – and the only advertising we had were business cards and they said 2XMo with a phone number and when you called the number all that it had was a voice recording that said what time and where and that was it.

The straightest guy in America starts his own midnight raves.

I’m not lying; we might have had eight people there, maybe. But, we were committed. We were going to do it Friday and Saturday, wait two weeks and then do another Friday and Saturday. So the first Friday and Saturday, total for the whole weekend we might have had 20 people. But, we knew we had to try it one last time. So, we’re getting ready for the rave, and we’re all kind of moping around and expecting the absolute worst … and then, near midnight, I go over to the window and look outside … and see the parking lot is completely packed with cars, and there is just a sea of humanity at our door that stretches completely out of sight. And then I look a little more carefully at the sea and I realize that it’s 99.9 percent guys. And the light bulb goes on: the gay community discovered 2XMo. And no lie, the next time we did it, we were f*cking packed. And I mean _packed_. We had to hold people outside, we were so packed. And then a few would leave and a few more would come in. It was just the most incredible thing ever.

The raves got Guyer caught up on the back rent, just in time to be shut down by a fire inspector, who came looking for an occupancy permit the fledgling theater company was too naïve to know was required. Then, once they found a space on Spring Street, it burned to the ground, spinning them out to Easton, where they remained for more than a decade, developing into to the full-scale comedy theater with more than 50 full-time employees that, today, occupies the space at 503 South Front Street.

How in the world can you justify doing it all these years? Is it just that you can’t see yourself doing anything else? I mean, you’re talking about code problems and back rent and drug addicts and late night raves and fires …

At the end of the day, I love what I do, and I love the people I get to work with. Honest to God, that’s what makes it worth doing. I’m not personally on stage a lot anymore, so that’s not my motivator. I get off on producing these shows; I get off on the vast amount of new work that we create. No one creates more new work than Shadowbox. Period. That’s incredibly satisfying. We’ve created a world here, where we can create art at a stupendously high level, because there are so many talented folks around who are completely committed in terms of the time and energy that they have and their own personal benefit from the experience. Creating great art gets to be what we do as human beings, that’s our job. This made all those drunken idiots and code violations worth it; this is why we did it. This is the dream, man.