Concert coming to Hordville April 1

Banana Rams owner Justin Blase is holding a concert at the Hordville Event Center featuring opening act Tim Buck Too and main act country singer Logan Mize on April 1 from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.
All 350 tickets have been sold, according to Blase, which means close to 400 people will crowd in with bartenders and security at the center. The    lead organizer said he hopes  the event will provide the community with funds for beneficial projects throughout the year.
“Everything I do here is essentially for Hordville,” Blase said. “It’s just trying to put Hordville on the map and make it better.”
The funds for this concert will go to renovations to the Event Center itself, while future shows may cover housing or other projects.
“There’s constant renovations (to the Hordville Event Center) to get it to the point where we’re satisfied with where it’s at,” he explained. “So it’s kind of just the jumping-off point of where we want to be.”
Mize, who is booked to open the event, is a country singer best known for his No. 39 country hit “Ain’t Always Pretty,” according to Billboard.com.
“His private show tour, in between his big band tour where he just does acoustic sets, we applied and there was an open date,” Blase related. “It worked out really well for me.”
Tim Buck Too is a bluegrass-style band that hails from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Also at the event will be a barbecue food truck from Hastings called The Big Pig.
The Hordville native also talked about the local support of neighbors for the event.
“Nobody’s really trying to pump my brakes on what we do here,” he said. “It’s a close-knit community. I mean, I’ve talked to everybody who lives around there. Everybody’s aware of what is going on.”
Blase, who ran the Tri-County Foundation event for three years, noted that the tickets sold out in short order from social media and word of mouth.
“Just social media and then I have two posters up in here,” Blase said at Banana Rams. “It was just word of mouth and we sold out. It’s crazy to think that I could have sold 600-plus and there’s just people every day coming in wanting to buy tickets and we’re just sold out because I don’t want to overdo.”
The organizer foresaw having multiple concerts, shows and productions through the year at the event center, permitting the number of liquor licenses authorized for weddings and other events cannot be more than 12 a year.
“I would love to get comedians that can come through,” he stated. “Just more theatrical events is what I’m excited for at the event center itself.”
To realize his dream, Blase stated it will depend on the support that the events receive.
“The whole purpose of all this is trying to maintain what we’ve got and get to the next step,” he concluded. “It’s not just me, it’s plenty of other people that make it happen. It’s a whole army -- it’s a whole village of people that make an event like this successful.”