Shawn Slater Denver Skins

Friends,

I'm currently in Las Vegas working with Sonny on the layout. Good news is text and images have been placed, Next the fine tuning. Sonny is making the magic happen. Do yourself a favor and preorder the book and get extra goodies in the mail next week. You can do this by visiting: http://bobrobart.bigcartel.com 

The book release date has been set.
Date: Saturday, October 10 2015
Location: Mutiny Information Cafe 2 South Broadway Denver, CO 80209
Time: 6 pm
Special musical guests TBA

excerpt of Shawn's interview. 

What do you think what eventually happened in the Denver scene? At one point, a lot of new kids arrived calling themselves skinhead and had a different take on what you guys started out as?

I don't know where all that came from. It was gradual. It didn’t happen overnight. That second Black Flag show at the Rainbow Music Hall. That was when Gary had all those business cards made -- Support Your Local Skins, the Few the Proud the Nazis. That's when we gave one to Henry, and he jumped off the stage to come after me. That's when Jeff came up and told Henry, "You might get one shot in, but we're going to kick your fucking ass."

Did he back down?

He got back up on stage, said something about it, and that was it. When we were younger, everybody was pissed off at the world. What path were we all going? When we look back to those days we essentially woke up, partied, listened to music, skateboarded, rode bikes, and we didn't care about what was going to happen the next day.

At the time, did you feel that kids involved with hardcore had a lot of energy and did extreme stuff like ride BMX bikes, skated ramps and gravitated towards music like punk.

You gotta look at people that did that sort of thing in Denver. They were outcasts. I moved from Southern California in 1977, and my first day of school in 6th grade I was wearing Vans and someone tells me, "My grandpa wears shoes like that." Right from the get-go at that age, you had your jocks, your freaks, your hicks … I really didn't have that in California, it was like, "Hey, buddy, let's go to the beach." You grabbed your boogie board and went to the beach. At school, they were telling me, "No, no, no, you gotta wear Adidas.” As I got into 9th grade, you had to be a jock, you had to do this ..." Fuck that shit. I remember one of my teachers telling me I was the good jock gone bad. I played football, I played lacrosse, and I followed that fucking norm. One day I got invited to punk rock and realized that this is what I liked. We looked at all the magazines. All the punks skateboarded and BMXed, and that's what we gravitated towards. Look at how many people showed up to the ramps after school. Everyone went over to each other's house and hung out. It was all tight-knit.

Eventually everyone in the scene started grouping themselves. We're the peace punks, we're the skins, we're the hardcore punks, we're the junkie punks ... It was weird that everyone started getting labeled into little groups. During the whole time, I was in the scene, I don't think I ever fought anyone in the scene ... with the exception of one skinhead who was talking shit and got his mouth pounded. If you really reflect back to that time, what troubles really existed within the scene? I remember the last show at Kennedy's, but that was just one big drunken onslaught and everybody tore that place down.

to read more, order the book. 

Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina)