During the summer of 84,
after an Idiots Revenge practice/wrestling matching in my parent’s front lawn we
piled into Ken’s metallic gold hatchback and drove down to Christian’s to catch
the D.R.I., C.O.C. and Faction show. It was a typical summer midweek night in
the desolate lower downtown Denver: warm with the bums staggering out of bars
around from the corner outnumbering the punks. The “bum mobile” with
its bright flashing lights combed alleyways collecting the passed out drunkards.
The street sweeper followed while the music raged inside. Between bands we
roamed around outside forcing down cheap cans of lukewarm beer complaining
about how warm it was.
As for the bands that
night, it wasn’t your typical hardcore or thrash fare. What Denver witnessed
that evening was a shifting of music on a grand scale, perhaps a merging of
genres. There was definitely some metal influence in the music, though more prominent in C.O.C.’s set. Both D.R.I. and C.O.C. at the time were
treading and infusing a metal sound into their song writing essentially evolving
the hardcore sound that would set standards in the coming years. Appropriately
the term “crossover” would be coined for this style on D.R.I.’s third album
three years in the future.
At the end of the
night I’m certain several people drove home including myself completely dumbfounded
and in awe about the heaviness and sudden chord progressions we saw on stage. I
had picked up C.O.C.'s-An Eye For An Eye LP before the show and had mixed
feelings. I hated it more so after the show because it didn’t translate to what
I witnessed live. The same could be said about D.R.I. though their Violent Pacification
EP was more listenable.
Another person who saw
the show that night was Jim Hale. Jim would later front Burnt Fase, a band I
consider Denver’s first real punk-metal group. The five-piece was something
wicked and brought a new element into the scene that wasn’t always welcomed
by others. Their shows were notoriously tense ridden and would often be an
arena for a showdown between the skinheads and Mexicans, meaning bassist David
Lee’s family and friends.
Jim had pipes and let out ear piercing wails
and screeches while frantically shaking his head to Mark’s bombastic drumming.
If you ever seen a photo of David Lee holding up his bass, he held it like a
weapon until lowering it to blast through songs like an on/off switch. Live,
you wanted to be up front banging your head to the quick assault of the band’s
fury of sound.
When Burnt Fase
recorded and released an LP/CD combo it was suspect. Most local bands barely
had enough money to record and at most release a cassette demo or a 7” EP but
certainly not a CD. Even Wax Trax barely started selling CDs stocking only a
handful. To put it into perspective, the price of buying 2-3 LPs was the cost
of a single CD. For many of us a Burnt Fase CD wasn’t plausible. Without a
follow-up tour, the band appeared as fast as it vanished.
Jim and I chatted about
the origins of the band-how it came to be, going to see real metal bands at the
Rainbow and being chased out of Denver by skinheads. Below is Jim’s story.
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| Burnt Fase one Denver's original crossover band. Original photograph: Unknown. Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob Medina. |
I consider Burnt Fase and Ante Bellum as the first crossover bands in Denver,
what do you think?
The scene seemed to have crossed over pretty quickly; a lot
of bands wanted to get harder and maybe a bit more edgy. It went from punk and when
bands like Corrosion of Conformity (C.O.C.) came through, they were hard punk with
a thrash metal edge. It seems like a lot bands wanted to go that direction at
that point. Thrash metal started to take off about this time as well. I would
say it was more of the thrash than mainstream metal that punk was leaning
towards at the time. Metal was still viewed as pussy rock, whereas thrash
really took more of that punk energy into a harder direction.
Do you attribute the D.R.I., C.O.C., and The Faction show at Christians
that propelled directional change in some of the Denver bands?
That was the show that did it for me; I think it was the Eye
for an Eye tour. Those guys just ripped so hard-they crossed over to heavier
riffs and played super fast. Maybe it was the drop D tuning, it came in so
heavy.
I was always into Bum Kon; they developed a punk metal edge.
They were influential for what I wanted to do. I was really into the metal
world-into all hard bands with the super fast and hard sound. Then I started hearing
some of the punk stuff. I liked that punk was aggressive and fast. As it got be
84-85, bands like Slayer started coming out. Shane from Happy World and I were hanging
out at his house talking about wanting to be the first Slayer band of Denver. That
conversation is where Burnt Fase came out of-we wanted to be a fast thrash
metal band. When we put the band together it didn't come out as hard as I
wanted it, but it was definitely harder than anything going on in the scene at
that point. Once Shane and I got Larry from Bum Kon to join, we started working
on making the band’s fast and hard sound. Larry had a hardcore and thrash
background and started listening to Slayer and was inspired by them. We all wanted
to see what we could do that was sort of like that. Shane was really into doing
something new. Happy World was his first priority and Burnt Fase was his fun
side project at the time.
So your idea of a band was to have a metal influence, but maintain
hardcore sensibilities?
In the 70's I got turned on AC/DC and Black Sabbath early
on. My first concert was KISS and they blew my fucking mind. I got into the Sex
Pistols and Ramones because when I heard them I thought, "Holy crap!"
The Ramones were super fast but not really aggressive. Maybe I was an angry
person and gravitated more towards the harder stuff. The first Iron Maiden
records had sort of a punk influence.
My friend Dave sent Tristan over to my house so he could take
me to a punk show. He showed up at my house with a double green Mohawk and told
me "I heard you're kind of crazy so I'm going to take you to punk shows."
He took me to shows and turned me on to the whole hardcore scene in late 83-early
84. Then I got in trouble and did some time in Gilliam Youth Center, nothing
but good times...
Trouble?
Yeah, trouble with a Capital T. I was an idiot with a bad
attitude towards any type of authority. When I got out, I basically went back
into the scene and attended every show I could see. Butthole Surfers at the
Packinghouse-one of the best shows I had ever seen. CH 3/Samhain-even though
that was kind of a nightmare show, it had all the aspects of a scene I was into.
I was very aggressive and I needed an outlet. When I think back to bands like the
Samhain, they were hard, had a doom sound and didn’t give a shit about anything
or anyone. That was a great combo for any young kid to look up to. Trouble just
was part of the allure to the scene.
Back to you and Shane listening to Slayer.
Shane and I were hanging out with Gigi and I was into thrash
metal, had long hair, went to shows, and we were talking and I said we should
really do a hard band. My favorite band at the time was Bum Kon. Basically when
I first saw those guys, I thought, if I could be in any band I would want to be
in that band. Fortunately for me I became friends with Larry, Mark, Erik, and
Bob so when we started working on building Burnt Fase it was Shane and I
talking then David Lee and I talking. Shane, David Lee and I would hang out and
smoke a lot of weed.... so we decided, let's put this thing together. We
started calling people. I think David Lee just got done playing with Children
of Denial. Shane was already on board, I
asked Larry and Mark if they wanted to do something a bit different and they
were stoked to give it a try. We all got together down at the Yogurt Factory;
it came out sounding good, like country-metal-punk. It was a weird sound.
Our first stuff was super fast short songs. Our first show
in Fort Collins, we all piled into Dave Lee’s molester van, drove up and ripped
that place a part. That when we all knew we had something different and good.
Shane had some conflicts and missed practices. He eventually dropped out because
he was busy with Happy World. We recruited John from Malibu Kens to replace
Shane. It wasn't truly metal-metal; I didn't want a hair metal band. I wanted
the vocals to sound super screamy and the music fast and hard. Punk had almost
been played out; the scene needed bands with a little bit more aggression,
which of course correlated to all the violence that was going on. We fit almost
perfectly in that because unfortunately every time we played there’d be a freakin'
riot, people fighting. We had a lot of people that came: we had David Lee's
crew and those guys didn't get along with the skinheads. There was always
tension and about our third song, Fase Death, and I'm not kidding-every time
we'd play it there was a fight.
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| Flier courtesy of Larry Rasmussen. |
Did you guys ever talk about that at practice or after a show,
"Shit, man, we're like a soundtrack for people to clobber the crap out of
each other"?
(Laughter) We'd have practices and say we're going to go
have fun at our next show knowing that it was probably going to turn into a
riot. We would look at each other during songs and we could just feel it
happening. The show at the Auraria Campus was a bad scene. The skins started
beating-up on Mark's girlfriend Amy. I still had words coming out of my mouth
when I saw Mark running past me. He was playing a skinhead like his snare drum,
hitting him so fast… We're in the pit fighting and the next thing you know
Leroy (David Lee’s brother) and David Lee are in there. At that point, the skins
just straight up hated us didn't want us to have a good show, it was a like
football practice. They would stand at the back of the crowd and line-up then
would run up and hit people trying to enjoy the show.
That is one of the reasons why I left Denver, the skinhead
thing just got so thick. I was friends with the core guys like Jeff, Shawn, and
Tommy. Jeff was always a cool guy with me, it was funny because I had long hair
and maybe it was because I always had weed with me. The new group that came in,
like the Ashleys and Maxwells... Those guys just wanted to fight, disturb the
scene, and play the race card. We didn't play that-we were just out there to
have fun. I was a skater guy that just wanted to skate and go thrash in my band
and that was it.
I didn't have a problem until the Ashley types arrived. I
left Denver because four skins showed up on my doorstep one morning wanting to
kick my ass because I pulled a knife or cut Ashley at the C.O.C show because he
was beating-up some 4-foot kid and he’s like 9-feet. Why was he beating this kid
up? So they threatened my life and I thought I needed to get the fuck out of
there. I was living in Breckenridge snowboarding...so I moved to San Francisco.
That whole skin thing was real, it happened. It was a part of the scene that
was uncomfortable; it was actually the most punk part of the scene. Punk was definitely
a rebellion; if you didn’t have this element of danger in there it would be a
false rebellion. This fit my attitude perfect I didn’t give a shit about
anything but Skating and Burnt Fase and maybe weed and LSD-it made it a little
more edgy and likeable that anything could happen. Jeff actually was good guy
and did a lot more to stop that.
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| Flier courtesy of Larry Rasmussen. |
David Lee's crew?
He had a brother Leroy and he would bring in all his buddies,
which people thought they were a Mexican gang. They weren't. They would show up
and it wasn't their fault, they wanted to party and would get into the pit and
have fun, then the skinheads would see them and they would become a target. The
presence of those two factions ruined a lot of the shows. You had the Mexican
mafia going on and you had the skinhead mafia going on and anytime they were in
the same place at the same time it was never a good thing. Blood was often spilled.
Funny, both groups knew what to expect and they both showed up.
(Laughter). Yeah, it was almost like an invitation when they
saw the flier. However we weren’t always the main people that got it going. The
perfect one was the C.O.C. show at the Aztlan. We showed up, and while we were
playing fights broke out, the skins beat-up the B'LAST! van, people were
getting maced...That is kind of the allure of punk, you didn't know what was
going to happen. It sucked to see a good show turn to a disaster within a
couple seconds, but it happen almost every time we played.
Expanding the punk sound?
I think what happened in Denver, specifically was that the
scene got flooded with a lot of bands with not a lot of distinction. There were
the main bands like The Fluid, Brother Rat, Bum Kon, Happy World, and Rok Tots.
They were the staples. Other bands came in underneath that and all sounded the
same. When you come out with something different, which really wasn't
different, it was just thrash metal with a little punk edge. I think you start
to sway people. Later you have Expatriate with that kind of sound. It brought
the punk thing deeper into the metal scene.
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| Collage courtesy of Jill Razer. |
At what point did Burnt Fase decide to record and document your sound.
In 86 we went to Avalanche Studios to record a quick 6-song
demo. We went in with Shane and it was the nicest studio we could find. David Lee
was funding it so we went with the best we could find. It didn't capture the
first set we had. In 87 we went into Colorado Sound and spent a week there and
worked at nights, paid cash to get a better deal. We spent about $17,000
recoding a CD. Which is more than anyone ever spent on a record in the local
scene I knew of.
Shit! 17 grand?
We came out with a CD, we thought we were going to blow-up...it
was because David Lee had a lot of money and didn't mind throwing it down. It
was his baby, if he wanted to blow it out; he had the means to do it. We were
one of the first bands in Denver to put out a CD; there were literally 2-3
other CDs at Wax Trax. We basically had a good set and the first couple of
shows we played; we thought we needed to record this because we had the money.
Any touring after all that production of putting out the CD?
Ha, no. We pretty much broke-up after putting out the CD.
When the CD came out, we had a launch party and then we had a blowout with too
many personalities in the band...then drugs got involved. At one point David
Lee pulled the trigger and said he was done. We all went with it. Mark and I
weren't getting along that well since we were living together, we had a little
blowout and that's when they started Soak and played a show with the other
singer and later Mark and Larry said, "Hey, why don't you join us"
That was the band for me. Burnt Fase was badass and fun for sure. Soak was the
next level of Bum Kon and that band just blew doors open. It was the best band I
even been in.
Soak felt like a later version of Bum Kon?
It was like Bum Kon version 2.0, the core of it. This is no
slide on Bob; Bob was the baddest-ass guy ever. Bum Kon was my favorite band in
the entire world. For me, getting an opportunity to play with those guys, I was
all over it.
It was the top of the line for what I liked. You can say
that Mike Serviolo is one of the best guitarist I'd ever seen, but for what I
like, it was these guys. Mark is one of the most underrated drummers out of
anybody-he could just pound on the drums like John Bonham. And Larry could play
as fast, as punk, as rock, as thrashy metal as you wanted. And you have Erik on
bass who played it like a guitar, One time at the Grove he played so hard his
fingers where bleeding all over the bass, the most punk rock thing I’ve seen. I
was hanging upside down from the rafters screaming my brains out and see a pool
of blood forming on the ground below…Erik , so badass.
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| Flier courtesy of Larry Rasmussen. |
When I was talking with Davey form the Frantix, he said Ricky compared
Mark to John Bonham and Davey to Keith Moon.
That sounds about right. Those are two guys that never got their
due justice. Mark tried, he lived it, but he had to pull out because of health
problems, because of his back, knees, he’s a thick dude. He had joint issues.
etc. He still plays and makes his own tapes. He’s the best I ever played with.
Great guy. He was so good I would tell him he should push his kit to the front
of the stage and we'd play behind him. People were coming to watch him because
he would hit his kit so hard and loud, just amazing to watch.
After Burnt Fase it seems like David Lee dropped out.
It's out there and most people know the story. It was the
mid-80's and a lot of people in the scene smoked a little pot, snorted some
coke. David got popped for selling so he was shipped off to Canyon City for a
number of years. Mark was involved in that. Soak moved to San Francisco and Mark
couldn't travel so we got Jason Smith for the recording. It was what it was. It
just happened back in the day, there was a lot of shit going on and sometimes
people got popped and that was the game we all played back then. Fast and hard.
It seems like you played extreme music to go with the extreme sports
that you were into.
When I was in Burnt Fase, I was trying to be a professional snowboarder.
I was sponsored. For me it was always an extension of who I am. I like to do
stuff that is on the edge, individual sports...It went great with the music I
was doing, a soundtrack to my life. Soak
sold a couple of songs to commercials, snowboard movies, it was a great avenue
to try and push that genre of music into that stuff.
Burnt Fase stories?
One of the best things I liked about Denver was that we had
house parties and the second time we played was in a basement and this is when
I knew I was in a fricken' crazy band. One of David Lee's guys gets into a
fight out there and we're all in a 10' x 10' room and I'm singing out to a
crowd in another room and the basement starts turning into a whirlwind pit and
somehow somebody gets shanked. Some people pick the guy up and there's this pit
still going on and someone is trying to patch him up against the wall. Someone
comes down the stairs and switches off all the lights and all you can see are
the lights form the amps. It was dark; people are screaming...it was one of the
more exciting shows we ever played. That’s one of the cool punk things about Denver
was playing basements, backyards, Yogurt Factory...It was always amazing how
you can put a show on just about anywhere.
One of the best shows we ever played was in the basement of
Jerry's Records. Ecstasy started to hit pretty hard in Denver. We get down
there and David Lee didn't show so Larry played bass with Mark on drums and Shane
guitar. It was an ad hoc sort of deal; we played on equipment that wasn't ours.
I had a 4’ mic cable and a mic that looked like a spike. It was sharp and I cut
my mouth while I was singing. We played with this crazy line-up to over 50
people in that hot smelly basement. A lot of people said that was one of the
best shows we ever played because we sounded good and a lot of people were on
drugs. Yep those where the days of haze and fun- nothing will ever be like that
again.
