I have to admit my first encounter
seeing the members of Anti-Scrunti Faction (A.S.F.) amongst the audience at
Kennedy’s Warehouse and on stage was quite conspicuous. In the context of 1984,
sporting mohawks and wearing leather jackets with names of punk bands painted
on them and mismatched thrift store clothes was indeed a bold statement. Mainstream
Colorado culture wasn’t quite prepared for such fashion declarations. Witnessing the four teenaged girls of the band adorned in
such attire reassured me that I was indeed hanging out with likeminded people.
It was difficult not to be an instant fan and admire their commitment in
challenging society’s predisposed perceptions of how young women should look
and act.
Musically coupled with attitude, A.S.F.
was Colorado’s version of a Crass-like band. They were the scene’s de facto voice
of feminism years before other punk groups across America adopted a similar
approach that branched off and created a sub genre within punk. In the scope of
the national punk scene at the time, the band was an island. Collectively the
members confronted issues related to the inequalities within both the scene and
society as a whole sans apologies. With the help of appearing on a Flipside
fanzine compilation album, their song ‘Big Women’ gained the group national
attention. Their cut was a retort to the perceived sexism of a GBH song sharing
the same title.
While the band had no grand agenda in
converting punks to feminism, their honest and raw emotions did evoke awareness.
It could be argued that A.S.F. was ahead of its time in addressing gender
inequalities that would be later give momentum to the Riot Grrrl movement and
later the Queercore scene in the years ahead.
Kat Parker was one for the original
members when the band formed in later part of 1983. Additionally, she
documented the band’s beginning and the people at shows through her photographs
and writing. She was kind enough to indulge me in a little A.S.F. history.
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Kat, Sarah, Tracie, and Leslie. Original photo by Roger Morgan. Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina)
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Friends, shows, and a camera?
I would take my camera when we'd go to shows
to document that moment of time. I wanted to capture what people were doing and
the spaces we were spending time in. It was mainly Kennedy's during that period.
Did you feel the need to capture the punk
movement?
Yeah, I did. Maybe, I didn't consider it a
lot but it was what was going on in my life. When you’re a teenager, what
you’re doing feels urgently important. It was important because there weren’t
many of us. We just had a small group of friends who were interested in the
same things. I think that was part of it.
How did Anti-Scrunti Faction come together?
Leslie had already started another band, a
three piece with Janette playing guitar, Eric on drums and Leslie on bass and
vocals. If I remember correctly it didn't work out because Janette was too busy
with college or finishing high school and Leslie still wanted to be in a band.
Tracie got pulled in at some point. When Janette left they still needed other
members. We were sort of in the same social circle so Sarah Bibb and I got
recruited; it was pretty sudden. Tracie and Leslie already came up with the
name. I was about to get a guitar and Tracie and Leslie were like, you're in
the band because you got own guitar. I think Sarah was brought in the same way
because she had drums and knew how to play. I did not know how to play at all
when we started.
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| Drawings from Kat's notebook. |
Did everyone else in the band know how to
play their instruments?
Leslie had not only done the project with the
other two, she was doing some other stuff. I remember her playing and recording
music by herself. She had a little more musicianship than the rest of us.
What was it like being punk in Boulder at
that time, in a college town with frat boys and college kids?
It was pretty bad in Boulder. I know a lot of
our guy friends got beat up and we were messed with as well. There was a lot of
harassment from frat types on the The Hill. Most of the time people would yell,
"Get a haircut!" from their cars. Sometimes there would be other
comments. There was more menacing stuff such as being chased by someone in a
car. If we were our driving we'd have to look out for other people that would
follow and chase us. I was with a boyfriend one time when we were getting
chased and I don't think we were that radical looking at the time. Maybe his
car was recognizable, I think they were from Fairview High School or something,
but we got chased all the way to his house. When we got to the house he laid on
the horn until they left. The jocks at Fairview would be relentless picking on
the punks. The administration didn't do anything about it. Things didn’t get
better until after high school. Fairview was particularly awful, I went to
Boulder High and it wasn't quite as bad. I didn't get harassed as much, but I
was known as the girl with "the" mohawk because at that time I was
the only girl with that haircut.
What made you want to get a mohawk?
I don't remember. (Laughter) I had been
playing around with my hair: cutting it, spiking it, dying it and I think the
mowawk was just more of a bold statement. Having a baldhead was something
unambiguous.
What did your parents think about it?
Well, I asked for permission to get the
mohawk. My mom said, "Okay." She was fine with all of that. She
wasn't happy when I shaved the rest of it off. Well, I didn't shave everything
off, I left just a little bit of the tail part and the bangs. For some reason
that bothered her.
Yeah, I get it. My parents were fairly
conservative; they weren't down with me getting a mohawk. About the best I
could get away with was having short hair and maybe spiking it with Knox
gelatin.
You can do that and then wash it out. Right.
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The band's debut show. Flier courtesy of S. Slater.
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A.S.F.'s first show?
We played a show with four other new bands at
Kennedy's in early 1984. I had only been playing for about a month and it was
pretty mortifying. I wasn't embracing the not being good part, I wanted to be
good, but I wasn't there yet. I was terrible. There was this thing we used to
do where we'd switch instruments. I would sing, and I could sing and I was
comfortable doing that. Sarah would play my guitar, Tracie played Sarah's drums
and Leslie stayed on the bass.
When you switched instruments, were you
improvising?
We did. We had the drum kit at my house and
we practiced there, that's sort of a loose term. But we hung out a lot together
and sometimes we'd play around with different songs and that is when we came up
with those other songs that were non-official A.S.F. songs. We might have been
playing around with them before I even had the guitar. There were songs I had
written and I think those were the ones I was singing. Leslie was laying down a
bass line that went with it.
I don't remember if I saw A.S.F. on your
debut night, I might have. My friend Jimmy, Ken (Spike), and I were excited to
see an all-girl band. I know for sure I saw A.S.F. at Kennedy’s at least once.
I remember it being sort of a spectacle; the band looked and sounded punk as
fuck on stage just going for it. The band definitely made a splash. I liked the
spirit for sure. So after the debut show you weren't in the band anymore, did
you leave?
I think I stopped playing with them. When the
summer arrived I did my thing, I think Sarah went to Alabama for the summer and
Tracie and Leslie wanted to do the Flipside tour. Sarah continued to play on
the recordings but didn't want to play live. That was around that time we
recorded a few songs for the Flipside compilation. They used our song Big
Women. As for that song, we recorded the Flipside tracks around the same time
as the show at Kennedy’s, maybe in March.
Sarah played on A Sure Fuck EP that was released later.
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| The band's debut EP. Image courtesy of Roger Morgan |
I had sent questions to Tracy and Leslie and
I don't think they wanted to answer them. I would have liked to get a better
perspective on some ways they were influential on the Riot Grrrl and Queercore
scene that later developed. I know that Leslie was in Tribe 8 later on.
With A.S.F. there wasn't any intent on that.
Leslie got involved in that later. The band was more about feminism. Not
necessarily in an overt way, but in the sense that we were female and we
thought that our opinions mattered. Sometimes we were frustrated when we felt
dismissed by people on the basis of our gender.
In some circles, that is still considered a radical point of view.
Stating the obvious, your version of the song
Big Women was a retort to GBH's song with the same title, but was it also
geared towards anybody else? I had a suspicion that it was a comment on some of
the testosterone within the Denver scene.
Leslie wrote the words to that song, if she
had specific people in mind, I don’t remember who they were. Really, I think
she was addressing inequities that still exist in how women are perceived and
in general and how they are included and/or marginalized in social
movements. It was around that time when
some of the Denver punks were really getting thuggish and it wasn't really fun
going to shows anymore. For me, I didn’t really want to go to shows after I
wasn't in the band because the violence was becoming more active. I think
because we were living in Boulder and there was an excess of testosterone in
the frats. You grow up in that environment and you see these crazy-ass pledge
things going on. And you see that extreme versions of masculinity or
femininity. We were in a town where we saw lots of “mating rituals” of college
students such as guys strutting around, shoving, being noisy and girls
strutting and preening and doing the coquettish thing. But you also saw some of
that at the shows. In contrast, we were opinionated, loud, and foul-mouthed. We
often wore boys’ clothes, drank too much, acted rude, and we had haircuts that
people felt they had to comment on. We/I often felt additional jabs at our
“failure” to fit into some tidy package of femininity, at not putting ourselves
on display for male approval. The song ‘Slave
to my Estrogen’ was sort of about that pressure on women to doll-up and dumb
down with lyrics like; “Vanity vanity, I'm losing my sanity. “I’m so pretty,
I’m so dumb, come on baby, let’s have some fun.”
We saw a lot of weird rituals
fraternity and sorority had their new pledges do. There was plenty of underage
drinking and male posturing. There was a frat house with a red door and
according to the stories, if a woman walked out of a party at that house and
was still a virgin then the door would have to be whitewashed. Pledge week
often involved public humiliation as people tried to prove their worth to the
house. I once saw a group of girls walking around The Hill wearing diapers and
chanting something about their sorority.
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Leslie and Sarah at Kennedy's. Original photo from Katherine Parker's collection. Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina)
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I thought the song ‘Slave to my Estrogen’ complimented
the Canadian Subhumans song ‘Slave To My Dick.’
That was part of it. I'm looking at this book
that people in the band wrote comments in during that time so there are lyrics
in there, cartoons...I got it out this morning. A lot of the songs weren’t
developed, we were just farting around and maybe I had a poem and I was singing
along to it or we would say something and sometimes I would get that stuff on
tape.
Since you still have that you must have felt
at the time it was pretty important to document.
A.S.F. was my social unit for that period of
time; we spent a lot of time together including all of our weekends and some of
our weeknights. We were together constantly.
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| EP insert. Image courtesy of Roger Morgan. |
What was it like in Denver compared with
Boulder: shows and the scene in general seemed more centralized in Denver.
It was the Lepers and us, maybe one or two
other projects people were doing or developing that weren’t on our radar. There
were almost no shows in Boulder; we all pretty much went to Denver. It would be
a big deal if there were a show in Boulder County. We had our own little group
of people in our hangout houses. Mostly we would hang out at the house where
Leslie and later Tracie lived. Or the four of us would be at my house. At the
time Boulder was small enough where you knew a lot of people in the scene. If
you went to The Hill you'd probably run into people who were a part of the
scene. It was easy to run into somebody we’d all knew in common.
You mentioned that you had become
disillusioned with the punk scene in Denver?
I think the violence was part of it. I first
started going to shows at 15 and we'd slam dance. It wasn't called moshing. It
was like riding a wave. There was physical contact, but it wasn't painful. I
remember at some point I didn't even want to go out into the pit because people
were using their elbows and I was really short. I guess the energy changed and
became more violent. Early on the slamming felt like more of a release and you
felt safe within your community, It started to turn into these people with
uncontrollable energy and they didn't really care if they hurt people. I
remember the Lords of The New Church at the Rainbow Music Hall, at the show
something was going on near the front of the stage. Stiv Bators stopped singing
and pulled a girl up on to the stage. I think she got her face smashed. He
started yelling at people, "What the hell are you doing?" There was
that mood for a lot of us, we felt like misfits, we didn't fit in with any
particular group and here was this safe space where we didn't have to be
cookie-cutter. When the violence was going on it felt like the scene has been
infiltrated by people who didn't get what punk was supposed to be about.
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| Collection of the author. |
Special thanks to Ana Medina for proofreading.
