Oi! Uberfall-Denver's controversial punk band.

“We are united” was Uberfall’s rallying call for scene unity. The members of the band seemed to have links to all aspects of the scene from skinheads, to punks, to goths and even befriending artists and experimental musicians. The reach of their friendships and connections were vast and varied.

Once the group formed, it was impossible to get away from noting the band’s kin to a swastika logo spray painted in alleyways and dumpsters around the Capitol Hill neighborhood and beyond. Uberfall was even a household name amongst detectives within the Denver Police Department as I learned firsthand sitting in the back of an unmarked car along with two friends being questioned about the so-called Uberfall gang. To read about the incident click HERE. The band certainly found themselves in many spotlights. 

Musically, the group’s niche was stop on a dime crisp sing-alongs. That didn’t keep the band from experimenting with slow dergy and sometimes noisy tunes. Uberfall recorded a 10-song demo that never saw the light of day due to a lack of funds for a properly release. Plus the continuous line-up changes plagued the band since the group’s inception. One of the running jokes was, “Raise your hand if you’ve never been in Uberfall.”

Uberfall was more than a one-liner. The depths of their sideline controversies and shenanigans were largely disconnected from their music. One of the misconceptions was that they were merely a band, when in fact the group’s in-your-face guerrilla art tactics generated strong reactions from the public and authority figures. Big John and Flye were basically the visionaries of the band. Eventually one strong personality inched out the other and everything downward spiraled from there. All the ingredients were there to create a legacy, but the band couldn’t maintain their charismatic mojo that made them a momentary sensation. Big John, Flye along with Carl shed some insights to the inner working of what it was like to be in Uberfall.

An early line-up of the band. Original photograph from DMT fanzine. Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina)

Your origins?

Big John: I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  I was part of Wyoming’s first hardcore punk rock band, Spontaneous Down Syndrome. We played our first gig in Colorado at a nice place. They had a deli tray and beer waiting for us. We were really impressed. They called us and asked us to come down and play, we were like, “Sure.” Then they asked if we wanted anything special. So we said, a 12-pack of good imported beer and deli tray with an assortment of meats and cheeses. When we arrived at the show, they took us into the back and pointed us to our dressing room, “The beer is in the fridge over there!” I looked over at Paul Howard and said, "Oh my God, they were being serious." I think that's the night I met Pete Flye and we started hanging out. Anytime we'd play Denver I'd stay over at Flye's house. Paul had other friends in Denver he stayed with. That's how we got Uberfall going. I didn't want to live in Cheyenne anymore. The town was really boring in comparison with the scene in Denver. We played about 5-6 gigs in Denver before I finally moved.

How did you get into punk being in Wyoming?

Big John: My parents got a separation and my mom and I moved into an apartment. One day I'm in the apartment and hear music coming from the next-door neighbor. It sounded really cool and I liked it. I wasn't shy at all, I put down the book I was reading and walked over to the neighbor’s house and knocked on his door. He opened it and I said, "Wow, what kind of music is that?" He said, "Punk rock." This guy was an English teacher at the high school I was going to. So the guy who would later become my teacher introduced me to punk rock. At that point I had been mostly listening to the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop.

And you Flye?

Flye: I got a scholarship to a private school and that is where I met Carl. I started going there in the 4^th grade. Carl and I started hanging before I got kicked out in the 8^th grade. I didn’t do well academically plus I wanted to grow out my hair, which they didn’t allow. So we had a special meeting during which I told them art and music shouldn’t be mandatory classes. I eventually went to vocational school and Carl also went there. At the time he had turned me on to Bad Religion, Circle Jerks… I met the skins because of little Sammy who went to the same school. I befriended Sumo at Wax Trax, he was the guy that didn’t have any attitude. He would always give me fliers trying to get me to go to shows. I had wide spectrum of friends.

I went to school with the original bassist, Mike Lee. Since he knew I was taking art classes, I think by default asked me to design a sticker for the band. While I was in Biology class trying to draw the perfect skull with the Uberfall logo on the forehead, my teacher, an Orthodox Jew walked past my desk and kindly asked me not to draw what she thought resembled a swastika. Would you consider the band’s logo as a way to stir the pot, to make people feel uneasy?

Big John: The name came about because our drummer Matt Johnson had a party one night. We were trying to think of a name for our band and Matt grabbed a German dictionary and said, "I'm just going to randomly open a page and the first word I put my finger on will be our band name.” Flye and I thought, "Ok, that sounds cool." He opened it up, spun his finger around and put it down in the word, uberfall. When we saw the definition, “to overthrow” we collectively thought, “That’s cool!” Out of that we were trying to make a logo, and the U and the F together looked kind of like a swastika and thought it was pretty hilarious. We went ahead with that. It was meant to be a red herring, make people think one thing then have it mean something totally different.

Flye: The logo definitely served its purpose. You want a symbol that draws attention and demands an explanation. Something easy to draw on a school desk, spray paint on a wall or paint on a jacket. Most of all, with punk rock, you need controversy. Look at bands like Dead Kennedys...now it's almost a household name. It’s very offensive. Same thing with their logo...how many kids had that logo on their jackets and couldn't name one DK album? The UF logo may have been somewhat of a joke, but I considered it more of a promotional gimmick.

Uberfall art. Unknown. Courtesy of Pete Flye

Did you get a lot of shit for that?

Big John: We got tons of shit for that! Anytime we had our jackets with our logo painted on them people would get so mad. It was great for us-we loved for people to get mad; it was attention. I know it got the local police a little worried. I thought that was just awesome.

Did they think you were some sort of gang?

Big John: Yeah, they thought we were some type of underground neo-Nazi punk gang. Then the whole Christian’s thing happened. Christian and Omar took over a space on Larimer Street, which they appropriately called Christian's. It was basically a commune with a bunch of artists, punk rockers, and weirdoes living there. The brothers had been separated from their parents when they were young and put into a home for boys where they were mistreated by the staff. The staff would tell them stuff like, "You know you need some new sheets for you bed since they are really dirty and maybe you'd like another blanket, but we don't feel good giving that to you unless you tell us something really private about your lives." The brothers would tell them things and then they would use those things to keep them in the home instead of finding them a place to live outside of the system.

There was an former military guy living at Christian’s and knew how to make bombs and stuff like that. He left brochures and pipe bomb making materials outside everyone's door one day. Christian and Omar got into making them. Omar sent one to the head of the program that he and his brother had basically been trapped in when they were kids. It was suppose to detonate when she opened the package, but it didn't. They found out the Federal Postal Inspector and the FBI was looking for them so they disappeared. Nobody knew the pair’s whereabouts. They were good about not telling anybody. Since they couldn't find them, they decided to investigate all of us. That's when the government came up with the gay neo-Nazi conspiracy theory and linked Uberfall to it.

Gay neo-Nazi conspiracy theory?

Big John: They knew Christian was gay so they just threw the rest in there. They thought that Uberfall was some sort of organized neo-Nazi recruiting arm of something larger. I don't know what they thought, but they figured we were a part of it. Their one-way window vans were parked out in front of Christian’s and in the parking lot behind it. I remember when I had to go in and talk with the FBI and the Federal Postal Inspector. There was this camera image of Mike Lee on the back bumper of one of the vans shaking it. They were, "You know this illegal, and this is considered interfering with an investigation." I said, "Mike just thought it was a random person's van, he didn't know it was the FBI. “You're in such secret vans, how could we know you guys were the Feds?" One of them tells me, "You're a real smartass."

Some of this came out in Westword, the article was titled: Pipe Dreams.

Big John: A lot of it did come out. You know, the Feds even had our phones tapped. We'd make-up fake conversations pretending to know were Christian was, stuff like, "He's in Hawaii now" The FBI would later interview somebody else and say, "We know that Christian is in Hawaii, which island is he living on?" We were passing around bogus information; it was pretty funny.

What happened to Omar and Christian?

Big John: Well, they both got caught and went to prison for a long time. I don't recall the outcome after that.

They were born to be institutionalized-from a home for boys to prison?

Big John: It's sad. They were both really nice guys. I just think the system fucked them up.

Flye on the cover Rocky Mountain News Sunday Magazine. Collection of the author. 

Do you also think the attention you got from the police was partially due to all the band's logos painted everywhere?

Big John: It was. We'd make little propaganda fliers and randomly put them up in different places around town that would say stuff like: The time for the revolution is now. We did stuff just to fuck with people and authority. We knew they were watching, so we wanted to give them something to do.

They should be out there fighting crime instead of chasing a bunch of punk rockers wasting taxpayer’s money.

Big John: I was into graphic art before I knew it was called that. It was like a little hobby making propaganda fliers. I would only make 10 or 15 and take spray adhesive and put them up in different parts of town in places like Cherry Creek.

Did the attention help popularize and propel the band?

Big John: Definitely. It was band propaganda for sure. The more shit we could stir the more people were interested.

At what point did you finally stop playing in Uberfall?

Big John: I thought about why I left Uberfall…then went, “Oh, yeah” and remembered the band having different people in it all the time. It was a revolving door of members. It wasn't even the same band anymore. Towards the end when I left it was like 5 months of different people. It was just Flye and I.

I left shortly after I joined Idiots Revenge. I was also doing my project Control Corporation, which was techno/electric stuff. We had those lovely samplers and stuff like that. That was mainly my project and sometimes Scott Hosterman would join along. We really didn't play out as a band more than once. I also did this industrial project with Flye and a couple of other people. It was basically this percussion thing with found objects from around the Packing House. We thought making sound with the objects would be interesting and it was.

Carl: I honestly don’t remember leaving the band. The place where we were practicing got sold or the renters got evicted and it took me like 2 months to get my drums back. As I recall that time was kind of a hiatus for UberFall. I was going to this Shamanic church at the time, and I got Mike Lee involved and he disappeared for like two weeks on some crazy camping spirit quest. Those are the last things I remember about my time with the band.

Flier collection of Pete Flye. 

Denver was a hotbed for experimental music, My theory is I think underground music in Denver had an art element to it because early punk shows happened in spaces like the Pirate Art Gallery, and later the Art Department, Flash Flood Art Space, The Core…beside people in Colorado were somewhat isolated from the coasts and didn’t have any sort of templates to follow. Do you think there was a strong relationship or a correlation between the two?

Big John: I really think there was. I met Bert Bodnen, Hugh Caney and Paul Dickerson at Christian’s and really got along with those guys and they started introducing me to industrial music. I was over at Kelly Cowan’s house and I picked up one of his records and asked him about it? He said I wouldn't like it. I said, "It looks really interesting, would you play it for me?"  It was SPK. I liked it. He was shocked and asked if I wanted to listen to other stuff. And I was, "Yeah." It was through meeting them how I became involved with industrial/experimental music.

What was the relationship between punk/hardcore/industrial music in Denver at that time?

Big John: Those guys were interested in the punk scene because it was underground. I think though that they met other people. They had access to people putting on shows, like Headbanger.

I remember asking Mike Lee what he was doing one evening, and he said we're having a band meeting with our manager? That sort of caught me off guard. At the time, I didn't think local punk bands had managers. Managers seemed anti-punk in a way. He described it to me that all the members sat around and talked about stuff. I guess in today's terminology, it sounded like you guys had group therapy with a life coach (LAUGHTER)...I don't know, maybe because the band was a revolving door of band members. Perhaps Big John and Pete Flye were just difficult people to be in a band with and you needed that mediator to make sure the band got along.

Big John: Was Carl Frank one of our drummers?

He was the drummer on the band's demo!

Big John: Oh, now I remember Carl. We had gone through so many drummers. It was like that mockumentary Spinal Tap. We had a manager. We met these two guys from Nederland, CO: Dan Lockridge and Robert Hall. They were fun to hang out with and both had a lot of money. When we met Dan he was talking about wanting to manage and record bands. When he said "record" Flye and I both looked at each other and asked Dan if he wanted to be our manager. He casually said, “Yeah, ok." That's how we got into the studio. It was great because we didn't have to look for shows anymore, he just found them for us.

Flye: Dan also opened Flash Flood Art Space. We helped him clean-up the place and made it so bands could play gigs in there. As for Uberfall playing shows, a lot of times we would throw our guitars into a car and show up to gigs and ask if we could play. Maybe borrow another band’s drum set and amps. Sometimes Dan would slightly manipulate other bands into letting us borrow their equipment. That’s what happened at the Flash Flood show that Nate mentioned in his interview. We weren’t on the bill and while everyone waited for Bum Kon to play, we got on stage and did a couple of songs. We probably played a 10-minute version of Sex and Violence.  

Carl: I got to record with UF on this session and it was a really good time. We were recording at Barking Spider in Boulder and staying with the band’s manager in Nederland. We talked about releasing it, but I think I had moved on before that came to fruition. I don’t think anyone had money at the time for duplication and artwork.

Flier collection of the author.

Uberfall's first show was my band's first show too, at the Packing House. We opened, but you guys already had a fan base, so you went on 4th or 5th. I think you blazed through your set and people wanted more. So you played Oi! Uberfall twice.

Big John: We thought the 10 songs would be enough. When you're playing everything speeds up. The three-minute songs turn into a minute and twenty second song. As for people coming to see us that night, it was Pete Flye’s doing. He was a kid that people liked. He was super social and got out there told people about coming to see his band.

Flye: One of my main objectives was scene unity.  Not only did I really like the Oi! sound, but I really loved the early L.A. stuff and the whole D.C. movement. We tried to incorporate these influences to draw a wide fan base. We also tried to book shows with bands with different followings and sounds, not only did this draw a diverse crowd but it allowed people to hear us and other bands that normally wouldn't. I loved playing shows with Mau Mau 55, Human Head Transplant, A.S.F. etc. 

In the beginning, Uberfall was more punk than Oi!  Your look and Oi! sound didn’t develop until later. It seemed that the band was hitting its stride both in image and music. Describe that time.

Flye: We all pretty much had or hands in the mix when we made songs. Sometimes I would show up with some lyrics and John or Mike would come up with a melody. There were times John would show up to practice with a whole song. "Oi! Uberfall" started out as a bass riff Mike came up with and I wrote the lyrics. Carl would always have good input on tempo and structure of songs. As the band slowly disintegrated I was leaning towards the Oi! sound and was looking for members to fill that genre...that was my big mistake, looking for members to fit the mold instead of letting members mold the band like we did in the early days.

It was difficult to find a practice space especially since we had problems keeping members. We shared a practice space with H.H.T. on 11^th and Broadway above a beauty salon. Later in the band’s career I told a guy he could be our manager because his mom or aunt let us practice in their basement.

The name, logo, the charisma of the band members seemed to be the initial success of the band. Uberfall seemed like that band that had potential to go far, but it never did.

Big John: What happened to us is we...certain people in the band started taking it too seriously and started to show a lot of ego. Every time we had good band members, an argument would happen and they would quit. And we had to go back looking for replacements. With every new batch of people they progressively were less talented. I think what we had when we first started was great with a lot of potential. Even after the 2nd or 3rd generation still had the potential but it just got worse.

The more Oi! version of Uberfall. Original photograph unknown. Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina)

I hear you on that. I know by 1986, Flye even recruited me to play in the band and we went over to some death rock guy's house. He was decked out in his black clothes and white make-up. After trying him out, Flye and I get back into the car and earnestly asked me what I thought. It was hard to imagine that guy playing those songs. To me there were always two different Uberfall bands. At the beginning there was the casual, come as you are, let’s have some fun and spray paint our logo around town, type of band. Then there was the later period Oi!/street punk looking guys Pete had recruited that were good as well, but the band couldn’t maintain the momentum. The band eventually took a dip and seemed to be trying out anyone who had a car and equipment. I understand wanting to keep a band on life support, but in retrospect I think Flye should have taken his talent and done something different.

Big John: It just got way to serious. I think in our punk scene, the more fun you had, the more successful you were. Sure, you did your practices and tried to become better, but the main thing was just to have fun.

Like the Lisa Geyer song, Bad Girl?

Big John: That was just fucking with Lisa.

Flye: She wanted that song dedicated to her and always asked us to play it for her. That’s why we put that song on the demo. Come to think of it, the music from that song was from of Big John’s old bands. I think he might have done that with several of our songs.

Yeah, when John joined my band, Idiots Revenge he would say such and such part was from one of his old bands. We even took an old Uberfall song, played it backwards at a slow tempo. John was a master at recycling melodies.

Flye: (Laughter). Yup.

John, one of the interesting aspects about your personality is that you are a cross between a conceptual and performance artist in that you come up with these ideas and you try to see how far you can get away with things. Even when you played in Idiots Revenge we had that song ‘Not My Fault’ and you would target Anarchy Annie, and the A.S.F. girls, who in turn thought we were a sexist band. We totally weren't!

Big John: You’re right we weren't, that's what was funny. I remember being at a party and Annie came up to me and said, "Why are you guys such dicks, why do you have to be such a dick? And I said, "Why are you even saying this to me?" And she goes, "Your music, you're just nasty sexist dicks" Finally, I go, "You take our music seriously? Can't you tell when somebody is poking fun at you, we don't really want to make anyone angry, we're just teasing." I'm not going to be singing, “Stop your bitchin' and get back in the kitchen” and be serious about it. I'm not a caveman. So she finally understands it's a joke. After that conversation they all liked us. I like to push the envelope and do little pokes at people and see the reaction. I never mean any harm. It's more along the lines of, “Lets see what they do if I do this.”

Burn any bridges with this approach?

Big John: I think it's about a 50/50 deal. I burnt some and made others stronger.

After making the demo did you want to make a record and go out on the road?

Big John: We were hoping to put out a record and there was some interest. I don't know what happened to that. Dan was actually a good manager and he grilled the label with questions and told us that we wouldn't have been happy with the deal and we would get screwed in the end. In retrospect being screwed wouldn't have been that bad if it got our record out. (Laughter) I don't know, we had our principles back then. We did play out of town like Boulder, Ft. Collins, and Greely...a poorly attended show.

In the interview I did with Ted of Dead Silence, I asked him what went down between his band and Uberfall. What was your version of that?

Flye: I think the interview you did with Ted was the first time I heard about Kevin referring to me as a Polish Nazi. Dead Silence was putting on a benefit one time and we reached out and offered to play. They didn’t want bands playing they thought would bring out the skins. In the true Oi! fashion, like on the Oi! compilation albums John wrote a poem about that incident then we wrote a song called Dead Silence. At shows, John would read the poem before going on into the song. One of the lines in the song goes, “Waited for a call but all we got was dead silence." We had fun like that.  

Uberfall, Denver’s premier punk gang.

Giving detectives a crash course on Denver punk rock.

(Part 2 of Idiots Revenge is still under construction. In the meantime enjoy this ditty from the archives. The event occurred on an early afternoon in the summer of 1985.)

Toledo Pat, Spike, and I had just walked out of Wax Trax and were about to drop off our records in Spike’s car then head over to 7-11, when two plain clothes cops showed us their badges. As they escorted us to their car I was thinking how typical it was for them to be harassing punks. We asked them if there was a problem. They said there wasn't, but they wanted to talk with us. 

The three of us sat in the back seat of a squad car. The cop on the driver’s side locked the door so we couldn't leave. We were feeling pretty anxious. We thought they were going to take us somewhere and beat the shit out of us. I've seen a couple of Denver’s finest lay into other punks pretty hard for no reason at all. Their taunting tactics starts with name-calling, you can see it in their eyes how they itch for a reaction or the slightest provocation to make us their punching bags. Their hatred for us was purely based on the way we dressed. The mentality was; if you’re living outside the conventions of what “normal” people wear, then you’re obviously a threat to society. This was one of the symptoms how punk was negatively portrayed in the media. They asked for our ID's. Spike and I handed ours over. Toledo Pat searched for his and said that he left his wallet at home. They ran a check on our licenses while they gave Pat a shit storm for not having his. “Pat, we need social security number, DOB, address...” The officers were irritated. I could see them letting us go and driving off with Pat. Ten minutes had gone by and we were becoming a little more nervous, sweaty palms and all. We saw a few of our friends pass by on the way to the record store. This was good. I was thinking that if for some reason they decided to take us away, we had witnesses. Our thoughts were becoming irrational at this point because nobody was saying anything. The officers in the front were waiting for a call on our ID's. Like a dumb ass, I asked the cops why they had us in the car when a voice came over the radio. Then one in the passenger’s seat hushed me mid sentence.

Hey Dan, will you look at those punk rock faggots. I bet they a part of that nazi Uberfall gang.

"OK boys, you two are fine," he said looking at Spike and I. They went off on Pat again for not carrying any identification. They continued waiting for Pat’s background check to come in and told him “it was the law for all American citizens to carry identification with them at all times.” It sounded like they were going to let us go. We weren't about say anything else. We figured that the more we talked or asked question the longer we would stay in the squad car. We were just happy that the silence broke. The cop on the driver’s side asked Pat what the symbol on the back of his jacket meant. Pat was wearing his roommate, Big John's, jacket. Big John played bass in the band, Uberfall (lit. overthrow). Uberfall's logo UF closely resembled a swastika, perhaps intentionally designed for shock value. The band had stickers, and spray-painted logos all over Capitol Hill. One cop asked us if we belonged to a gang of Nazi's. We laughed out loud. That bummed them out. Pat said that it was his roommate's jacket, and it was a symbol of a band. The cops weren’t buying it. They asked again if we were part of any gang, as if they hadn't heard us the first time. We said "No" in a more solemn tone. “Tell us about the Uberfall gang.” We explained that Uberfall was just a punk rock band. "Why is their symbol everywhere?” It wasn’t our band, we didn’t know, but it was in our best interest to tell them something, anything. While we were spouting off something lame to the effect of, "The guys in Uberfall want to be famous blah, blah, blah…" Flye, Uberfall's vocalist, crosses the street in front of us wearing his leather jacket with a big Uberfall symbol painted on the back of it. Pat, Spike, and I spotted him and tried not to stare or laugh. The cops were to busy being consumed by whatever bullshit we were making up that they were oblivious to the world outside the car. The thought occurred, "If you want to know what the symbol means, ask their singer, Flye, he just walked past.” We just sat there caged, finishing our symposium of why the Uberfall logo was all over Denver.

Early computer graphics

HQ called back. Pat's background check produced a clean record. There was no evidence that any of us belonged to the "Uberfall gang," or any other gang for that matter. They finally handed back our IDs. The cops went off on Pat yet again, telling him that he was lucky they weren't going to haul him down to the station and throw his ass in jail for not having an ID. We sat there politely and took the last of their shit, while collectively thinking, "Fuck these assholes and their ego trips." We had nothing left to say; we hated them for wasting our time with their head games.

They both got out of the car. The cop on the driver’s side hit the latch to open our doors. They thanked us for our time and told us to stay out of trouble. We walked back across the street towards Wax Trax to find Flye. The cop on the passenger side yelled at Pat to remember to carry his ID. We just snickered and stuck our fingers in Pat's face telling him, "Don't forget your ID, boy!" in our quasi redneck “boy, you got a pruddy mouth” accent.

Another Uberfall sticker design. 

We walked into Wax Trax and Flye was at the counter. He asked us what we were doing in the cop car. We told him that the cops were looking for him, "The leader of the Uberfall gang."  "What?!," Flye broke from his usual soft-spoken gentle voice. Flye a gang leader? Violent? Hardly. He was the son of a preacher. Flye thought we were pulling his leg, especially the gang part. We told him the story of what just happened. His face got red; he was sort of embarrassed. He put his hand up to his face and giggled. The clerk finished putting Flye's records in the bag. We told him that the cops were still out there and that he had better take off his leather jacket. We walked out the door and gazed over at the cop car and saw two more punks in the back seat. We didn't cross the street to find out who was in there. We’d have to wait to find out later that night at the show.

Flye and a couple other punks were featured in The Rocky Mountain News newspaper in a pull out section. 

“They got two more. Shit. We’re thirsty.” Spike said we should walk to 7-11 so he could get a Dr. Pepper Big Gulp. While we were sipping our drinks and waiting for our bean and cheese burritos in the microwave, Spike told me how Pat accidentally took a big swig of windshield wiper fluid in his car yesterday thinking it was cheap King Soopers blueberry punch. We all laughed. The buzzer on the microwave went off and we were out the door on the way to band practice.  

Special thanks to Ana Medina and Monica Zarazua for editing   

A night at the Packing House (A short history of Idiots Revenge pt. 1)

…be an idiot not a fool.

In memory of CR (Charles Robert) Smith

I’ve seen my fair share of new bands, catching their first shows when the talent was raw. The more interesting performances are the young kids just learning to play their instruments, sometimes struggling just to hold them in place. The idea that anyone can get up on a stage and run through a handful of songs has always been an appealing aspect about punk music. The emotions and clumsiness of kids rocking out their tunes are pure and honest. Standing in front of them on the dance floor, their friends cheer them on forgiving all the off-tempos, missed parts and not-so synchronized endings. In the early days of Idiots Revenge that’s exactly what we endured: standing in front of an audience essentially learning to play our instruments.  

One of the crucial components to starting a band is commitment from everyone involved, in addition to playable equipment, which was most likely second hand and/or partially broken. When Rob, CR, Jimmy and I started to play music we were totally focused on writing our own songs.  We were married to the idea that one day we’d be playing on stage opening up for touring groups like our friend's band, Immoral Attitude.    

For the time being, Idiots Revenge settled on my parent’s basement as our practice spot. I still didn’t own a real amp and had to rig my stereo so I could play a bass through it. My vintage Sear’s Silvertone bass had a loose bridge and one unlucky strum on the E string would cause it to fly off and whip you in the arm or worse, the face. It was a pathetic sight, but it mostly worked. CR had somewhat of a real drum set with cracked cymbals and duct taped drumheads. Jimmy used his allowance to buy himself a Radio Shack microphone. His makeshift PA was plugging the mic into one of Rob’s open inputs on his guitar amp. Rob had the best equipment out of the four of us. He managed to get a distorted sound out of jazz amp with tons of unwanted feedback. This was mostly due to him and Jimmy using it simultaneously. We made quite a racket writing songs.  It proved to be real work and a test of our collective patience. With the exception of Rob, I don’t think any of us had a clue how to play music.  

Since we were all under the driving age, our parents were the punk equivalent of soccer moms; we relied on them for transportation. CR’s dad would pack the drum set between the trunk and backseat and Rob’s mom would tow his guitar and amp in a similar fashion. After a summer of infrequent practices and less than successful attempts at writing music, CR eventually decided his new girlfriend was a bigger priority than spending time in a basement struggling to playing out-of-tune songs. He arrived an hour late one afternoon on a motorcycle.  We were in awe that he was driving around without a license, but it was overshadowed by the fact that he was busy getting laid. His excuse didn’t help matters. We were already bummed out from waiting and to throw in that he was having sex when the rest of us weren’t… When he stopped showing up altogether at the beginning of our freshman year, I was given the duty of telling him he was out of the band.

Jimmy started off his freshman year at a new high school and befriended a punk who went by the name of Arrow. Jimmy told him about our band and how we recently lost a drummer. Arrow mentioned that his classmate Spike (Ken Neubert) played drums and was looking for people to play with. We all met at a show and immediately clicked; he was in. Jimmy and I assumed Spike got his name from his spiked hair, leather jacket, and motorcycle boots.  He had a likeness to Mel Gibson’s character in Mad Max.

Before we played a show, we had stickers. Designed by Spike
Sure, I have this skull tattooed on the left side of my chest.

Idiots Revenge was back in action until Rob joined the high school wrestling team and found himself a preppy girlfriend. This left him little time or desire to continue playing music. He was hardly heartbroken when I told him that he was out of the band and followed that up with dropping out of the scene completely. Like CR, we still continued to be friends. Spike suggested that we should jam with his friend, a fellow senior he knew through Art Club and D&D. Mark Putt was like a mini-adult: he had his own car, equipment, knew how to play music, was responsible, and even dated a “normal” wholesome looking girl. At first I was a bit skeptical that he was into metal, prog rock and listened to bands like Yes and Rush. Mark definitely didn’t look like someone who would be into punk, much less play in a punk band. He dressed like someone you wanted your parents to meet. Jimmy and I both instantly liked him because aesthetically he would be that odd looking non-punk guy on stage along the lines of Spinal Tap's first drummer (the one who died in a gardening accident) and besides we really wanted to play in such a bad way. After the first practice, we were impressed that Mark sounded good, but more importantly he didn’t break any strings, which always seemed to plague Rob.

The addition of Mark was really what got Idiots Revenge off the ground. Not only did he have songwriting abilities, but he helped develop the band’s sound and quirkiness. We spent a little more than 8 months getting a set of songs together.

Our first performance almost happened in the form of a party on a snowy Friday evening when we were practicing in Mark’s parent’s garage. We stood in a room without a heater and one lonely light bulb that hung and flickered above us. We could hardly move our hands up and down the frets on our instruments. With our songs barely down, the thought of playing in a warm room full of partygoers sounded like the perfect remedy. Our dreams of a warmer setting were crushed when the guy throwing the party never called Mark back. I suppose most people wouldn't want a punk band playing in their living room. 

At the beginning of my sophomore year the band was ready to debut and we were finally asked to play a show at the Packing House in early November.

The Packing House was a tiny building converted into an art gallery/recording studio in the midst of Denver’s slaughterhouse district. All the touring bands played there: Suicidal Tendencies, The Freeze, Butthole Surfers, CH3, Samhain, The Necros, Ill Repute, Dr. Know, RKL, and countless others that defined punk/hardcore at the time. The space was unforgetable: lawless nights, skinheads, and especially the harsh smell of rotting flesh. The stink attached itself to your clothing and hair and in the morning you would have to dig out thick black snot from your nose.

The best part about the venue was that it was almost impossible to find. I remember the first time my dad drove Jimmy and me there. We spent close to 30 minutes looking for the place. Finally, a drunk near 7-11 pointed us in the right direction. Naturally, my dad was a bit hesitant about dropping us off. There were no signs of cops, authority figures, or other adults. I convinced my dad that everything would be fine once we went inside. After all, I was a 14 year-old freshman in high school so I thought I could take care of myself.  To tell you the truth, when my dad drove off I wondered if I would be alive at the end of the night. It wasn't like going to see Black Flag or GBH where the show was in a neighborhood with a pay phone around the corner in case shit went down. The atmosphere of the Packing House was like that of the Old West: every person fends for themselves. You didn't want to piss off the wrong person. The first experience going there was definitely a crash course on independence and self-preservation.

Try following this map. 

Hours before loading up the car and heading to the show we ran through our set in the garage to make sure we had our songs down. The line-up that night was a six-band local show. We were the openers, followed by The Lepers, The Druids, Bad Circus, Uberfall, and Immoral Attitude. When we hit the stage, about 30 people came in to watch us. We played our eight-song set of sloppy punk tunes overwhelmed by nervousness. By the end of our set, most of the crowd went back outside in the cold to drink. We were pretty forgettable. Our performance didn’t matter because it felt great to be on stage. It was like an initiation, a rite of passage into the Denver punk scene. We were just thankful our drum set didn’t fall over or we didn't break a string. When we were tearing down, Tommy from Immoral Attitude was the only person who came up to me up to say we sounded good. I always remembered and appreciated his encouraging words.

It was typical that each band would have their own flier.

The Lepers were a late addition to the bill and Uberfall was Denver’s newest street punk/oi band on the scene following the footsteps of the newly reformed and improved Immoral Attitude who traded in their skate punk roots and adopted a more English punk sound in the vein of GBH and Chron Gen. The Denver Skins were starting to develop a reputation. They were mainly a bunch of skater kids with shaved heads that danced harder than others in the pit. A couple of years later they would eventually grow into a monster and become a destructive element in the scene, but at this time it was mainly a small group of friends who would fuck with people by calling themselves skinheads.  

Unite, really? 

During the third or fourth band a drunken longhair dude jumped up on stage and said something to the effect of, "all you skinheads are a bunch of fucking assholes." A few seconds later, the guy came crashing out of the barn-like doors. One of the doors literally broke from its hinges and was on the ground with the guy lying on top of it. He staggered to stand up and the skins dragged him 100 or so yards in the direction of the Platt River. Minutes later, I saw the same longhair walk past me heading back into the club. I'm thinking, “that guy has some balls to show his face again.” His balls were much larger than I thought. Not only did he walk back into the space, he got on stage again to call the skins assholes. He was either determined to get his point across or suicidal or just plain stupid. Once again he came crashing through the doors chased by an even larger group of skins. They kicked his ass all the way down to the river and supposedly threw him in it. I kept watching and listening for the longhair's third appearance. He must have finally figured out that being at the Packing House wasn’t conducive to a long, healthy, and peaceful life.

Shortly after our debut show, Idiots Revenge would play one last time with Jimmy, a party in bum-fuck-Kansas (east Aurora towards the abandoned missile silos). The show was in the basement of Jeff’s house, a classmate of Jimmy’s. Most of the people attending all went to school together, including my newest crush, Jenny. The sound was terrible as it bounced off the unfinished cement walls and we played worse than at the Packing House. Maybe my jaundice view of that particular night was exaggerated by getting turned down by Jenny and waking up the following morning with a terrible hacking cough and a slight fever. I blame the clove cigarettes we all carelessly smoked. Being depressed from the night before and trying to get Jenny out of my head, I put on a Kraut album to lose myself in the music. My dad barged his way into my room yelling at me at the top of his lungs, “Turn that shit off!” He had a rare crazed look in his eyes like he was going to start breaking my records or possibly me. Maybe he had put up with my punk rock shit long enough. After yelling at me some more he eventually left, slamming the door behind him. I spent the rest of the day in bed hidden under my covers.

Ok, everyone call KAZY and ask for the Sex Pistols.

Maybe a month later, Jimmy’s dad caught us smoking kitchen spices in his house. True, we raided the spice cabinet because we were curious to see if smoking parsley, oregano, etc. through a soda pop can would get us high. He was convinced that we were smoking marijuana and claimed, “No one’s that stupid!” I readily responded, “We are.” One look at his face, I had a gut feeling that the wrong words said in the wrong tone had just escaped from my mouth. We naïvely hoped his dad would be understanding since he was a former hippy and all. Those hopes were immediately dashed when Jimmy’s father sat us down and told us we were prohibited from seeing or speaking to each other for an entire year! After the severe reprimand, his dad drove me home in silence. Our observance of the restriction lasted a little over 24-hours until Monday afternoon.  His dad wasn’t at the house when Jimmy got home from school, so we used that window of time to spend hours on the phone. Sadly, Jimmy’s parents got a divorce and his dad and the new girlfriend decided to move to Madison, Alabama taking Jimmy with them. It was a motherfucker of a winter, but Ken, Mark and I managed to continued on. 

Special thanks to Ana Medina and Monica Zarazua for editing