Book Update and Sheri Van Decar of Human Head Transplant

Friends,

First apologies for not posting last week. I have been knee deep with the editing process. The editor has done an excellent job in focusing on continuity and cleaning up the grammar. This week we will be fusing the chapters together and doing the final edit before sending it off to layout.

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

The artwork from the book will be exhibited and avail for purchase.
If you wish to preorder the book, you will receive extra goodies. You can do this by visiting
http://bobrobart.bigcartel.com 

From here on out, I will be posting excerpts of interviews.

Sheri Van Decar of Human Head Transplant 

About the time the music scene started to splinter, evolve, and exponentially experiment, Human Head Transplant (HHT) arrived to fuel the continued potentials of avant-garde in Denver. Although they were lumped as an industrial group, their early sound escaped any firm genre boundaries.

Their ambitious aesthetics appealed to the fans desiring a soundtrack that did not adhere to cookie cutter 4/4 tempos, structured riffage and solos, and perfectly timed endings. Vocalist, guitarist, and trumpet player Sheri Van Decar has categorized their melee as, “ … a melange of sound and a vehicle for expression and personal evolution!  A right ol' eclectic mix!”

  

Their compositions combined live instrumentation layered with electronic textures ranging from keyboards and drum machines to samplers and analog equipment mashed together long before computers simplified such tasks. The group both seduced listeners with soothing synchronizations and chaotic layers, which evoked disconnect and alienation.

The band often performed in appropriate settings, such as art galleries, junkyards, and converted warehouse spaces in desolate areas of downtown Denver. Their most infamous appearances found them opening for Einstürzende Neubauten in 1986. Meanwhile, Beach Blanket Bingo, their alter ego, satisfied their cravings to play pop.

While my friends eagerly dropped hits of LSD in preparation for their shows, I tripped, minus the narcotic haze, because the shows alone were such a heavy encounter with arrayed visuals and dizzying soundscapes.

Human Head Transplant. Original photo by Nancy Kennedy
Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina) 

How did Human Head Transplant (HHT) come about?

It was early 1984, and I was starting to listen to so-called industrial music, and my friend Jonathan Garcia told me, "Sheri, I met these guys from, Michigan, and they're really into that type of music, you should meet them." It was Bert and Paul Dickerson. Paul was staying at Christian’s, and we were invited along to do something. We went over there and started making an awful lot of noise. Kelly was also from Port Huron, but was living in Winter Park and eventually came down to Denver. He was quite interested in what we were doing. At first, it was just Bert, Kelly and I and it went from there. We all had some musical background, but the boys more than I did.

As HHT, our first gig was at the Art Department on Santa Fe. We pretty much got our start there. We managed to secure other art gallery performances, warehouses, and whatnot.

When the band started out, did you have a concept in mind?

We did. We wanted to experiment with different sounds and noises, and we experimented with different instruments. I had a trumpet that I don't remember how I got, plus an electric guitar with a little amp, and I managed to get pedals. I would play around with those things and doing vocalizations in one form or another.  People actually thought that I could play the trumpet, but was just being ‘avant-garde’… hilarious, really.

The remainder of the interview will be published in the book. 

Mark Metz of Children of Denial and Survival Research Laboratories

Project update: Postcards are done, 9" x 12" prints are done, flies have been sent to the editor, rewrites being made...it has been busy over here at Punker Bob. You can still support the project by pre-ordering the book and get extra goodies by visiting: http://bobrobart.bigcartel.com 

Mark Metz is one of the people form the Denver punk scene that wanted to take his music endeavors to the next level. He stared out fronting the band Children of Denial, a great group I only caught a couple of times. They had a straightforward melodic punk sound and made them a local favorite for a short moment in the early months of 1985. One of their more famous shows when opening for Broken Bones/Battalion of Saints at the Art Department came to an abrupt ending when the Denver Fire Department arrived on the scene . Indicative of promoters taking creative liberties in spelling band names every which way, they have been listed as: Children of Denile, Children of the Nile, and my favorite, Chillin of de Nile. Mark initially went under the moniker Scurvy and once proclaimed the group was a “teenage rage disco band” during an interview in Der Moderate Times.

Mark’s brand of humor and attitude of “anything goes” found himself befriending some of more underground and notorious characters in the scene like Paul Dickerson who schooled and mentored him in industrial music along with situationist shenanigans that kept Denver’s creative outpourings fresh.

After much experimenting, Mark eventually realized his shortcoming with substance abuse and alcoholism and refocused his creative energies on building destructive machinery by teaming up with Survival Research Laboratories in San Francisco.

It should have been curtains long ago for Mark, but his will to continue and overcome is a remarkable story he shares below.      

Children of Denial. Original photo from Der Moderate Times.
Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina).

Where in Colorado are you originally from?

I was born in southern California, but only lived there until I was about six. Basically, I went from LA in the 1960’s where there were 20 TV channels, freeways, and everything else to a ranch near Grand Junction in western Colorado—that’s where I went to high school. I moved to Boulder in ’81 to go to college. It was really just an excuse to get out of Grand Junction, I had no interests in education and I was definitely more interested in partying. I spent a couple of years in Boulder, one-year flunking out and the next hanging around and getting into trouble.

About that time I was into collecting records. I moved into the dorms and I immediately became friends with a fella living down the hall. I had been listening to the Talking Heads and other new wave bands. He had a couple of records…one was the Sex Pistols and the other was Run DMC. It was hip-hop and punk rock all at once. I felt, "Whoa, damn! The world is changing!” There was always a lot of music involved, but I was more into the drug and party scene. Things got pretty haywire up in Boulder. I was hanging with this hippy girl and her friends who were selling pot and coke out of the apartment. One night we got held-up at gunpoint. She was ready to get back in the coke business the next day so I cut off my hair and said, "Fuck you hippies" and took off with a backpack full of peyote buttons to hitchhike to New Mexico. 

Children of Denial?

I heard that punk rock was starting to happen in Denver and my brother was living there. I got the hell out of Boulder and went to stay with him for 2-3 months before I started going to shows and hanging out at Wax Trax. I remember the first show I went to in Denver was the Festival of Pain. It was an industrial show in a basement...there was a railroad track with violin strings and guitar pickups and everyone was making a bunch of noise. I think they were playing Throbbing Gristle on the sound system. It blew my mind, mostly because my friend in Boulder had given me a little packet of what was going to be the next big thing. I asked him ‘What is it?’. He said people were calling it different names...it's MDMA. He gave me a pure quarter gram of what would later be called ecstasy in the 90's. In 1983 it was still legal and nobody had ever heard of it. I tried it that night and that's why the show left such a mark on me. I'll never forget sitting there by the wall melting down to ‘Discipline.’ Was another ten years before that came back around in a big way.

I met Chris Kieft, a hotshot guitar player at a record store and we both wanted to start a band, so we became Children of Denial. One of our songs was ‘Sacred Hatred’ which nearly became our name. Our heroes were Iggy Pop and Nick Cave, or maybe Motorhead and Venom. Our practice space was a vault in a building in Capitol Hill. It was my first squat. I could go stay with my brother, but this was the place I could just hide, no one is going to say anything if I sleep in here. Of course the goal in those days was to use whatever money you got on partying and not on anything you can put a lock on or steal. So that is where we played and I lived. We never had a PA system so I would scream over the guitar and drums...we thought we were hot shit, better than any other band in town. We only played out a couple of times in front of people. Our bassist was a Latino guy and he was into dealing drugs so he was in and out. Our drummer was a powerhouse named Martin Day. Any one of us could be the weak link in the band. Bad mood, hangover, girl trouble, jail… When we had it together it was rocking.

It was such a wild time in Denver. Are there still cities in the world where young people can just go and basically fuck-off, have fun, live on a super low budget, and be creative? I was a big alcoholic in those days and I also knew how to wait tables. I managed to keep a part-time waiter job to keep a few bucks coming in, and because waiting tables is the best drinking on the job job there is. There was certainly no long term vision, no goal...it was, "How much money do we have, and where’s the party tonight?"

Flier collection of the author.

What was it like living in the vaults?

I didn't explore the tunnels much as most were sealed up. The vault I was in, you went down into the basement and there were all these storage rooms with wooden shelves. It was open from the main hallway. In the back with all the shelves was the vault door, like a bank vault. In there was a just an 8 x 20 foot concrete room, a long and narrow space. We had the band gear set up in there plus I slopped a couple of mattresses I would crash on. I had a way of getting in there at night and fixing the door to make it look like no one was in there.

How did you get away with squatting and playing down there?

Chris made some sort of agreement with the manager of the building to let us practice down there; he knew we were using it as a practice space. He definitely didn't know one of the band members had moved in. I wasn't too concerned about taking showers or using the bathroom. It was a place to go crash out after I was done drinking.

How long did you live down there for?

Maybe 6 months off and on? I still went out to my brother’s place on West Colfax once a week to take a shower and eat a real meal. The squat was right smack in the middle of Capitol Hill where all the action was. In those days, you didn't pull out your phone to figure out what was happening. You got out and went down to Wax Trax, or the Mercury Cafe or Muddy’s—you got your fliers, and you figured out what was going on that night. You got around on foot, we just all roamed around the hill.

When I left Boulder, I decided my driving days needed to be over. I had to make a choice, drink or drive. I couldn't do both so I gave up the driving. (Laughter). I left my last car for several years up in Boulder.

The squat was cool, we practiced a couple of times a week, plus living there but it all came to an end real fast. There was a firebug going around on the hill lighting fires. Whoever it was, I don't know if they were malicious and knew I was in the vault or just some crazy arsonist looking to light-up places. One night I woke up smelling smoke and I'm like, “Holy Shit!” I got up and pushed open the vault door. I was about 20 feet from the main door of the hallway. Someone had come in and thrown gasoline on the wooden shelves and lit them while I was sleeping. When I opened the vault door it was one of those split second decisions; dive through the freaking flames and survive or roast like a marshmallow. I dove headfirst and plowed through the fire, it scorched me a little bit. I landed out in the hall coughing and spluttering...at that point, I guess they knew I'm living there. Within 10-minutes the alarm had gone off and the fire department was there. They sprayed our amps and my bed down with water. That was the fastest eviction I ever had. I don't think anything was salvaged. I don't think we ever practiced after that, though we might have played a show. Something happened to Dave our bassist; I think he had to disappear for a while. There wasn't a lot of mojo to keep the band going.

After the vault burned up I needed another place to live. I met several people and found the Leonard. About that time I met Paul, browsing the industrial records section at Wax Trax. I was always into noisy stuff, punk was great, wild, and crazy, but what's even wilder and crazier? The industrial noise was louder and more edgy. Paul and I hit it off real quick. He schooled me a lot on the industrial stuff going on like the culture. He had all the RE/Search books, records...I don't know if he was the first, but several folks from Port Huron moved to Denver: Kelly, Burt...They all brought their whole industrial music repertoire. Human Head Transplant got underway and they started doing their noise band. Paul and I became two of the weirder characters of the whole scene. Since the punk band wasn't happening anymore, Paul and I were doing a lot of dumpster diving in the alleys when I found a folder from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. It had what became the We Never Sleep symbol on it. We were like, "Man, that's us." So we named our band or whatever you want to call our conceptual art thing that. It wasn't just getting together and making noise, we had a poster campaign going on.

I still was hooked up with my Boulder connections and that is what made me pretty popular down in Denver. The punk rockers loved psychedelics—the kind of drugs the Grateful Dead fans take. I was able to run up to Boulder and get all set up. People were coming over to our place to get some serious stuff.

Did you ever visit our apartment at the Leonard?

Flier courtesy of Trashistruth.com

No.

Paul decorated the front room-he took the Charles Manson face that was on the cover of LIFE magazine and wallpapered our entire front room, three out of our four walls with little 4” x 6 " Charlie Manson’s. He took a Barbie doll and little miniature scissors and fake-blood and did the whole reenactment of the Sharon Tate murder scene. On the wall was a Sharon Tate memorial. People would come over to the house on acid and walk into this room and see Paul sitting on the floor with a shaved head doing what he was doing and listening to impossible music they couldn't understand. (Laughter) One night we were at a party in an upstairs loft and this young skinhead who had it in for Paul for some reason comes charging up the stairs below me. In one of my more violent split second decisions I cold-cocked him right between the eyes with a full Heineken and rolled him right down the stairs. He actually came to our door later with bandages on and apologized, I forget what the original hassle was about. Another time I’ll never forget was when we worked with Tom Headbanger to produce the Einstürzende Neubauten show at the junkyard. We had Blixa Bargeld as our houseguest to get some rest before the show-he was traveling with a black trash bag for luggage, and smelled worse than any gutter drunk or junky I had ever encountered.

For a couple of years Tom Headbanger was the building manager there so to speak. His job was to collect the rent each month and pass it along to the building owner. One month the money didn’t make it to the owner...so he lost his job. That’s when Big Billy Satan took over. The building started to take a little more of an occult flair. They were all up into their own occult mojo so to speak...Church of Satan...that sort of crap.

One of the most remarkable memories I had of the Leonard was the whole skinhead contingent. They had their own aesthetic, agenda, and they were into speed. Back then, that stuff was rare. Most people did acid or mushrooms, occasionally coke, but the skins seem to be the source of the speed, maybe they had some sort of connection to the Hell’s Angels or another biker gang. Of course since our moniker was We Never Sleep, we were right up there with them on taking anything that would keep us going for a couple of days. Some of the skins lived a couple of blocks from us. One night we heard all this commotion. There was a big church on our block and it was on fire. I remember running around and knocking on everybody’s door yelling: "The church is on fire! The church is burning!” We all ran up on the roof of the Leonard at two in the morning with bongs, beers, and lawn chairs. All these crazy people are up there watching the church burn. The story at the time was the skins or punks had something to do with the fire. It felt like an end of an era with the church burning. Things were changing in Denver, how far was this going to go?

At what point were you done with Denver and decided to move to the bay area?

Paul and I organized a mail art show in Denver. In those days there wasn't the Internet. We had all these underground records and cassettes from all around the world. They all have some sort of address on the back of them, so we xeroxed up 100 trippy little invites and sent them all out to every address we could find. The letter stated that it was an erotic mail art exhibition and solicited pieces from people. It worked out well; we had 30-40 people send in stuff. Some of the pieces were elaborate and others were cheesy and silly. I did an installation for the show. I found a calf's head out in the pasture; it was pretty gnarly with skin still on it. So in the corner of the gallery I set the calf's head up on the torso of a mannequin body. I went to the butcher and got a bunch of tripe and guts, whatever I could get. I ended up doing a Hindu/Hare Krishna looking altar with the garlands around the neck of the deity made of raw meat…. It was a little Denver spin on Krishna.

Did you go to the Krishna temple for the free Sunday fest on 14th and Cherry?

Yeah, we did that in Boulder, Denver, and later San Francisco. That was the joke, we're a bunch of anarchist that go and eat free vegetarian food. Anyhow the mail art show hooked us up with people from around the country and world. One person we became acquainted with was GX Jupitter-Larsen and his associate Black Humor up in Vancouver. The noise stuff he was doing, The Haters, when I heard it I thought, "Wow, this is the next level." What he was doing was pure explosions montaged together, the sounds of destruction. We all hit it off well. In the summer Black Humor told Paul and I to get ourselves up to Vancouver to house sit since he was going to be gone for a month. Paul and I hitchhiked all the way up there on less than a $100. We booked a We Never Sleep tour and played in a couple of galleries. I remember the Seattle show; the gallery was so upset—we weren’t what they expected. They were begging us to stop. They thought we were going to be calm and sophisticated and we’re thinking, “How can we make as much racket and be as offensive as possible?” (Laughter).  

We ended up in Vancouver and spent the month at Black Humor's apartment. He pretty much had the first commercial digital sampler and when I saw it, I knew at the time this was going to change the world. It was a big black box that could only do an 8-bit sample. We understood the implications of it. This was going to turn the music industry inside out.

You didn’t have much money, how did you eat?

I don't know how they let us across the boarder, we hardly had any money and we told them we were only going for a couple of days. We went down to the alley behind the Granville Market and dumpster dove for veggies and other outdated food.

Paul and I used to do this trick that we learned from Headbanger. Taco Bell used to have salad bars, you could go there and for $1.99 get the salad bar. Tom had big military jackets with huge pockets. Literally that was the scam: you would go to Taco Bell, spend the $1.99, and eat as much off the salad bar as you could and then you would load your pockets with everything. I'll never forget Tom putting salad dressing right into his pocket and eating salad right out of it. (Laughter) We pulled that kind of stuff on the road. We listened to the Charlie Manson song, "Garbage Dump” - it was basically the dumpster diver's anthem.

While we were in Vancouver we saw the Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) videos and I was like, "These people are really blowing shit up!” The guys weren't just talking about tearing things down; they were doing it with flamethrowers, robots... Paul and I heard SRL was doing a show in Seattle. We found a number for Mark Pauline and called him at his workshop in San Francisco. We told them we could come down from Vancouver and volunteer to help set up their show. They were, "Of course, we love volunteers, see you there." Paul and I hitchhiked down there and found the parking lot where the show is going to be and there was absolutely nobody there. We literally slept underneath a flatbed semi truck in the pouring rain. The next day they showed up and we were there on-site for a week getting ready for the show. We dived right into it—helping them make props and putting things together. That was our first show with SRL. A couple of weeks later in San Francisco they did a show at the opening of a nightclub, DV8 under the freeway. Keith Haring did a big mural inside the club for the event, I met him drinking champagne on the back stairway. The show was insane; they almost had to shut down the freeway. It was one of most dangerous feeling shows we did because it was packed and people were really close to some extremely dangerous shit. Somehow Mark Pauline has amazing luck because he has never killed anyone in the audience in all these years. Those were the two SRL shows Paul and I worked on together. The We Never Sleep tour was pretty much over.

It was decision time; Paul was going back to Denver. I had my taste of flames and metal and decided I'm working with Mark Pauline and SRL. I stayed on and rolled up my sleeves. Six months later Eric Werner was throwing away a car, a Pinto and I said, “Let me take it and I'll try driving it to Colorado.” I needed to go back and get all of my records. I remember when I left I had a crate of 200 records and hocked them to Duane Davis. (Laughter). I'll never forget, he put them up on a shelf in the basement. I think he gave me $100 to travel on. Paul and I went separate ways from that point on and I never looked back to Denver.

During my early years at SRL I was still drinking and partying hard, taking whatever kind of drugs I could find on the street, squatting, living in cars. You see homeless people now and they don't look like they're having much fun, but in those days we were homeless-it was intentional, it was anarchy, it was a party. I knew about all the soup kitchens and the places to eat like the John Coltrane Church of Jazz where you could get free red beans and rice and figured out how to get on San Francisco's cheap-ass welfare system. They would give you $300/month, so I faked a foot problem. For a long time my life was living on the street and every two weeks I would get a check for $150. First thing I would do after cashing it, I would run right up to Haight Street and make the best deal I could and spend at least $100 on acid, usually getting two sheets and then I would sell singles to people. In those days, I was the most entitled fuckhead of them all, I had a trench coat, shoplifting my Courvoisier and caviar, eating in soup kitchens, living in a squat...SRL was an anchor for me. I would go on binges for several days, then crawl back into the shop and slowly come to. They’d let me sleep up on the tool loft and get me a burrito and put me to work for a couple of days and then I’d go back to where the party was. Mark was cool, he never judged me for being a waste case back in those days as long as I could see straight when I picked up a power tool.

SRL started to have some pretty significant success and I had cleaned up my act quite a bit by then. We had a tour to New York, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and another one to Barcelona. I ended up full time with SRL and did about 30 shows over a period of 5-6 solid years.

The best squat I ever had in San Francisco was because of an SRL show. We did it at the old Yellow Cab warehouse south of Market. We did the show in the parking lot and on the corner there was this big metal building that was the old garage. Inside the building there was an office that had its own locks on it so we had access to that. On the outside there were bathrooms with running water. When we finished the show and moved all the machines out, I saw my opportunity, so I changed all the locks and sealed up the place for myself. I had it for almost a year and in a squatter’s life that's a long time. I didn't have electricity. I had an old 12-volt television that I found somewhere and I would go and jack car batteries and run my 12-volt TV between the channels so it would have static and white noise on for light. And I had a tape deck in there so I could listen to music. I had a couple of sofas and I slept up on a loft on top of the shelves.  I actually had parties and brought dates there. I made a massive ‘art’ installation out of empty oil drums in the garage.

When did thing start to change?

I'm on Haight Street one day and my friends are looking at me and I'm feeling sick. One of them tells me, "You're looking really bad dude, your eyes are kind of yellow, and you should really go talk to somebody." I was literally across the street from the Free Clinic. I go in and the doctor tells me that I'm showing all the symptoms of Hepatitis or it could be Jaundice. They asked me what have I been doing lately. I told them I was living on maybe one burrito and a half-gallon of Carlo Rossi a day. They told me, "You're basically drinking yourself to death, you're 25 years-old and you’ll probably be dead in a year if you don't pull your head out of your ass." I thought, "Oh shit, I’ve really reached the end of the line."

I had a German girlfriend in the Mission at that point...I stopped drinking for 3-weeks and went back on a bender drinking and doing speed for a week. That time I relapsed really just about did me in. I remember climbing into her room up the rain gutter on Florida street. I finally stopped drinking on my own. I scored a bunch of cheap pot so I could smoke constantly, and went to Rainbow Grocery and got little bags of any herb that could detox me and I started quaffing down huge pots of medicinal tea. I also started eating a lot of ice cream because my liver was craving the sugar; basically I weaned myself off the booze with ice cream, and since I was used to veering into every corner store for a beer I would now buy an It’s-It. I was still squatting, although by this point I’d been flushed out of the Yellow Cab garage and was inhabiting a bed made of dumpster-found leather scraps wedged between the hot-water heater and the stairs behind the flat of some junkies on 14th Street. Most of my remaining street friends were going seriously downhill at this point.

Brian King from SRL and Jeanette ‘Jin’ MacCulloch, a New Zealander whom I’d met while she was a volunteer on our most recent show had a little room with a low ceiling above the garage in their flat on 10th Street in SOMA with heat, which was a big deal for me. They rented me the room for couple of hundred bucks a month. Part of getting that room I knew had to do with flirting with Jin, we were circling around and she needed a green card so she could stay in America for her clothing business. I had started doing part-time work setting up A/V projectors for conferences in order to make rent. She called me up one day at work and said she was having trouble with her green card, "Will you marry me? I need to stay in America" I was, “Um, what the hell, ok, sure!” Since we were at that point officially engaged, we fell right into it and the romance was on. We immediately set up a fabric workshop on a side street in the Mission and within a few months found a tiny shop on Haight Street for $900/mo, a block from Golden Gate Park, which was the first location for the store she named Ameba. I built huge impressive industrial style fixtures at the SRL shop. My luck had totally turned around when I stopped drinking. Someone gave me a 1967 VW Bus. Since I wasn't drinking, I could drive! We used our deposit money to open the shop and were living in the van for the first month we were open. I remember sleeping near Ocean Beach a few times and jumping in the surf in the morning to freshen up before going and opening up shop. It was very bizarre to be both ‘homeless’ and ‘in business’ at the same time. My former street cronies were baffled to see me behind the counter with a broom in my hand scarcely a year since we’d been in line together at the soup kitchen. I was with Jin for about 5 years, and our daughter Isabelle was born when the shop had been open about a year. They anchored me to stay off the booze and drugs for sure and decided to move back to New Zealand in the end.

One day this girl from England named Emma comes into Ameba and says her boyfriend is a DJ named Jeno and he makes “mix tapes.” She tells us it's underground music, acid house, the latest thing in England, and would we like to sell them exclusively under the counter? I was like, “What? Never heard of it, sounds good, sure!” Our clothing fit the acid house aesthetic. That's when I discovered all this exciting new dance music that had been happening. I fell hook, line, and sinker for it. I would dance myself to oblivion in the back of the store at night to the tape called Energy, it was a rough time in some ways and that tape, and remembering how much I needed to dance saved my life. For quite a while I didn’t know there was anyplace to hear it live, and then suddenly there were Full Moon parties on the beach and late-night parties in warehouses and basements everywhere. Our store on Haight became the epicenter of the San Francisco rave explosion. I was about 10 years older than everybody else and had stopped drinking, so the early parties that weren’t in bars and were more psychedelically oriented appealed to me more. It felt like we were part of something on a spiritual tip like the mid-sixties, and I know most of us felt much like the punks did—this was a special time in history that would only be new once. I was lucky to experience, (and survive) both eras.

For me, one thing always leads to the next. I find it much more useful to continually create my personal zeitgeist in relation to the present rather than indulge in nostalgia or historical recreations. Now that the Internet exists, all the genres exist simultaneously forever and I not sure if anything new can possibly happen anywhere. What becomes more clear over time is that humanity crossed a huge tipping point in our dance with technology during those chaotic decades of the 60’s to 90’s. So it’s hugely meaningful and valuable to tell the stories and create the context for all the key cultural moments that will shape us forever and never happen the same way again.

Big Bad Bob Ferbrache is all you need to know.

For many people out there Bob Ferbrache is sort of an enigma in the Denver underground music scene. He has pretty much covered all the genres from punk, to noise, to industrial, to Goth, and has been involved with a hybrid of neofolk/sound collaging/Celtic group for the past 20 years. It’s a safe bet that he has tried just about anything once music or recording wise. After my conversations with Bob, I found him to be more of a music enthusiast with an incessant thirst to explore and experiment with sound.

Bob is often credited for discovering and fine tuning the so-called Denver sound where some might argue started with the Frantix-My Dad’s a Fuckin’ Alcoholic EP (his first attempt at recording music that wasn’t his own). Following his punk start he moved on to capture and help influence the recorded outputs by: Human Head Transplant, Warlock Pinchers, 16 Horsepower, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, and the controversial Blood Axis-The Gospel Of Inhumanity LP (Michael Moynihan’s band and co-author of Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground)-the above is merely a splash of his accomplishments.

Bob, Big Bad Bob, Robert or any combination thereof is no stranger to controversy. He’s been threatened and labeled all sorts things, from a maniacal Carpenters fan (as in Karen Carpenter), to a Satanist, to a neo-Nazi, just to name a few that have been thrown out there. “Also if you were looking for more notorious accusations leveled at me I was accused of the JonBenét Ramsey murder by CBS news. It's a funny story that was perpetrated by Andrew of the Warlock Pinchers. It even got me questioned by Boulder’s District Attorney.” Although he has been self-employed for the past 30 years recording, producing, and playing in bands, he has quite a list of other experiences that have taken him around the globe. He doesn’t play up his achievements; he matter-of-factly describes his work as if he is walking to his favorite sandwich shop down the street. 

On a short trip back to Denver I headed over to Bob’s house in Federal Heights. In my conversations with Davey of the Frantix, he had mentioned that Bob turned him on to Trappist beer from Belgium, specifically Chimay. I arrived prepared with a couple bottles of Belgium brews in a brown paper sack; a tripel and a gueuze in case you're wondering. We chatted a little and thought we should go grab sandwiches and a couple more bottles of Belgium beers to continue our education. The evening even included summoning Davey on the telephone.

Living in Egypt was another topic that popped up; an experience we both had in common. Bob was amazed how American soap opera stars past their prime were not only still relevant, but all the rage and treated like royalty over there. Former president Mubarak even invited the cast from one of the more popular stories to his palace. “They also showed western movies on TV when I lived there with all this gang violence and the dialogue is like, "I'm going to shoot your motherfucker…" but then they would cut out parts where people are kissing or about to walk into a brothel.” I relayed back to Bob the one night my wife and I were watching a cooking show and the word “pork” was bleeped out. The Egypt conversation ended when he told the story about asking a visiting friend to bring him a hit of LSD. “The calls to prayer are so dense, it has a psychedelic edge…by design I wanted to try out acid at the City of the Dead. I hung out there all night long by myself. Lots of people live in there inside the tombs. Family members of the people that have died surfaced at night.” It was his last time taking acid.

The conversation turned to touring Europe with his band Blood Axis and how music and the arts are more revered compared with the states. According to Bob, sales wise the band’s The Gospel Of Inhumanity LP was as successful as all of his other projects put together.

After all this chatting I finally hit the record button.

UNX at the Packinghouse in 1983. Original photograph courtesy of
Jill Razer's Denver Punk Scene page. Brush and ink drawing by Bob Rob (Medina). 

…In recording The Itchy-O Marching Band LP, Jello Biafra is always going to shows looking for new bands. He was genuinely interested in putting out their record. A year later after he signed the band and released the album he called me up to tell me the Itchy-O record was the best I ever made, ever. I was like, "Do you remember when...” I'm grateful he put it out. He didn't put it out because he's my friend and did it gratuitously; he released it because he heard something he liked. At the release show I must have had a dozen people get into my face telling me “nobody can record them” or “nobody can do them justice” and not a single one of them had listened to the fucking record.

I admit I was surprised when I heard the album. I was in Denver for a couple of days and saw the album by chance at Wax Tax. I had seen the band a couple of times and always thought, "How could someone capture that?" I shot video with my camera and showed it to my students in Egypt several years ago. They were dumbfounded by the onslaught of imagery: the size of the group, the flames, the hearse, the flags, and the overall procession. So I had my doubts when I saw the record. I took a chance and bought it. I was surprised on how clean, clear and organized the music is. You layered it quite well. And to be honest, I didn't know you recorded it.

Most songs have over 100 tracks on it...When I recorded the Foreskin 500 album that was on a 16-track and an early 2-track digital thing. I would record two tracks at a time, mix it and dump it on the reel tracks. It was one of the first albums ever done that way; it became standard practice. For Denver and music in general, the Foreskin 500 album was groundbreaking.

It seemed like a lot creative endeavors from the early 80's Denver music scene was fueled by the process to problem solve, survival, and the need for expression. In my opinion, it seems like a lot of us just thought up stuff and did it. You got into recording because you wanted to do it yourself?

I can't get a job at all-I've been self-employed for 30 years. Technology has changed that quite a bit. Everybody is doing what I did now with their laptops or IPhones. People are making whole albums with Garage Band.

That's a pretty significant change. Most of the bands I was in as a teen couldn't afford to go into a studio-at best we had ghettobaster recordings. Think of all those bands that never had a chance to make a proper recording or to have their songs documented. Nowadays everything is over-documented…people pulling out their phones and snapping pictures and shooting video of the most mundane shit possible. 

It gives a lot of bands that didn't have the ability to do it now, but it also gives a lot of idiots that shouldn't have that ability, the ability to do it. During that punk rock era, that was sort of my legacy-documenting some of the Denver bands during that time.

How did you get involved in recording?

I wanted to do it myself. That is about as basic as it can be.

Because you had a band and you wanted to record the music yourself?

I always had bands here and there during that time. D.I.Y. started happening. I had cassette tape recorders and started bouncing tracks off each other. I initially did that on a 4-track cassette recorder. By the time I recorded the Warlock Pinchers-Pinch a Loaf, I was using an 8-track reel to reel.

 It only seemed natural for the Warlock Pinchers to be in cahoots with Bob.
Flier courtesy of trashistruth.com

How did you find yourself getting interested in underground music?

Jello Biafra and I were friends before he was in the Dead Kennedys. He turned me on to D.I.Y. stuff. I moved to San Francisco for awhile and when I came back I started meeting like-minded people...bands that were doing original music, politically motivated, thrashing...and a lot of that ended up being done by 15 year-old kids. People my age were dressing up in spandex and playing cover songs.

How did you meet Jello?

We were rival record collectors. We would go to the record stores at the same time and would fight over the same record. I wasn't competing that much because Boulder was their turf. Jello, this guy Sam and Joe were competing. I'd pop by for a little bout. I owned Wax Trax (laughter).

When you literally have one day to advertise a show...2 nite, Mon 13, 8 pm.
Flier courtesy of trashistruth.com

The UNX?

That was an interesting project-we took elements of hardcore. I hooked up with the rhythm section, the Swank brothers. Miguel was 11 and Chris was 15 at the time. Their ages added up together equaled mine. People my age weren't into playing that sort of stuff, they weren't even interested in playing Sabbath-they just wanted to play that strummy Eagle's shit.

The UNX played a show, maybe with DOA (?) at Taste of Denver. They wouldn't let our drummer into the show because he was 11. When we were loading in I carried in the drums, emptied the bass drum case then went back out to put him in it and carried him in to the show. Once we got on stage, we played and it was done.

Larry from Trash Is Truth gave me the UNX recordings; it has the hardcore crunch sounds that you captured with other bands at the time. It sounded like you wanted to experiment with a nosier direction guitar wise. Were you looking to expand beyond a punk sound?

The obvious transcription would be metal at that point. The guitar sound got heavier and noisier. With Human Head Transplant and The Soul Merchants, that was very heavy stuff. That was the next phase right there. It's way heavier than the punk shit that I was doing despite the melody, harmony and the rhythm of that. It had a very Beatle-esque romance to it as opposed to one chord dissonance. UNX was really fun for a year.

Why did the band end?

There were many different circumstance-they were little kids.

Were they in a different place than you were?

No, not really. I was immature, still am (laughter). I could play in a band with an 11 year-old if they were as good as Miguel. No problem.

How did you meet up with those two kid and go, "Hey let's start a punk band?"

I had a friend Steve Lobdell; I think he played guitar in Problem Youth...though later he ended up playing in Faust for a while. He was 16 and he was really advanced at playing. I gravitated to him a little because of his talent. He introduced me to the Swank brothers. He told me they were looking for a guitar player so we started playing together just like that. By that time I had already knew the Frantix because I recorded the first record for them.

As opposed to seen and not heard.
 Flier courtesy of trashistruth.com

I've seen those Frantix living room recording pictures.

The Frantix recording was the first thing I did other than my own material.

How did you get involved in recording the Frantix?

What did Davey say?

We didn't talk about any of the recording sessions.

I think it was Matt or Ricky who brought it up, so we had a party Davey’s mom’s house and set-up and recorded the songs and did the vocals right there. It was done in one afternoon.

Was there a secret sound to Ricky's guitar sound?

The real secret was that it was done then and forever blown in the wind. He had a little amp that was blown up to start with. He had a bunch of small Peaveys at one time that were painted pink and blue psychedelic colors. He got the acoustic amp later that blew-up and burned down the Fluid, maybe it was technically the Madhouse practice space. (Laughter) He got the amp because it was the loudest he ever heard. It came from me. Somehow it caught on fire and burned the space up.

We should call Davey! (After a quick exchange of greetings, Bob tells Davey why we’re calling.)

Ferbrache: He’s basically calling you because I can't answer the questions properly and I have to defer to you.

Davey: If you bring Chimay ale you've got every answer.

Ferbrache: We’ve gone beyond the Chimay.

Davey: Did you ask Bob Ferbrache about the whole experience recording the Alcoholic record?

Ferbrache: That's why we are calling you because I can't remember anything. (Laughter)

Davey: Bob, that was the greatest.

Ferbrache: That was awesome, that was one of the greatest times in my life.

Davey:  So Bob shows up to my house driving a Pacer or Gremlin.

Ferbrache: A Datsun B210.

Davey: He shows up and says he's got a little this and this, 3 microphones and we're like. “Yeah, man, fuck yeah.” My mom's upstairs drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. What Bob witnessed was with a real football, not a Nerf. We're standing around in a circle throwing it as hard as we can at each other's face while Bob is taking his shit in. We don't even stop; we're like, "Yeah, take it downstairs to the family room." Ok, we had challenged a whole rival pack of young adults to a tackle unpadded football game. And this is the whole truth. Early in the morning we've been playing tackle football in the park with a bunch of young thugs and we beat the fuck out of each other. We were bruised and everything else. Bob shows up and we're 3-4 hours into this thing and he goes, "We gotta record this thing today!" We're like, "Yeah, that's cool' and we all high-five each other and get back to business. So Bob brings in the three microphones, a Fender amplifier while we're trying to see who can throw a football the hardest and knock out or bandmates. Bob steps outside in the middle of all of this and says "Are you guys ready to go?" We went in, and did it on one take. It was one sound check. Bob brought in his own amplifier. Ricky plugged into Bob's amp and went, “Nope.” So Ricky used his Peavey pacer amplifier and it had caught on fire a couple of nights before at the Packinghouse. We got into a situation loading out and grabbed drums and amplifier and threw over our heads into a back of a pick-up truck. Anyhow, Bob goes, "I don't think this is good." Rick fucks around with the amp a little bit and goes, "This is good Bob." and Bob goes, "I guess we'll do a take." That was the deal. One take.

Wait, what was the situation you got into at the Packinghouse where you had to get out of there throwing your equipment over your head?

Davey: No, no we did that every time we played. (Laughter) It wasn't a situation, it was, "Let's get the fuck outta here." Bob, do you remember some cat where the Highlands is now right off of 23rd street and I-25? 

Ferbrache: There was a viaduct there at one time.

Davey: I think Bart the skater had a hand in a house destruction party there. Bob Rob, somebody had an old house that was going to be torn down in a few weeks, and put up a flier for a home destruction party and invited every miscreant deviant; we didn't give a shit. It was a show with no PA and the whole point of the show was to destroy this fucking house and all these people did.

Here's the most important thing, you know how Pete Best was the fifth Beatle? Well, Bob Ferbrache is the fifth Frantix. There was one point before the Madhouse thing where we got out of the Frantix and didn't know what we were going to do and ended up being the Fluid and the Fluid ended up being the Frantix and Rick died. Bob was always right there. (End of phone call)

Was the music you were making and recording on your own more experimental?

It was, but I also like the discipline of working with other people. My major band during that time was the Soul Merchants. It was still in the underground realm, we played with Bum Kon, the Fluid and all those bands. We were more textured and for a lack of a better description, we were a Goth band. We dressed in black and greased our hair. 

How did you get involved with the Soul Merchants?

I saw them as a three piece, I really liked them, and they had a lot of good songs-I like good songs. The guitar player was a long time friend of mine and I didn't even know he was in the band. I told him, “If you had one more instrument in the group, you’d be incredible.” He said, "I know what you mean." So I started playing with them the next day. (Laughter).

That’s a way to get into a band, point out their weakness and offer a suggestion on how to fix it, preferably affixing yourself into the equation.

We recorded and the band had so much material. In a period of 3 years time, we had close to 80 songs recorded. We released two cassettes, and an album...the album was only made because I stumbled across a pressing plant in Canada that was reasonable and would press a 1000 copies. Three records were made because I found that plant: The Fluid's Punch in Judy, Bum Kon's Ground Round and our record. Smooch (Andrew Murphy) reissued a Soul Merchants double CD and the entire 4- track cassette Bum Kon Recordings.

Rumor was that nobody knew about all those other songs on the Bum Kon recording session, was that tape was lying around on a shelf? 

I knew about it, I'm sure Bob McDonald knew about it. I mixed it once and sent it to him; in fact I sent it to him a couple of times.

It's hard for me to comprehend that people have albums worth of material sitting around; I guess they had other priorities.

I remember going through all my four-track cassettes and I had a few things and found an incredible Jux County recording. There was a Peace Core recording that was never done. I took all the Jux material and gave it to Mike Serviolo.  He has them so if he ever wants to mix them... That's where the Bum Kon recordings was; they just sat there.

Gotta love sexy punk-goth illustrations.
Flier courtesy of trashistruth.com 

You joined Human Head Transplant while playing with the Soul Merchants?

It was concurrent. We did shows together. I worked with HHT and started recording, it evolved into that. I phased out of Soul Merchants and phased into HHT. Initially, I had a producer role in HHT; we were always trying different things. We were doing pop music and industrial. One week we would play a sadomasochistic industrial show, which was a wall of sound of noise protesting the Supreme Court actions on the sodomy ruling in 86 and a month later we would come back and play computerized pop music.

Did you like the freedom of experimenting with different sounds with HHT?

Definitely. I drifted from band to band; I was never one that was much interested in the wide aspect of it. I liked doing it because I liked to have a good time playing parties, getting fucked-up, and carrying a gun. To be the rock star...that wasn't my interests in it. I worked with all those other bands and recording them. I was more interested in that realm of it.

Did you help bands find their sound when you recorded them?

The role in that is, a lot of band never heard themselves before and they realize good or bad... a lot times someone hears themselves after being recorded and say, "We sound like that, Oh my God, we need to do something about that." Even to this day I do records with bands for what they want.

You’ve also help bands solve problems on the go?

I remember a situation once were the Fluid were playing in Boulder at the Depot. The Soul Merchants played up there quite a bit. During one show Matt's on the mic yelling at me and I go, "What the fuck do you want?" He was trying to get me to come up on stage because his amp was fucked up, I realized it was a fuse in his amplifier and I didn't any fuses left. What I had was a pack of gum in my pocket when gum was wrapped in aluminum foil. So I wrapped the fuse in the foil and stuck it back in and it worked. Since he saw me do this before, maybe they tried to fix Ricky's amp the same way and that's how it caught on fire burned down the Madhouse practice space.

I fixed may fuses with foil, even a HHT show in the Netherlands where we blew out transformers. We blew all this shit up; we took our own transformers there and fixed them on stage with foil for all three people that were in the audience. We had great shows in Europe except that night. We were playing an art galley and it would have been great if 50 people showed up, but Fugazi was playing next door. The sound guy came in and did a sound check for us and left it up to us because he wanted to go see Fugazi, he didn't even want to stay at the show he was being paid to do sound at. 

I was talking with Davey not to long ago and he told me that I turned on to good beer. He said that I was drinking a bottle of Chimay beer at a Husker Du show at Kennedy’s standing in the front watching the band. I don't have one recollection of that whatsoever. That’s why he brought it up in our phone call.  

 Zozobra is one of Bob's lesser known bands.
Flier courtesy of trashistruth.com

That's funny because he was telling me about going to Albertsons and picking up a cheap 12-pack of whatever is on sale like Miller or MGD. I'm thinking, "Why would you do that, there are so many good beers out there?" I brew; I've made several trips to Belgium and rode bikes to breweries. I'm a fan of Belgium beers.

We played (Slim Cessna’s Auto Club) Belgium in the town where Duvel is made. It was a youth center where they had a concert hall; it was literally next door to the brewery. We go backstage and the promoter tells us, "We have a whole refrigerator full of beer for you, your kind of beer." He had imported American Budweiser. I go. "I don't drink that shit, even when I'm in America." He was, "Oh...do you want some Duval?" I was, "Yeah," He leaves and comes back with 10 cases. (Laughter). I drank like 8 bottles.

You must have been pretty messed up, it's like close to 9% alcohol.

We revived HHT one last time to make a CD in 91. Bert and I moved to Seattle at the end of 89 for a couple of years then I came back here. I hooked up with the Haters and did a tour. HHT did a tour in Europe and everyone was all into it. We were like, "How did everyone hear about us." That's how strong the underground cassette culture was.