A Brief History of Denver’s Underground Music Heritage

Denver has never been considered a cultural mecca in the national and international zeitgeist. The city has long seemed to think of itself as a cowtown with a frontier past that looms over the present. But there have always been people who have had to make their own fun.  

The most famous musical entities and movements identified with Colorado like Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, The Fray, The Lumineers, EDM, jam bands and Americana can seem anomalous minus context and roots to local culture. Local journalists have made an effort to piecemeal these connections for decades, but that information is atomized and challenging to research. What follows is a brief and very incomplete exploration of the people and phenomena that have made Denver a contributor to music culture. 

Polly Urethane

On December 26, 1968, concert promoter Barry Fey brought Led Zeppelin to Denver for its first U.S. concert, where the band performed at Auditorium Arena to launch their North American tour. This was shortly after the closure of a rock club called The Family Dog where Fey had booked Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, The Doors, Chuck Berry and Buffalo Springfield.

On March 12, 1962, Harry Tuft opened the Denver Folklore Center in the Swallow Hill district east of downtown and organized events, classes and workshops, while providing a store for instruments, records and books related to the popular folk music movement that had already spawned in various other American cities. That effort eventually led to Swallow Hill Music and over the decades helped to usher in a sustained, modern interest in folk music forms.

In the 1970s, punk shook up the musical landscape in Colorado as it did everywhere, showing how anyone could be in a band if they had the attitude and desire. Jello Biafra grew up in Boulder and was a roadie for the first Colorado punk band The Ravers before he moved to San Francisco and helped to form the Dead Kennedys, as well as the record label Alternative Tentacles. 

Wax Trax Records was opened by life partners Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher in Denver in 1975 and was a locus for finding punk and other left-field music before it was sold to Duane Davis and Dave Stidman in 1978. The store remains a supporter of the local scene and a fine place to find a wide range of music. 

Moon Pussy

In the 1980s, punk continued to flourish but now was joined by more avant-garde acts. Morton Subotnick, one of the inventors of the synthesizer, attended University of Denver and met future experimental film legend Stan Brakhage, who was raised in Denver. 

A similar bit of synchronicity manifested later when Mike Johnson and Bob Drake formed Thinking Plague in 1982, an internationally renowned art rock band that’s still going strong. By the middle of the decade, a couple of members of the great punk group Frantix partly founded The Fluid, a group that blended post-punk and garage rock for a sound that seemed to resonate with a style from Seattle that would go on to be called “grunge,” and The Fluid’s charismatic sense of fun exerted an influence well beyond Denver.  

The first national breakdancing competition happened in downtown Denver in the early 80s, and rapper/musician/playwright Jeff Campbell, aka Apostle, competed as a young teen. It was a hint of the long-standing relationship Denver has had with hip-hop going back to the late 70s, with the foundation of the radio program Eclipse on KGNU.

Also in the late 80s, other roots of the Denver alternative music scene came together when Gothic Americana found an early form with the foundation of The Denver Gentlemen (which would split and lead to Sixteen Horsepower and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club). Hip-hop beats and punk attitude merged in the inspired mayhem and prankster antics of Warlock Pinchers, the moody and atmospheric fusion of post-punk and fiery psychedelic garage rock heard in the music of Twice Wilted and the proto-shoegaze of The 40^th Day.

In the early 90s, The Apples in Stereo formed and would become a part of a musical entity called The Elephant 6 Recording Company. The latter helped to establish 90s indiepop of the variety that combined melodic psychedelic rock inspired by The Beatles and The Beach Boys with experimental music. The first release by the collective was an album by local weirdo music legend Little Fyodor. Elephant 6 would make a massive impact on indie music throughout the 90s and beyond, and the Apples’ Robert Schneider’s Pet Sounds Studio is where Neutral Milk Hotel’s epochal 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was recorded.

A constant presence for decades in the Denver scene was Bob Ferbrache, who was sort of an intern for Barry Fey in the 70s. But throughout the 80s and up to his departure from Colorado in the 2010s, Big Bad Bob was a recording engineer and producer who put an indelible print on the sound of music from Denver. Most often associated with Gothic Americana and 16 Horsepower, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and his own band Tarantella, Ferbrache had engineered countless punk records and later worked with the likes of dream pop legends The Czars and sprawling, tribal industrial juggernaut Itchy-O.

Pink Lady Monster

Denver has been fortunate to have numerous small venues operating for years, but one feature of the local scene that has set Denver apart from many cities has been the active DIY venues and house show scene often run by musicians and art students. Most of these were largely unknown outside of Denver until the late 90s when Monkey Mania in its various manifestations hosted touring bands on underground labels and well-known indies like K Records and Kill Rock Stars. The wide spectrum of noise artists put Denver on the map. Sonic Youth once played a collaborative noise show with Wolf Eyes in Monkey Mania on July 26, 2004, after performing at the Ogden Theatre. Rhinoceropolis, founded in 2005, brought Denver to the attention of a global underground culture with which artists like Pictureplane and Midwife are most often associated.

Heavy metal has also become a bit of an institution in Denver in the past decade and a half. Death metal legends Cephalic Carnage are well-known, but it was the artists associated with doom and extreme metal that have brought attention to Denver in recent years, with Primitive Man, Khemmis and Bloood Incantation garnering wide cult followings. Perhaps less well-known is that Relapse, a label now based in Pennsylvania, was founded in Aurora, Colorado in 1990 before relocating to Upper Darby Township, Pennsylvania, a year later.

In the 90s you could probably go to all or most of the cool shows in a month in Denver. Now, that probably isn’t realistic, and that’s a good problem to have. But Denver’s long and storied local music culture can be obscured and forgotten in the 3-5 year cycle of cultural amnesia.  But events and artists like those mentioned above still emerge and make their mark in Denver. Convulse Records has revitalized the local hardcore; Snappy Little Numbers issues punk and garage rock in cool editions; and Multidim champions forward thinking in electronic music. Glob, Seventh Circle Music Collective, D3 and Squirm Gallery are active DIY venues. Small clubs like the Hi-Dive, Lost Lake, HQ, Globe Hall, Larimer Lounge, and The Skylark Lounge make it possible for touring bands to have a spot to play with decent sound near local amenities. And a new crop of quality bands and musical projects that have emerged in the past half decade means there’s no real reason to get too bored with the scene in a city that has outgrown a good deal of its cowtown backwater status.

by Tom Murphy

Tom Murphy

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