A bar called Malfunction Junction started hosting a band called The Jonny III which, even though it wasn't punk rock, was very popular with whatever punk people there were in town. Other local bands played there too, and it became the punk club. It was a few blocks away from my apartment. It had a DJ booth and somehow I managed to convince them to let me play my records there, with free beer in lieu of payment. There was nowhere else in town you could hear the stuff I was playing, and I believe I enhanced the proceedings. I also found it a place to practice my one true talent at the time, being as obnoxious as I possibly could, not just in the DJ booth but at all times. I did try to torture the listeners by playing some pretty horrible records, and sometimes when people requested a song, I would play a different song by the same band. They would jump up and start dancing, and then realize it wasn't the right song, then dance half-heartedly through the rest of it. I had a weird Italian single by a guy called Bobby Solo, Saro Un Illuso (It's An Illusion). I always made it the high point of the evening, giving it a big introduction through the microphone as if it was the greatest thing ever, then played this goofy '60s Italian pop song. Har har. The night a new DEVO video was being shown on Saturday Night Live, everything stopped and every person in the place crowded up to the bar to watch it, to the bartender's complete mystification.
One of the regular bands at the Junction was the Violators and they put on the fiercest, rockin'est show. They were actually competent musicians playing mostly original songs and they hit it hard and fast. Tom Pop was a vital, magnetic figure, serpentine and vibrating, thin as a weed. He loved to smash his microphone to pieces. Tom became my best friend and I became in a minor sense the Fifth Violator, drawing their gig fliers and doing Tom's stage makeup, which got me into the gigs for free. Before the development of the Mosh Pit, which turned rock shows into a big Boy Fight, boys and girls could actually dance together or with each other, or all by themselves. We'd pogo, hopping up and down, and sometimes a couple of guys would slam dance, smashing into each other. Commando Man was always up for slam dancing. One night two strange women showed up at the Junction, dressed as a french maid and a nurse with a whip, and they danced only with each other, the nurse whipping the maid. They were the hit of the evening for sure.
One remarkable figure who participated in the scene was Lilly Rose, one of Denver's most visible transsexuals. Somehow she got a pretty decent band together and played a few shows as Lilly Rose and the Thorns. I ended up palling around with her quite a bit for a while, even designing a cover for a single that never got recorded. One night, when she was between boyfriends, she informed me that it was a choice between me and another guy. That kind of freaked me out and I wasn't around for her to hang out with any more. She had a song which included the line "I'm afraid of catching your disease." One night at the Junction she asked me to have a drink with her and I declined. She said, "Oh, you're afraid of catching my disease." I agreed and that was that. This was a couple of years before AIDS so that wasn't the disease she meant. I just didn't want to think about what being her boyfriend would entail.
A gig which stands out in my mind above all others, and which deserves to be recorded, was one which never happened. Lilly Rose and another band or two were to play the Club Aeroplane, which had never had a punk show. It was a really neat streamlined International Style place, with big windows and neon. Not a super classy joint but one with a pretty normal clientele, and they obviously didn't know what they were getting into. I took the bus and got there pretty early when people were first arriving. Suddenly there was some sort of bustle, Lilly and her band got on stage and started playing even though there was hardly any audience. they had played for half a minute when the lights went out. Cut off. Thrown out. Lilly told me somebody from the club had seen somebody giving somebody a blowjob in the parking lot - I don't know if that really happened or not, but it probably did. What's certain is we were a bunch of freaks and monsters to them and they panicked. Something just came over me, and I cussed the whole place out, and they just took it. Looked mad as hell but they didn't give me the thrashing I deserved. Lilly treated me like a hero for that. Commando Man was there that night, and Club Aeroplane was a touchstone for us; we were veterans of the same campaign.
In my memory it was the Violators that were the heart of the scene at that time - maybe it was just a year or so but it seemed timeless, a panorama of adventure that they try to make movies about, "one wonderful summer when everything changed." The Jonny III were more popular and played more shows because they were more mainstream. There were other bands like the Aviators and Defex which we Violators, of course, despised. Not that I had anything really to do with the Violators and what they were, but they were my band more than any other could be. They were all just decent people. Shawn, the guitarist was more in his own space, but Rich, the bassist, and Tom were pretty close and we hung out a lot. The drummer is to me a blank. I know they had one, and I knew him, but who he was I can't recall. Tom was a really good friend to me. I later moved out of town, then moved back, and he sought me out. He'd call me up or just come by my place once or twice a week and drag me out for coffee and make me live in the world for a while, and I really valued that. He liked good movies and good books and could converse intelligently about them. He liked the movie Village of the Damned, identifying with its images of children with terrible powers keeping the adults in subjection, so I copied the picture and lettering from the paperback of the novel for one of their fliers, with the gig info stuck in sort of offhand at the bottom. When I drew fliers I wanted something that didn't look like the halfassed cut and paste garbage everyone else was doing, something that would stand out. Tom kept his own life separate from the times we were together, and he told me a few crazy things about himself which I still don't know if they were true or not. How he lived I don't know but when we were together we just had a real good time. None of us seemed to do drugs or even smoke cigarettes, or drink anything more than watery bar beer at the shows; we were just burning up inside with the energy of youth and onstage Tom was an inferno. The Violators tore the place up, knocked it down and stamped on the pieces, laughing. Tom's bands were always outstanding, and his songs were sharp and fierce. He thought about and wrote songs all the time, and they were full of his intelligence and wit. I don't know if he or his work could have stood up to real fame, but not everything has to be nailed down or pasted in a book to be valuable. Some things burn fast and bright but you remember them the rest of your life. See, that's why I don't like to reminisce, I am practically weeping here.
End of Part 2
