In 1988, my friends and I eagerly awaited the arrival of Cynthia Connolly’s seminal book, Banned in DC, one of the first books to document a localized punk scene in the US through photographs, flyers, and anecdotes. Naturally, the only place in Denver likely to stock something that underground was Across the Trax, a satellite store of Wax Trax that carried everything the new and used record store couldn’t cram into its spaces: T-shirts, posters, zines, books, and other music-related ephemera. Cindy Davis managed the space and saved me a copy when it arrived.
My friends and I spent hours poring over its images, talking incessantly about the incredible bands featured in it, from Bad Brains to Minor Threat to Rites of Spring. We were struck by the history of Washington, D.C.’s tight-knit music community, much of it centered around Dischord Records.
I always wondered what the Denver version of that book would look like. Denver had its own bands, fanzines, photographers, venues, and even a record label, Local Anesthetic, based out of Wax Trax. By the time Banned in DC came out, I was already in my second year as a punk show promoter. My friend Rich Jacobs and I talked about how the logical next step was to start a record label. Using my paychecks from working at Winchell’s Donut House, Donut Crew Records was born. We envisioned something like Dischord: a label that would document Colorado bands and continue what Duane had done with Local Anesthetic, helping to prop up our local music scene.
By mid-1992, my days as a promoter and Donut Crew had run their course. My friend and roommate, Sonny Kay, took the reins, started promoting shows, and launched his own label, GSL.
When I left Denver permanently in the summer of ’96, I would occasionally return home, still feeling that Denver’s rich underground music history lacked the documentation it deserved. I was a fairly seasoned road-tripper by then, having toured through punk scenes across the United States. I know I sound biased, but compared to what I’d experienced elsewhere, the openness of Denver’s early scene felt like an outlier. Maybe it was our geography, but our sounds and aesthetics seemed to mutate organically under one umbrella. I felt that history needed to be captured and shared.
Photo credit: Duane Davis During a trip back home in ’97, I printed and posted flyers in record stores announcing that I was working on a book about Denver’s early punk scene and looking for contributors. I got zero response. It wasn’t that people didn’t want to participate; I eventually realized I’d gone about it the wrong way.
Years later, while living in Ethiopia in 2014, I started making drawings of FLAG (Black Flag) from photographs I’d taken when I was a stowaway on their three-date European tour. Then I made a couple of drawings of The Fluid from their reunion shows. Somewhere between those drawings, I had an epiphany: the Denver book should be illustrated with expressive lines and colors that captured the rawness of the music and the personalities behind it.
With renewed fervor, I reached out to my old friends, who were more than willing to share their stories and the things they’d held on to, from flyers to photographs. It became a life-changing journey, one that allowed me to meet new people and reconnect with old friends from an era that shaped who I had become.
That’s how Denvoid and the Cowtown Punks came together.
“I thought about it for 20 years and put it together in 18 months.”
The Fluid at the Grove Photo credit: The late Nancy Kennedy With gratitude to Duane Davis and Wax Trax, Jill Mustoffa, Tom Banger, Nancy Kennedy, Larry Rasmussen, and everyone else who contributed to this book. Check out the second edition of Denvoid, updated with 28 additional pages. Released and distributed by Wax Trax (pre-order your copy here).
[Editors Note: As one of the many slightly younger punks who patronized the scene that Bob, his contributors, and many others helped create here in Denver – it was truly a revelatory experience. It gave me and so many kids in our generation the feeling that they could create their own destinies. Wax Trax is honored to bring this great document of that time to new sets of eyeballs.]
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