Alex Chilto, Mojo Nixon, and Thin White Rope at the Casino Cabaret in 1988
By the mid-1980s, Denver was starting to get on the map for second- & third-tier touring bands, driven primarily by the string of label-supported New Wave and Post Punk bands booked into the Rainbow Music Hall by Chuck Morris under the umbrella of Feyline Presents, bands like the Ramones, the Cure, Siouxsie & The Banshees, the Pretenders, U2, New Order, Devo, Talking Heads, and, as the cliché goes, More More More.
Nibbling a little further down the food chain, were some smaller and very definitely more adventurous promoters: Doug Kaufman, Tom Headbanger, and Marilyn Megenity – three people who had no problem with fire, unusual sex acts or buckets of dead rabbits as long as there was a band on the stage.
Here's the shorthand for what these three did:
Marilyn at the Mercury: Black Flag, X, Misfits, Birthday Party, Gun Club, TSOL, Bad Brains, the Church, Rain Parade, Husker Du, Nico, Green On Red, Dream Syndicate, etc.
Tom Headbanger did shows at anywhere he could find a space and an electrical outlet: Einsturzende Neubauten at the infamous Junk Yard show in 1985, GBH at the Aztlan, GG Allin, Psychic TV and a long string of local and traveling Punk, Industrial and Hardcore bands at Nancy Kennedy's Wherehouse. Sidenote: When Tom dropped out of promoting, he handed the baton off to Bob Rob (aka Funky Bob Medina) who gloriously, if insanely, brought Flipper, Swans and Meat Puppets to the Fraternal Order of the Eagles Lodge in Thornton!
Doug Kauffman at the Ogden, Bluebird and Gothic: well, just about everyone else – Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Nine Inch Nails, Jesus Lizard, Butthole Surfers, Pere Ubu, the Beastie Boys, The Blasters, Social Distortion, Sugarcubes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, etc.
The three live music reviews below are all from shows at the Cabaret Casino in 1988. Doug Kauffman promoted all three of them - and it was a bit of a miracle that he wrangled them here to Denver. The Casino, originally opened in the 1930s as the Ex-Servicemen's Club and then the Casino Cabaret, was, in its heyday, known as the Harlem of the West and hosted names from what was then called the “Chitlin' Circuit” such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, BB King and dozens more.
In 1988 the venue had fallen on hard times and had been, I think, boarded up for awhile. Located on Welton St., it is still hosting music now as Cervantes' Masterpiece Ballroom.
The stages come and go – and so do the bands and musicians. None of the three bands reviewed below are still around. Thin White Rope broke up in 1992 with frontman Guy Kyser going on to a career as a botanist at the University of California - Davis; Mojo Nixon, 66, died of a 'fatal cardiac event', in 2024 while hosting the Annual Outlaw Country Cruise while the ship was docked in Puerto Rico; and Alex Chilton, 59. had a heart attack in 2010 while mowing his lawn at home in New Orleans.
The music goes on.
ACES UP AT THE CASINO
Live reports on Mojo Nixon, Alex Chilton and Thin White Rope
[Originally published in Waste Paper #22 - Aug 1988]
A decidedly average summer has been at least partially salvaged by a trio of shows promoted by Doug Kauffman that took place in the last few months at The Casino on 23rd and Welton.
The Casino, if you haven’t been there yet, is a jewel. Situated on a rough and tumble Five Points street among dark, sweaty juke joints and tiny, brightly lit eateries specializing in ribs and loose living, the Casino is a big, funky, cosmically urban club with a great stage, a big dance floor, plenty of table seating, excellent sound and a good view from almost anywhere. Highlights are a wrap-around balcony with tables and chairs and an enormous all-service bar that you elbow your way up to so you can shout your drink order out to folks who may have already drank everything in the bar. But never fear—you can always sneak next door, grab a beer and come back.
There is almost always a show Friday or Saturday night at The Casino and I recommend you go down and check it out for a good time.
FIRST UP: THIN WHITE ROPE
The occasion of my initial visit to the club was the first Denver appearance of Thin White Rope, a band from Davis, CA with three excellent lp’s to their credit: Exploring the Axis, Moonhead and In the Spanish Cave (all on Frontier). The material on the albums boils with a hard, edgy melancholy. Guy Kyser’s raspy, disembodied vocals registering a range of psychotic diagnostics as clearly and emphatically as a textbook on abnormal psychology—but a lot more compact and a lot more direct.
The guitar lines are a calculus of despair that seeks the gradient of a tension between collapse and explosion, a tension constantly evoked and yet never resolved in Kyser and guitarist Roger Kunkel’s hair-raising sabotages of each other’s playing. Cold roiling currents cut, weave, buckle, fold and slide between the two voices and guitars pushing towards a knowledge that can only be grasped through the willingness to stare into the world’s vast, indifferent eye, feeling the zero at the bone and the raw, gnawing need in the blood.
On stage at The Casino, the band looked tired. Just back from a European tour and a flurry of euphoric notices in the British music papers, they were just starting a long sweep across the country and didn’t look happy.
Kyser, lean, scruffy and worn, stood at the edge of the stage dressed in old jeans, a plain white tee shirt and scuffed engineer boots. Roger Kunkel on guitar and Jacek Becker on drums looked like two guys you might see sitting next to you in Accounting 301, and Denver’s own John Von Feldt (late of The Aviators) stood strapped to his bass, his eyes closed, rocking gently back and forth; but the howl they raised was far greater than the sum of its parts: a long wail from the darkness behind our bodies, a whisper of things too loud, too dangerous, too terrible to be brought out like this into the open; not merely said but celebrated and acknowledged as our own.
MOJO NIXON & SKID ROPER
Mojo Nixon, in case you didn’t know, once had a secret life right here in Denver as the singer in a band called Zebra 123 (one of the call letter codes heard on the voice over at the end of the TV show Police Story).
The band’s finest moment came one night at the Galleria Bibliothèque (yes, it was as bad as the name sounds) when Mojo hawked an enormous puce and mauve lunger the size and consistency of a pineapple jello mold onto the floor. He and the band (which included the illustrious Steve Brunner on bass) were asked to never darken the Galleria’s doorstep and bathroom towels again.
Shortly thereafter, Mojo pulled up stakes and headed out to San Diego where his transformation into Mojo Nixon has undoubtedly resulted in an enormously swelled head and bank account.
Mojo, of course, is practically a household name now that he has been provided ample opportunity to give full vent to the whoopee cushion he has for a brain on MTV. He is virtually the only authentic voice to be heard on that dreary parade of electromagnetic waves that limps into so many living rooms across the nation and for that alone Mojo should be a serious contender for a MacArthur Foundation grant.
Think of the people Mojo could piss off if he had a couple of hundred thousand bucks to work with! Good Christ! I think of the kegger he could throw. I can see the headline now: “Mojo Reserves the State of Oklahoma For Woody;” or the opening ploy in a successful Presidential campaign: “Two Million Friends, Two Million Kegs, Two Million Hangovers.”
At The Casino, Mojo and washboard expert Skid Roper played before a packed house. It was hot, wet and loud.
Looking like he’d just got off the evening shift at a Mad Dog 20/20 bottling plant, Mojo led a well-oiled crowd through a two or three hour survey of the weirder glitches and hitches in The American Psyche: Booze, Broads, Bullets and Big Foot, howling redneck metaphysics and lowdown dirty blues as familiar with Tiffany, Elvis at the Burger King and Martha Quinn’s Muffin as with a black cat bone or Big John the Conqueroo.
My own favorite moment came when Mojo rousted the foot-stomping mob into a sing-along chorus of “Nancy Reagan Sucks The Devil’s Dick”—an electrifying slogan I guarantee you will not hear at either party’s convention.
Yes indeed—a Mojo Night.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST: ALEX CHILTON
If you sit down to think about Alex Chilton, sooner or later you find yourself facing the two most overworked words in the critic’s Alex Chilton obligatory vocabulary: “legendary” and “seminal.” But, dammit, there it is: lead singer of The Box Tops, creator of the three Big Star lp’s, producer of The Cramps’ first lp, a sideman with lots of fine R&B bands and, according to myth, a prodigious participant in the dissolute, dissipated lifestyle of sex, drugs and R&R and last but not least, reputed tree surgeon in Memphis during some hard times back in the Seventies.
What I’d read lately indicated that Chilton has cleaned up and dried out, and certainly his new material on 1988’s High Priest (Big Time/RCA) is dry, careful and rock steady.
But that album did not prepare me for what Chilton dished out at The Casino. With himself on guitar and just a bass and drums for support, Chilton kicked his way through two decades of original material as well as a handful of hilarious, piss-take covers.
It was, I believe, the show every Alex Chilton fan dreams of: tight, precise, intuitive, confident and loud. His guitar playing was nothing less than masterful, leads melting into chordal patterns, sudden silences exploding into quivering melodies, arpeggios drowning in a tidal rush of harmonics: everything, I mean everything, worked.
About half way through the set, Chilton stepped to the microphone and with a little shrug said “Here’s the first song I ever recorded about twenty years ago” and launched into a blistering version of “The Letter,” a song that is a part of our history as surely as mini-skirts and moon walks. And he didn’t fuck with it, make it a joke or a chore; he just did it and it was great.
At the end, a woman who had been dancing up front for the whole night implored Chilton to do “Big Black Car” from the Big Star’s 3rd album. He told her that he’d like to do it, it was a good song, but the guys on stage with him didn’t know how to play it.
The woman implored some more. He stepped back, showed the bass and drum a quick run-through of the chords, stepped back up and led the band through a wobbly, achingly beautiful rendition of the song.
It was that kind of night.
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