FRANTIX

Local Anesthetic/

Alternative Tentacles

In the summer of 2013 Jello Biafra's label, Alternative Tentacles, asked me to write some notes for their upcoming release of everything they could get their hands on that had been recorded by the Frantix, a seminal Denver punk band from the early Eighties. I seemed a logical choice for this task since, through the Denver Wax Trax Records store, I had released the first two EP's by the band back in 1982 and 1983...

 

Frantix Liner Notes

When Dave Stidman and I bought the original Wax Trax Records store from Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher in late 1978, something was happening in Rock n Roll and we wanted to be part of it: the Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam and Elvis Costello already had their first albums out. We saw safety pins, dog collars, spiked hair, black leather and ripped jeans at the store and at shows at the Malfunction Junction and the Mercury Cafe, both venues less than a block from Wax Trax.

Punk Rock had come to Denver.

And then things really started to happen: the Eighties began: It was Morning In America and the darkness spread.

In 1981, in Washington, D.C., Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr. and Pope John Paul II almost died after being shot entering St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. That summer, the Centers For Disease Control determined that five men in LA had a rare strain of pneumonia associated with weakened immune systems and thus gave a name to the coming plague of AIDS.

Prince Charles and Lady Di were married. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were born. And so were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, slouching their way toward Columbine High School.

Bob Marley died. Bill Haley stopped rocking around the clock and Karen Carpenter starved herself to death. Muddy Waters slipped into his last mojo.

Ronald Reagan, if he didn't invent Hardcore Punk Rock, was its (anti)figurehead and, both symbolically and really, its very reason for existence.

The Frantix weren't in the first wave of Punk bands playing in Denver in the late 70s & early 80s: the Rok-Tots, the Violators, Defex, Dancing Assholes, Jonny 3, the Varve, Gluons, the Front and others were first, and, true to the Punk rock ethos, they fell apart and recombined with astonishing speed.

 

Punk Rock nostalgia seemed to settle in immediately. Johnny Rotten was a sneering Cheshire cat disappearing up his own ass while in the slam pit mohawked Phoenixes in doc martens and butt-flaps rose out of the tattered burn-out flames of the first generation skankers.

The guys in the Frantix started hanging around Wax Trax at this time. They did not look like Punk Rockers. They looked like what they were: working class kids who had grown up in blue collar families that moved to the suburbs looking for the Ozzie & Harriet Nelson Family life – they found part of it, neat houses, trimmed yards, new schools, safe streets. But there was another part that wasn't as nice: rootlessness, bitter class rivalries between those who had just a little less than enough and those who had more than enough, and, at the mall, a zeitgeist of casual violence and mindless nihilism the kids seemed to imbibe with 3.2 beer and 7-11 roller dogs. Shopping mall nomads and cineplex Lost Boys (& Girls) who didn't shed a tear when Yes announced in the Spring of '81 they were breaking up.

Caught up in the howl and fury of Black Flag and the sound of the LA Hardcore scene, the Frantix banged out their own version in drummer Davey Stewart's mom's basement, tapping into the reckless, hurtling speed of singed chords, breakneck drumming, sucker-punch bass and ear-shattering yowls of pain and anger that somehow transitioned from an explosion of unholy noise into something that you knew was music because it felt like it even when it didn't always quite sound like it.

But they were never, especially at their best, never, just Hardcore. You can hear it in their very first recordings from 1980: beneath the amphetamine stutter and sonic tachycardia of the songs are strands of Rock n Roll DNA belonging to Johnny Thunders and Keith Richards. On 'Dancin' To Punk' and 'FM Ear' you find lipstick traces of the Modern Lovers all over Marc's vocals, a flat, guarded quality, like that kid who gets to the party late but just walking in knows he's higher than everyone else but doesn't want anyone to know it just yet.

 

And the classic, 'My Dad's A Fuckin' Alcoholic'. Punk? Yeah, punk as fuck. Except it's not just punk. It's equal parts Black Flag 'Damaged' and 'Generic' Flipper with a touch of the Dolls' 'Personality Crisis': a slow-grind, audible Rorschach Inkblot where the reference grid shifts wildly between harrowing and hilarious, between grim reality and goofy, hopeless absurdity. The mix of Ricky Kulwicki's unstoppable lava-flow guitar, Matt Bischoff's droning, carpet bombing bass, Davey Stewart's insanely counterpoint trainwreck drums and Marc Deaton's teenage zombie vocals creates something greater than its parts. Here are four nice kids and you jam them together in the Supercollider of 80s Punk and you get something with a halflife of mere moments, a particle unknown before, slippery, evasive, burning out from the very moment you begin to see it.

So. The band had a tape. We had a radio show, RockPile, on the old free-form KFML. I liked the tape and aired it on the show. Then we had a record label, Local Anesthetic Records. Our first release, in 1981, was the Gluons, a local band closer to the Boomtown Rats than to the Circle Jerks. One side featured the Gluons with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Second release was Your Funeral, a gloom & doom trio of young women with sad faces, black hair and bad attitudes. Then, in quick succession, the Frantix, White Trash, Young Weasels, Bum Kon. By 1983 the label was pretty much over. The bands had broken up or were about to. Everyone was moving on.

Though I didn't know it then, one of the last times I would see the band was when they opened for the Circle Jerks at Denver's Rainbow Music Hall on October 27th, 1983. Confounding expectations, they opened with a cover of Pink Floyd's 'Interstellar Overdrive', five minutes of Ricky's guitar burning over our heads like like a sonic crownfire before an inebriated Mark (true to his nom de guerre, Marc Fuk) stumbled out on the stage and the band lurched into a juggarnaut of Hardcore assault.

And then they went their ways, other bands, other nights.

******

Ricky Kulwicki, RIP