Warlock Pinchers: An extensive oral history straight from the jokers' mouth

Courtesy of Andrew Novick

BANNED AT QUIGLEY'S

DW: We just never had any fun there, as much as we tried. So we did this show with the Haters. We set it up, and we'd heard about their plans about what they were going to do -- ripping apart furniture and playing a tape of static or something. They had smoke bombs. We thought it would be a really good one to play and get banned.

AN: Our whole goal was to never play there again.

DW: We played first, and then the Haters went on. I think the promoter thought we were the Haters.

Andrews: The Haters wore hoods with eye holes.

DW: One of them was Bob Ferbrache, at the time. Then they started ripping stuff up, playing static and people got confused; then they started letting off powerful smoke bombs. We were in the crowd, and we started throwing pitchers of beer, knocking tables over. Nobody could see what was going on, and it just turned into mayhem; shit was flying everywhere.

AN: It was totally trashed.

MB: Basically, we told the Program Council that there was this awesome band from Stockholm, Sweden, called the Haters. The Haters are performance artists that destroy shit and wreck shit, doing crazy performances. We played our show as normal, and the Haters came on and fucking destroyed the place. We joined in on the destruction and we got kicked off campus and got banned forever.

DvW: I was living with those guys at the time, but I was in the audience. I remember the Haters cutting up couches with chainsaws or something. I remember at the end of "Curious George and the Anti-christ" there's a chant that went, "Steal, Kill, Destroy." I remember running around, tables were being smashed and there was smoke everywhere.

I don't remember the aftermath because I had gone out the back door by then. For a long time, the Program Council people thought we were the Haters. I ran into Pablo Kjolseth recently and gave him a couple of tickets for the reunion show for his troubles.

DW: We snuck out the back door, and so did the Haters. Then we started this letter writing campaign to the Colorado Daily talking about how we did this show, and the promoters wouldn't pay us. So they would write back saying how we had destroyed the place, and they had to load up dumpsters full of trash and the smoke alarm went off.

Mike Kippenhan/Ultra Type

AN: I wrote some letters complaining about how I couldn't believe they would let these kinds of things happen on our campus. I was writing both sides, and they were also writing, so we had this big argument going on.

DW: Half the letters were just made up. We'd write letters from people we know like Michelle Clifford, Dave Clifford's sister, and she wrote back, saying it wasn't her who wrote the letter. We really didn't know how the media worked in regards to music back then. We thought writers just went to shows and wrote about them. We wondered how we got people to write about us, so we did all this crazy shit trying to get people to come check us out.

AN: Then we wrote songs about it, and that's a rich part of the history. "We Got the Beast" is about getting banned from campus. "Electric Hoedown" is about Dave Starr who -- after that show, and after we didn't get paid, and after complaining about us and banning us -- went so far as to call future venues where we were playing and telling them we were going to trash the place, and that we were horrible, and that would steal from them. He was really malicious, so that garnered a whole other song.

DW: "The star of David's falling, falling down low." We called him Pope David Almighty Shithead.

AN: We actually threatened to kill him in that song.

DW: The funny thing is that I'd never even met the guy. After we broke up, I met him at Ground Zero, where I was working in Boulder. He was friends with Michelle Clifford, and they were always hanging out. I met him there, and he said, "Hi, I'm David Starr." I ended up getting along really well with him. I don't even know if he even knows that we wrote a song about him.

AN: Pablo, who does the film program at CU now, he and Dave were the guys that ran Program Council. I see him all the time, and he thinks everything's really funny now. There are two different ways you can go in the end. After all is said and done, you can look back and laugh and think it's funny, or you can still be mad about it.