With all of the effort that's put toward indoctrinating middle-class youth into the cult of suburbia, it's not surprising to see the rate at which bohemian leanings are traded for button-down collars. It's something that usually takes place just after college commencement. Most likely, it's that familiar notion -- that one must immediately get a career and settle down -- at work. Of course, how one chooses to define "career" is a matter of wide individual interpretation, a fact beautifully exploited by the members of Boulder's Fairlanes: A couple of months ago, they, too, decided to take the grown-up path and focus on their future. It's just that their choice involved quitting day jobs, spending lots of time on the road, and playing more punk-rock music than they ever had before.
Boulder punk-rockers the Fairlanes work hard for their money.
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8 p.m. Sunday, May 6, $6
303-322-2308
Bluebird Theater, 3317 East Colfax Avenue
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Before that, however, they braved a (quickly aborted) digression into the nine-to-five world.
"We had student loans to pay off -- the usual -- and when you finish college, that's what you're supposed to do, I guess," says singer/ guitarist Jason Zumbrunnen. "We were still doing music and just figured that was the way to do what we needed to do. After just a little while, we were writing the music and going, 'Wow. We'd much rather be doing that than just working the typical job.'"
After three years of juggling the responsibilities of maintaining a punk band while working toward their bachelor's degrees at the University of Colorado, the Fairlanes have graduated to the status of a full-time band. Zumbrunnen, guitarist Robbie Kalinowski, bassist Scott Weigel and recently recruited drummer Andy Baldwin are setting their own schedules and defining their own job descriptions. Both the band's latest album (Welcome to Nowhere, released on the local punk indie label Suburban Home Recordings) and its goals to tour for two-thirds of the year -- an undertaking simplified by the purchase of a 27-foot RV -- are the act's first steps in liberating itself from traditional employment.
But even champions of the follow-your-dream mentality may question the Fairlanes' decision to ditch the day jobs to pursue a career in the always-risky entertainment industry. After all, the bandmembers had "respectable" vocations: Zumbrunnen was a chemical engineer, Weigel was a network administrator, and Kalinowski put his electrical-engineering degree to use designing superconductors. Each had invested more than his fair share of time, not to mention tuition dollars, earning the credentials necessary to land such gigs -- points that would be raised by even the most negligent parents. So it came as no surprise that the guys' mothers and fathers weren't immediately comfortable with their plan.
"When we first proposed the idea that we were going to go full-time and quit our jobs, there was definitely concern and a bit of disbelief," Zumbrunnen says. "We had jobs that we could do. I think that's where the disbelief came in -- like, 'Hey, you guys have a decent job. What are you doing?' I think they understood once we talked to them about how it was not making us happy. I think that's when they realized and became supportive of that."
The Fairlanes have always been good at breaking away from expectations. Though the band's melody-tinged punk rock bears traces of such classic acts as the Ramones and Jawbreaker and, therefore, isn't a radical assault on punk traditions of any sort, it was a style that had fallen out of favor in the metro scene when the band made its debut in 1995. Bands like Cavity and Four dominated the local landscape; fans in Denver and Boulder were more accustomed to raw punk rock than the Fairlanes' melodic tunes. Strangely enough, though, the band's poppier leanings didn't alienate it from the hard-assed punk audience of the day. Though punk fans are sometimes known for inflexibility when it comes to any sort of change in their scene, the Fairlanes felt welcomed at even their earliest gigs.
"I think that's one of the best things about playing in the Colorado scene," Zumbrunnen says. "Playing with bands that were different than us, we were accepted right away, which helped a lot to a really young band. We were pretty lucky in that sense."
And although their music wasn't always aligned with the tastes of the day, the Fairlanes weren't the sole standard-bearers for melodic punk in the Rocky Mountain region. Bands like Denver's Gamits, Golden's Pinhead Circus and Fort Collins's Armchair Martian also brought melody back to Colorado's punk venues at the same time the Fairlanes were cutting their teeth in the live arena. Though Denver's bar scene continued to be a haven for hard-rocking punk and garage bands, the Fairlanes and their counterparts quickly carved a niche for themselves by stressing all-ages shows as well as finding some common ground with the bar crowd. And considering all of the new forms that three-chord rock was twisted into during the '90s, when punk rock continued to split into finer and finer subgenres from mall punk to hard-rocking emo-core, it was only logical that the Denver scene would follow suit, Zumbrunnen says.
"There's so much branching these days. Punk has become such a big genre that there's the emo punk side, and then there's the hard emo side that's coming out now," he says. "I think maybe the definitions are becoming slimmer and more narrow. You have to find your own niche in there of what you like to do and play it."
