See Also: • More than two decades after being banned from CU, Warlock Pinchers officially unbanned • The Warlock Pinchers are still playing devil's advocate • Warlock Pinchers: An extensive oral history straight from the jokers' mouth • (Review) Warlock Pinchers at Gothic, 8/6/10 • (Review) Warlock Pinchers at Gothic, 8/7/10 • Best of Denver 2011: Warlock Pinchers - Best Documentary
In November 1988, the Warlock Pinchers played a show at CU-Boulder's Quigley's (now Club 156) that ended with the outfit being banned from ever playing on CU again. Now 24 years later, the band is having a weird homecoming of sorts tonight when the documentary Warlock Pinchers 2010: Will There Be Blood is screened on campus tonight at CU Boulder's VAC Auditorium. Andrew Novick says there will be a Q&A session afterward, and he's also showing a video of the legendary gig that the public has never seen before.
Of the fateful gig in '88, Novick says the band played Quigley's a number of times since forming, but evidently didn't want to play the venue again. Instead of turning down the gigs, though, they decided they were going to get kicked out. With that in mind, they enlisted San Francisco performance art group the Haters, who brought in some couches, filing cabinets and even some still-warm hot dogs they found behind the stadium.
"They were sitting on a coach for a couple of minutes just with this sound, and they're all wearing black hoods," Novick says of the Haters' 1988 gig. "They started cutting the couches with razor blades and then started pulling the stuffing out. Then they started getting more violent and hitting things. They'd throw something in the audience, and they'd throw it back, and the audience gets involved."So it ended up being this crazy industrial show where people were banging on metal and it got real rhythmic," he goes on. "Then they set off these smoke bombs in all four corners of the room, and these were like industrial grade smoke bombs. It's not a big room, so you couldn't see three feet in front of you. Once the smokes bombs went off, they totally split. They were out of there. Like they were up on the Hill, eating pizza at Abo's while the show was still going on. It went on for quite awhile. It's all on video, which is hilarious."
Novick says that because the Haters were wearing hoods, CU security figured it was the Pinchers who actually caused all the destruction. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't convince the security folks that it wasn't them.
"So, of course," he says, "we weren't going to get paid because they said they had to take out a couple dumpsters worth of trash. And they were like threatening us and stuff. I wrote a letter to the Daily with an alias saying, 'I can't believe you would have such horrific entertainment on campus' or whatever, and then I wrote a letter as a band member rebutting that. Then we actually got some legitimate letters and then the Program Council guys were writing letters. So we had a couple of weeks worth of letter writing campaigns, which is also hilarious."
Novick says that Pablo Kjolseth, who's programed CU's International Film Series since 1997, was part of the CU Program Council at the time of the gig and was one of the two guys who banned the Pinchers and wrote letter campaign against the band. About three or four years ago, the Pinchers' D-Rock became friends with Kjolseth, and Novick has met him on several occasions and the two have since buried the hatchet. For the Q&A session, Novick and Kjolseth will hash out different accounts of the event.
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