Audio By Carbonatix
Although Denver has been growing its own brand of DJs for as long as there have been clubs to mix records at, the last five years have witnessed a maturation of the scene and an explosion of urban record-slingers whose work rivals anything being done by their smug big-city cousins on the East and West coasts. In short, there’s a new generation in power, and Evan Nelson, aka DJ Skunk, is among the best of the breed.
Since last year, Skunk has been setting the roof on fire at Skunk Motel, a regular Monday bash at the Snake Pit, to the delight of the trendiest mixed crowd in the Rocky Mountain region. He’s an innovator who specializes in converting the masses to the electronic delights of the planet’s latest underground dance records. That he’s managing to do so in a city with a reputation for shying away from any permutation of culture that falls outside the mainstream only makes his accomplishments that much more impressive.
Skunk grew up as a disco baby, yet he’s always been passionate about exploring a wide variety of musical forms. He favored the industrial side of the spectrum in the Eighties rather than the Hi-NRG and electro tracks that were circulating at the time. But his current musical tastes have their origins in a trip he took to the UK late last decade.
“My life changed when I went to London and was first introduced to acid-house in the clubs,” he says. “It was truly amazing. I had never heard music like this before. I bought all these dance records in London and brought them back to Colorado and annoyed the hell out of my friends. They didn’t know what to do with this crazy new sound.”
Disappointed by that reception, Skunk picked up and moved to London in 1990. It was a particularly vital period for English music. “There was the whole Manchester scene, with the first fusion of dance music and rock and roll,” he remembers. “The rave scene had been around for a couple of years and was starting to move out of the fields and the warehouses and into the clubs because of all the anti-party laws in England.”
Upon his return to the states, Skunk hoped to see signs of musical progress in clubland. Instead, he discovered that “Madonna was still playing in every club and there was not a rave in sight. It was a bit of a letdown.”
Fortunately, the situation changed over the next year or so. Raves started sprouting up here in Denver, and the techno and house music that Skunk had discovered in London finally started seeping across the Atlantic. An obsessive vinyl collector, Skunk says, “I kept buying up records and almost by accident, I started mixing them. I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna be a DJ.’ I was hanging out with Craig C, the DJ who kicked off the Denver house scene with DJ Dealer at the Compound, and he showed me the ropes. I was invited down to play at the Ransom, which is now the Elle, and about five people came out to see me and Craig C. I must have train-wrecked every mix, but I got better, and things just built from there.”
As Skunk’s mixing skills improved, so did the world of Denver dance as a whole. Spaces like the late, lamented nightclub (america) and after-hours events like Disco 2000 II sprouted up, providing DJs with the opportunity to get paid for spinning in front of real crowds. Skunk is a fan of the sound that’s resulted, but he sees potential potholes in the road. “It’s important not to get wrapped up in nostalgia,” he says. “It’s really great to hear an old track, something classic that still has it going on. And it’s nice to relive some memories. But you can’t let yourself stop growing with the times. When you find yourself saying, ‘Remember that? Music was so great then…,’ you’re giving in to growing old and giving up on the future.”
To guard against just such a possibility, Skunk created Skunk Motel, the flagship of the Snake Pit. “When the Pit asked me to come on board, they offered me a Monday or a Friday,” Skunk reports. “I chose Monday so I could be more experimental. I didn’t have to worry about entertaining a weekend type of crowd or compromising my sound. I like building a kind of sonic landscape. You have to really feel the music and give it time to rise. We did the whole thing by word of mouth, and I didn’t think it would last more than two weeks.”
Such premonitions of doom turned out to be dead wrong. Skunk Motel celebrated its first birthday in February with its busiest night ever. In an effort to explain the event’s popularity, Skunk says, “Everybody comes for the music, and I think the progressive nature of the mix and the crowd really strikes a chord with people looking for something new. The crowd at Skunk Motel is unlike anything I have ever seen in Denver and almost any other city I’ve been in. It’s gay and straight and black and white and girls and boys and fashion nuts and dressed-down folks and everything in between.”
Word of the Motel’s murky milieu and hypnotic web of deep house beats has traveled fast. Ex-New York celebrity DJ Keoki and nationally recognized mixer Aquatherium have made a thorough inspection of Skunk’s creation, and members of both the Hardkiss Family and Dubtribe–acts that hail from San Francisco, one of the global epicenters of modern dance–have visited the area to hang out or guest DJ at the Pit. Dubtribe subsequently asked Skunk to fly to the Bay Area to record “Sly,” a vinyl single, with the band. “It means a lot to me just to have it in existence,” Skunk says. “People go wild for it when I play it in the mix. They don’t even know that they’re dancing to my record.”
The music industry’s recent embracing of electronic music raises the prospect that the dance army will soon swear in many thousands of new recruits. Skunk will believe it when he sees it. “As someone who thinks that dance music is the sound of the future, it is selfish to want to keep it all underground,” he allows. “It would be great if everybody understood it and embraced the sound. But I can’t see that happening. It has never been about being famous or having a superstar personality. It’s all about studios and dance floors, not concert tours and singalongs. I think it will blow up like Black Box or C+C Music Factory and then disappear again. I could be totally wrong about that, but I doubt it.”
And so, while the billion-dollar entertainment conglomerates hedge their bets, Skunk plans to continue working Mondays at the Pit, keeping two hands on the turntables and a pair of headphones around his close-cropped skull as if there weren’t another living soul within a million miles of him–which couldn’t be further from the truth. “I have no idea how it came about, but I love it,” he says. “I think people just decided that it was time.”
Skunk Motel, with DJ Skunk. 9 p.m. Mondays at the Snake Pit, 608 East 13th Avenue, free, 831-1234.
