Audio By Carbonatix
You’d think most bands, attention-starved as they are, would jump at the chance to get interviewed by the local paper. But when just such an offer is put to Pariah Caste guitarist Chuck Coffey, the only thing jumping up is his eyebrow. “Why do you want to write an article about us?” he quizzes suspiciously, sounding like the high-school geek in a John Hughes flick who just got asked out by the homecoming queen.
Coffey’s reticence is understandable. He and his bandmates — singer Nick Krier, guitarist Bryce McPherson, bassist Trevor Morris and drummer Colin Madden — are part of a circle of friends who have been recording their own music, putting out their own discs and playing and promoting their own shows since the mid-’90s, back when the musicians were still teens. A self-sustaining, almost subterranean community, it’s never been given much attention by the Denver media, despite the fact that the groups involved tour the country relentlessly, release nationally distributed CDs and have large and ardent hometown followings. Not that Coffey and crew have exactly been beating down the door of the music establishment — indeed, Pariah Caste seems dead set on living up to its name.
“The pariah caste in India is the lowest social class,” explains McPherson, sitting on Morris’s front porch with the rest of the group on a drizzly afternoon, waiting to load up the van and embark on a two-week trek across the Midwest. “It’s the class of people they get to clean out the sewers and gutters. They say that you get the bubonic plague if you touch them.”
“But it’s not like we’re this roving band of lepers or something,” Krier says with a laugh, “even though you feel like that on tour sometimes. You walk into a place and you feel all dirty, and people are looking at you funny.”
“We pulled into Wyoming to play a show once,” recalls Morris, “and someone had taken an American flag and hung it upside down next to our name. I was like, ‘Woah, I can’t represent that.’ At the time, we had T-shirts with a hammer and sickle between the ‘Pariah’ and the ‘Caste,’ but we don’t sing about Marxism or economics or anything like that. We don’t really have a political message in our music.”
But Pariah Caste doesn’t need to sport symbols or spout rhetoric to make its point. Since coming together in 2002 (original drummer Jason Walker left early on to concentrate on pounding skins for the Gamits), the group has held to the ethos of independence and integrity that its members adopted when they started rocking together years ago in an inbred network of acts such as the Facet, Mail Order Children, Gutbucket, Still Left Standing, 5 Day Messiah, Contender and the Gravity Index.
“I used to watch all these guys’ old bands when I was, like, fourteen,” Morris remembers.
“Yeah, we actually all met when we were changing Trevor’s diaper,” quips Coffey.
“Seriously,” Morris goes on, “almost every person in this band is a symbol to me of what made Denver the most awesome place to grow up and become a musician in. When I was a kid playing in this horrible, heinous band, Chuck became my friend and put us on shows with his bands. We were young and awkward and pimple-faced and said the dumbest shit, but everyone was just so super-supportive. It’s been great playing in this band with all these guys, sitting in a room and democratically writing a bunch of songs with them.”
Pariah Caste’s longstanding friendships and communal songwriting process culminated last year in its debut CD, Sisyphean Slope. Riddled with jagged edges and rife with angst, the music jerked in five directions at once while maintaining a unified focus and lockjaw intensity. But the group’s brand-new effort — a self-titled split release with the local country/roots combo Out on Bail — boils melody and discordance down into a seething pool of frustration, vengeance and the unblinking contemplation of death. Ravaged by the taut, rhythmic aggression of Fugazi, Hot Snakes and At the Drive-In, Pariah Caste’s four-song contribution to the disc is a merciless sharpening of the quintet’s sound — not to mention a pretty odd choice of counterpoint to Out on Bail’s backwoods, booze-soaked holler.
“We could have split a record with a hardcore band or an indie-rock band, and that might have seemed more fitting,” comments Morris. “But the utter disparity between our style and Out on Bail’s just screams, ‘Hello, we love this band. We love the people in it and the music they play.’ If we were trying to market something, we definitely wouldn’t put those two bands together on one disc. But the good news is, we’re not trying to market anything.”
When it comes to marketing, maneuvering and vying for mainstream acceptance, the members of Pariah Caste shun the whole idea as if it were an infectious disease, regardless of the fact that punk rock has lately become more lucrative and ubiquitous than ever.
“Ambition can’t be your motivating factor,” asserts Krier. “That’s just putting the cart before the horse. It’s like being stoked to start your new job, but when you get there, you realize you forgot your pants. I mean, we’re pretty serious about touring a lot and getting our stuff out there, but you have to have really solid relationships with everybody in your band first if you expect to take it anywhere.”
“We opened for this band at the Bluebird Theater when we started out,” recalls Morris. “They were on a big label and everything, but there were only twenty or thirty people there to see them. Then we went on our first tour, we played a basement show set up by some sixteen-year-old kid, and seventy people show up. How does that work out, where this big band with a booking agent gets paid a huge guarantee to play a giant, empty hall? Their world doesn’t even intersect with ours. It makes me happy to be small and independent and DIY. The grass is greener over here.”
Granted, such relative autonomy — the band rarely plays bars or theaters in town, existing instead within a thriving circuit of underground warehouses and other out-of-the-way stages — is a little bit easier for Pariah Caste than it might be for others. Coffey is the co-owner of Not Bad Records, the imprint on which all of Pariah Caste’s releases appear. Morris runs the Furnace Room, a bustling and inexpensive recording studio, out of his basement. And McPherson is the proprietor of Pancho’s Villa, one of many informal venues around town where misfits, fuckups and the proudly uncool can go get their rock on. “With all that going for us,” says McPherson, “it doesn’t really matter what trends go on in the music business. We’re a self-contained unit.”
Of course, no band is an island. But Pariah Caste draws its external strength and support from a small, tightly knit syndicate of like-minded local groups — many of which sport members that look suspiciously like the guys in Pariah Caste themselves. The result is a substratum of outsiders, operating under the radar and beyond the perimeter of Denver’s sometimes petty, image-conscious music industry.
“It must really suck to have to worry about things like that, keeping up with trends and trying to be on the cutting edge,” observes Krier. “Some bands that we’ve played with — and I won’t mention any names — just seem so cold. The shit keeps getting worse, and you’ve just got to keep on sinking lower and lower to reach an audience.”
“If your plan is to take over Denver, or take over anything, it’s frightening,” says Morris. “It doesn’t even seem human to me. Playing where and how we do strips things down to a much more communal, social, primal level. When I go places to see bands or play a show, it’s because I know and want to be around the people there. I don’t look at an audience and see a sales market; I see my buddies.”
In the end, the bonds of rock and brotherhood are what Pariah Caste is essentially about. As almost any ’80s teen movie will tell you, the weird kids have to stick together. Or as Madden puts it, “As long as I get to hang out with these four guys and go on tour and not have to worry about my shitty job back home, things are successful, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I guess what we’re trying to say is that we’re all chummy, and we’re all fond of each other,” says Krier, inciting a blast of laughter from his comrades. “As for making it big, I guess that’s up to luck, which is fine. I don’t mind being at the mercy of luck as long as I love the music we make.”
“After all,” sums up Coffey, “what’s the worst that could happen? We have a good time, and we like what we’re doing. We don’t need anything more than that to go on. That’s good enough for us.”
