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Nick Plumber: “My friend Tony and I had put together a noise band with Tony on guitar, my friend Adam on sax, a woman named Fred playing a five-gallon bucket of Jell-O with a toilet plunger, someone playing the watermelon meat hammer (a watermelon with a microphone stuck in it being beaten with raw pork chops), and me screaming the lyrics to “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” and reading from a Mickey Spillane novel. We called ourselves the Chaos Ensemble, and we were terrible.
“The highlight of the evening was when some hippies crashed the party and fled practically screaming after being pelted with raw meat flying off the watermelon meat hammer. I had been afraid of singing in front of an audience, but after that night, I realized that if I could do something that completely stupid and the sky didn’t fall, I could front a normal band with normal instruments.”
Whiskey Orphans play the Pit Stop Tavern on Friday, June 29.
Editor's Note: The Denver Bootleg is a series chronicling the history of local music venues by longtime Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz. Visit Krumpholz's website to see more of his work.
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