Plastic Rakes and Twinheads Play Outdoor Concert at Sundays on 13th Flea Market

Logan Rainard has an uncanny knack for finding niche groups of people, whether in grade school or Denver’s eclectic punk scene. Growing up, Rainard was a self-described “hyperactive skateboard kid,” and he likens the community of skaters from his youth to the music scene he’s entrenched in today.

“You could just go anywhere in the world, and if you met one skateboarder, you were kind of welcomed, and all of a sudden you knew all these other people,” he says. “Music is very much the same way. You go to a new city and you’re like, ‘Where do all the weird musicians hang out?’ And you’ve got a lot of friends all of a sudden.”

Rainard is intimately familiar with the trials of moving to a new city – he moved to Denver from the D.C. area in 2008, an already difficult shift exacerbated by his role as a gigging musician and the handful of bands he was leaving behind. A fresh transplant in an unfamiliar city, Rainard began to dig for Denver’s hidden punk-rock scene. “As a skateboarder, you go check out the skate spots in the town you move to, so [I was] like, ‘Where’s the good record store?'” he remembers. His answer was local brick-and-mortar shops such as Wax Trax and Westminster’s Black & Read, where “I spent a lot of time and money,” he says.

He also sought out venues known for hosting grungy bands with a flair for the unique, including the Lion’s Lair, the D Note in Arvada and Denver’s late Three Kings Tavern. His music career was revived through mutual connections and good old-fashioned networking. “I got in a couple of bands and got some stuff going and eventually bumped into that,” Rainard says, name-dropping late, long-established groups such as Little Fyodor and Babushka Band. As with his adolescent skateboarding squad, “once I knew one of them, I kinda knew them all,” he says.

Now Rainard is the bassist for five Denver bands: Bolonium, Torn Within, Klendathu Surf Riders Club, Plastic Rakes and Twinheads. Twinheads is a fairly new project of Rainard and his buddy Kevin Schultz, who also plays in TripLip and the jam band Shawarma. Schultz “had a one-year-old at home, and [my wife and I] were getting ready to rearrange our lives for our baby to show up, and Wednesday night became dads’ night off,” Rainard says. “So it was kind of like a dads’ hang out and listen to records night that turned into a band, because we would jam.” Twinheads is a two-bass duo with a drum machine whose sound incorporates the nerdy, post-punk elements of the ’80s band Minutemen.

Plastic Rakes, on the other hand, was established in 1996, when Rainard was still learning how to perfect an ollie on his skateboard. The Frank Zappa-influenced soft-punk band started as Mourning Sickness before rebranding to Plastic Rakes in 2015 after one of the original members left, leaving drummer George Phillips and guitarist Matthew Maher to revive the band. Rainard joined the band in 2018 after connecting with Maher, who is also a history lecturer at Metropolitan State University.

Plastic Rakes and Twinheads are both part of the Denver Art Rock Collective – a group that helps facilitate and diffuse art-rock music through a free recording archive run by Maher. Rainard notes that Maher’s affinity for historic archiving has spilled onto the DARC website, where there are “fifteen years of really cool, weird underground punk-rock music recordings of live shows,” he says. Anytime a DARC band plays a gig, Maher is there with recording equipment on and ready to go.

This weekend, the Plastic Rakes and Twinheads are playing at the Sundays on 13th Flea Market. The market has been a weekly tradition since its conception during the pandemic; it hosts fifteen to 25 vendors, including artists, purveyors of vintage clothes and skin-care booths. Pete Stidman, co-owner and general manager of Wax Trax, notes that anyone can get involved as a vendor or performer, though he does put performers “through the filter of our snarky Wax Trax employees. If the band makes it past them,” he says, “then you know they can play.” 

Rainard has played the flea market with Plastic Rakes a few times and always enjoys it. “We’re kind of these weird arty bands that sort of get relegated to playing the Lion’s Lair, or weeknights at smaller rock clubs and stuff,” he says. “And so while we do have a scene and a fan group, it’s a really cool opportunity to catch people walking down the street.”

Plastic Rakes and Twinheads play at Wax Trax, 638 East 13th Avenue, from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, July 30.