“I'm walking to the library one day, and a guy named Gabe Martinez — he goes by Ebag — was riding around on a BMX bike," he says. "He was way older than me at the time, and he saw all the stuff on my jacket, and he gave me a flyer to a place called the Fallout Shelter, a basement venue, and that's where I kind of met the first crew of people."
Within a month of that encounter, McCoy was playing drums in Ebag’s band. “We were just hopping from project to project and recording in basements and doing all that,” recalls McCoy, who now provides guitar and vocals for Mineral Palace, a local punk band whose namesake “comes from one of the city’s greatest achievements and failures.”
The lore of Pueblo hardcore runs deep, from notorious house shows, which became a regular part of the circuit for bands traveling through – McCoy was recently gifted an AFI T-shirt a friend purchased when the band played in town sometime shortly after the release of its first album — to local groups like Fanatics, Logical Nonsense, Son of Man and others that thrived in the '90s and 2000s.
Punk and DIY scenes are still alive and well in Pueblo if you know where to look – but McCoy, who founded DIY record label Bedfires Records, is hoping to make that discovery process a little easier while paying homage to those who continue to pass the torch with the Pueblo Alternative Archive Project.
Bedfires started the project this summer to document and preserve the history of alternative music in Pueblo, which McCoy says has been an incubator for countless bands. So far, he’s been able to conjure up information on at least 150 that have played some sort of original music in the Steel City since 2000.
“I work in a record store a couple days a week here in town, and so you get all these kids that come in, you find out, oh, they started a band, and I end up recording them and it's really cool to kind of see that happening again because I was the version of that happening again in the 2000s,” McCoy says.
Jesse McCoy’s current project, Mineral Palace, plays a show at Bio Back Gallery, one of a few current venues open to the city’s DIY scene.
Photo by Inaiah Lujan, courtesy of Jesse McCoy
It was one of those encounters that gave the archive project legs. A young band came into the record shop and its members said they’d been playing shows in Denver because there wasn’t a scene in Pueblo.
“I was kind of put off by that. I'm like, ‘That's absolutely not true.’ We've got four venues right now at minimum. And we've got a ton of really killer bands right now of all ages… they had no idea that there was even anything here. But a weekend before that, we had 100 kids in one of our local venues for one of our shows, and there's just a complete disconnect between these generations of kids that are coming up in Pueblo that don't realize that there's a history here of DIY music,” McCoy says.
That history originated in places like the Fallout Shelter and other basements where McCoy took his first steps into the punk scene, as well as such venues as the Indie House, the Pixie Inn and Phil’s Radiator, which closed in 2015 after two decades of business. Often, Phil’s was one of the only all-ages venues catering to young musicians in the DIY scene.
Other venues came and went over the years. As a young couple, Sophie and Kevin Healy started the Red Raven, an all-ages venue in the Bessemer neighborhood that was in operation in the early 2010s. Prior to that, Kevin started the Living Room, a downtown venue that catered to DIY bands.
Running a venue was a natural fit for Sophie, who grew up seeing her friends play punk shows around town, and Kevin, who had a similar experience as a teenager in Philadelphia.
“We got some amazing bands that came through that would have never stopped in Pueblo if there wasn’t a venue for them to play at,” Sophie Healey says. Because many Denver venues had a 100-mile clause, the duo had to sometimes get creative about attracting touring bands, but they’d almost always dictate that openers would be local acts. That helped Pueblo musicians make connections.
The two look back fondly on those years, the shows and the music, and say they’re glad to see the archive project help document them for a new generation. “I desperately think kids need something like this right now, and a community space for them to commune, to be nerds at, to be fans,” Sophie says.
That’s McCoy's vision, too. He wants to capture memories where they can live in a digital format forever: show posters, video and audio recordings, photos. He wants all of those examples of Pueblo counterculture to have a home – especially because he knows many people kept hold of them. The plan, McCoy says, is to host archival events where locals can bring their materials for scanning or digitizing.
Pueblo artist and musician Inaiah Lujan keeps a binder full of old show posters, a relic inherited from a good friend. Like McCoy, Lujan found a place in Pueblo’s DIY scene as a teenager who leaned on elders to get started. They gave lifts to Kinko’s to make flyers, booked shows and got the word out.
“It's such a frenetic and sort of fiery thing,” Lujan says of Pueblo’s DIY scene. “And I think that fire is not supposed to be maintained at one place. It's meant to just kind of get spread around. Part of that comes from just the innocence of not knowing any better. So it's just making a lot of mistakes along the way.”
Lujan started with DIY and kept evolving genres, following the thread of punk, which eventually led to the Haunted Windchimes, a beloved Pueblo folk band. There have been glimmers of punk in other creative projects, too, including graphic design, photography and film.
At 41, Lujan says mosh pits and punk shows aren’t as big a part of life as when you're in your teens, but whenever you feel like tapping back into the hardcore scene, it’s always there. “It doesn't go away when you leave. The torch just gets passed along,” Lujan says.
Beyond archiving Pueblo punk history and developing a current directory of resources for young bands, the project serves another purpose: McCoy can see it as a way to invite Denverites and other northern outsiders to take a peek into a music scene that’s often snubbed in a place that typically gets a bad rap.
“We had a conversation, me and some friends, and we were bummed out… and we started brainstorming a bit, and it turned into a campaign we're working on through the archive called Don't Go to Pueblo,” McCoy says.
“We want to make a brochure-slash-compilation of Pueblo to send out up north and around the state and go, ‘Hey, you're wrong about Pueblo. There's all this going on. Come see it. Come see what's going on down here.'”
To contribute or donate to the archive and learn more about events, visit bedfires.com/archive.
