by Duane Davis
Roland Barthes argued that true subversion doesn’t annihilate systems – it warps them. You don’t burn the code; you disfigure it until it stutters, misfires, reveals its seams. By that measure, the Festival of Pain was a minor masterpiece of cultural vandalism. It didn’t abolish music, sport or performance. It simply ran them through a meat grinder and served the results up with a more or less straight face.
When I wrote this article up for Westword 42 years ago in 1984, besides obviously being much taken with quoting from hip cultural icons like Barthes, Artaud and Sade, I was also interested in the ways underground scenes evolved rituals, ceremonies, musics and games to mark their members as Bande à part (to continue my practice of cultural reference theft, this time from Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1964 French New Wave film, also used by Quentin Tarantino for his production company, called, in translation, A Band Apart).
It is difficult to keep in mind the perspective of scale from now to a point four decades ago. In 1984, virtually everyone in the avant garde music and art scene in Denver knew each other. More, almost all of them were in Wax Trax every week, looking at the latest singles, LPs and music papers from England or other tiny scenes across America sending out vinyl messages from like-minded people into Punk, New Wave, Goth, Industrial, Ska, Nű Romantik or whatever else was trembling at the edges of the zeitgeist at that moment.
Events like the Festival of Pain, in those long ago pre-internet days, were a gathering of the tribe: tattoos like a visual cryptography only those in the know already could read, intricate architectures of hair style, clothing and footwear that had nothing to do with comfort or protection from the weather and everything to do with provocation or seduction, warning or invitation, and a jewelry of menace and desire. You walked in the door and you were among your own.
As noted in the review, the Festival was put together by Ken DeVries, a member of the original Punk scene that formed around Wax Trax in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Ken at that time was more Art/Damage provocateur than Punk, adopting the nom de guerre of Kenmore Dryer (you younger kids may have to Google that up) and affecting a generally bad attitude with a severe haircut. An accomplished and imaginative artist, Ken contributed many cartoons, comics and artwork to the various Wax Trax sponsored fanzines we put out through the 1980s.
After so many years, I no longer recall why I didn’t mention in the review that the Small Appliance Orchestra was me and a few people who either worked at Wax Trax or who hung around enough I should have put them on the payroll. For this, one of my very few forays into performance, I played one of the vacuum cleaners. In all modesty, I was, if not great, very loud.
Pain killers
[Originally published in Westword, 2/15/1984]
It’s crying time again at the Festival of Pain.
“Does the best of subversions not consist in disfiguring codes, not in destroying them?” —Roland Barthes
The Festival of Pain germinated some weeks ago in the fertile but aberrant brain of Ken DeVries as an opportunity for displaying private pathology as public obsession. The spectacle was conceived as the shifting constant in the balance of art and terror—and all in good, not so clean, fun.
DeVries quickly connected with Kurt Bauer, an individual who has spent a lifetime enjoying the fine art of being Sick. Currently nursing his illness through an association known as The Art Department, Bauer arranged for his space at 8th and Santa Fe to be used as the site of the Festival on February 3.
Together, our two entrepreneurs of malice established an itinerary of irritants ranging from a Bloodball contest to a magician to a series of musical entertainments provided by five bands which between them could not have figured out how to properly hum the melody line of The Star Spangled Banner.
“Everything that acts is a cruelty.” —Antonin Artaud
The evening began with Bloodball, a sport in which one team of four attempts to stop another team of four from tossing a balloon filled with paint through a small square cut in the wall about ten feet off the floor. The two teams, The Red and The Black, were outfitted like low-rent Road Warriors at a Salvation Army tournament with umpire’s chest shields, football shoulder pads and cut-up tires strapped on as leg protectors.
Thirty or forty spectators crowded into a space designed for twenty. They were given plastic garbage bags and shower caps for protective armor, which came in quite handy when the splattering began.
The action was fast and furious as the valiant Value Village Gladiators strove mightily to defy the laws of physics by stuffing two or more bodies into a space normally occupied by one. The floor, the walls and the spectators were soon covered in red and black paint and the whole scene became a canvas of motion and duration, a constantly changing and shifting art of color and impact. When the teams retired from the field of play, The Red prevailed over The Black by a hard-fought score of 1-0.
Meanwhile, the six-person Small Appliance Orchestra was setting up a flea-market ensemble in the basement to lead off the night’s musical traumas. Among the instruments were an electric ice-cream maker, a hair dryer, two vacuum cleaners, an ice-cube tray and a bucketful of empty Gerber baby-food bottles. The percussion section was rounded out with a marching drum and two record players that were eventually beaten into pieces in the ensuing mayhem. It was a stimulating, if somewhat unnerving, performance.
Next up was Carpet Squad, a Country & Western duo of guitar and fiddle which played TV theme songs.
Ain’t No Band was another duo; Neil Feather and John Sheenan played guitars and black boxes modified with klaxon horns and dildoes and enough wiring for a Rube Goldberg machine through PAs loud enough to peel off your skin. Industrial strength dirge.
Boulder’s own PusTones provided an acoustic set of small guitar and beer bottle while warbling Creedence Clearwater tunes. The guy playing beer bottle wore one of the most awesomely homely sheepskin coats to ever disgrace the human figure. The crowd screamed for more. Pain, I guess, is addictive.
Last up was Ken DeVries’ Revelation 13, three individuals who played a couple of synthesizers, a pile of metal tubing, and some empty plastic Wisk bottles while a taped Hellfire and Damnation preaching boomed in the background. I tell you, no one was napping when they set fire to their junk and closed the evening.
“Yield: unless you acquaint yourself with everything, you’ll know nothing.” —de Sade
To sum up: more festival than pain. The Bloodball was bruising, messy and exhilarating, and the bands… Well, the bands stand in somewhat the same relation to music as anti-matter stands to cheesecake: not particularly palatable but nonetheless an interesting change of fare from the usual dessert.
One last note. The whole affair was videotaped and is currently being rendered down to manageable proportions, with an eye to local access TV-time. Step aside, “That’s Incredible.”
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