LONGMONT — The first hardcore show Jacob Morales ever went to was The Runts, a punk band from Los Angeles playing an all-ages show at D3 Arts in Denver in 2022.
“It was horrifying. It was so scary. I was exhilarated,” Morales, the 18-year-old drummer of punk band MONKEYPAW, told The Colorado Sun.
“It was going on a roller coaster for the first time. It’s like you’re going up the hill, and you’re like, ‘I’m going to puke all over my lap. I’m going to! I’m so scared right now!’ And then it drops and just starts going and you’re moving around and it’s twisting and turning and it’s just crazy. And by the time it’s fully hitting you, you’re done,” Morales said. “That’s what punk is to me.”
He was terrified, he was having a blast. He approached the band after their set and copped a free T-shirt and CD from the singer, items he still covets.
Three years later, in August, Morales was mashing his drums with MONKEYPAW in the backyard of Summit Tacos, a Mexican joint in his hometown of Longmont, when D’Andre Lara decided it was time to jump into his first mosh pit.
Lara felt a surge of adrenaline, jumped in, jumped around, fell down, was picked up and pushed back in. “It was just like in the heat of the moment type of thing. Just a very fun, expressional type of movement,” Lara said.
The Summit Tacos show was the first time Morales, who has been in bands since the summer after eighth grade, had ever played a show in Longmont. It was also the first event that Michelle Webb, who runs the Instagram account Longmont Punk, hosted on home turf.
Finding your place
Webb is a longtime punk fan (she moved to Washington, D.C., at 18 in part because of the music scene), who has lived in Boulder County for 25 years, but rarely went to shows outside of Denver or Fort Collins, and never in Longmont, she said. She missed the shows, and didn’t want to move in order to make it a regular part of her life. So she determined to find the scene in Longmont — there are all these “back in the day” stories, she said. And if there wasn’t a scene to be found, she was ready to make one.
She started asking for bands and casting for a venue. No one bit. She considered having a show in her garage. That was the plan until someone mentioned Summit Tacos might be open to hosting a show in their yard. She locked it down. Scheduled bands. Had a friend design some flyers. She thought it would be cool if 40 people or so showed up. She sold 220 tickets.
The process of throwing that show revealed how many people were operating within or adjacent to the punk scene in Longmont, but they were missing each other without a central hub. So she started Longmont Punk.
One of the venues that turned down Webb for the initial show was the Firehouse Art Center, a community studio and gallery in a historic brick firehouse.
“I saw videos from the show — that would have been a disaster,” said Elaine Waterman, executive director of Firehouse Art Center. The art on the walls would have been destroyed, she said. “Thank goodness it didn’t work out.”
But the energy of the Summit show stayed with Waterman, and she knew she wanted to do something with the emergent scene. So she reached back out to Webb, as well as a local production crew and the Longmont Creative District, and came up with a workaround.
This Saturday, the Firehouse Art Center will host Out of the Box, a combination fashion, music and art show, where the art will be moved out of the gallery and into U-Haul trailers parked outside, so the fashion and music shows — mosh pits included — can happen indoors.
Fighting cringe culture
Back in the day, as in, the late ’90s, you found out about the next show from a flyer. It was taped to a shop window, or pinned to a bulletin board, or handed to you in front of a theater where a different show was happening.
“If you wanted to find it, you really had to search for it,” said Chuck Coffey, owner of Snappy Little Numbers recording studio. “You searched until you got to a point where you are at the center, and then you just have to turn around to find out what’s next.”
Coffey got into punk in the mid-1990s, and stumbled into a vibrant Front Range scene as a University of Colorado student in Boulder. Punk was as much a social scene as a musical one. It was finding your people and figuring out your values, he said. There was constant networking, show trading, favor swapping, sleeping on floors.
“The DIY thing is real, but no one does anything by themselves,” he said.
That sense of belonging is still critical, but now a lot of it happens on the internet. The internet, “the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to heavy music,” according to Morales.
While Coffey seems optimistic about social media helping kids find their people quicker, Lara said his peers are more self-conscious than ever, afraid of being called “cringe” because of social media. Both admit it is a double-edged sword.
Lara likes to “pop,” he said. He likes differences. He likes expressive clothing. He becomes visibly frustrated talking about the way his peers tamp down their personalities in order to fit in. He toggles between his personality as a diplomatic student body president and a deeply spirited teen.
“I feel what my generation is lacking is community, because they don’t fully understand it,” he said, and added: “Cringe culture is so hard because it’s constantly changing. It’s just like, ughhhhhhhh let me live my life!”
Tied up in cringe culture is the “nonchalant” TikTok trend, where teens show each other how to appear effortlessly unbothered in all kinds of situations, especially in relationships.
And if punk is about pushing back, for the younger generation, part of what they’re pushing against is this sense of feigned apathy.
“The term ‘nonchalant’ should be a hate crime. That is a dangerous word,” Morales joked. “If you’re nonchalant, then you’re attractive, you’re this mysterious being, you’re this cool character. But when the day is over, what even are you if you don’t like anything? What are you as an individual if you don’t if you don’t believe in anything? If you don’t stand for anything?
“That’s why I think punk rock and hardcore is vital for kids who are wondering why they aren’t the thing everyone is attracted to,” Morales said. “It should be the opposite. It should be like, I’m going to this thing, and my people are going to find me there.”