I am banned from singing at the Mercury Cafe in Denver.
Back in 2000 I formed a songwriting duo with a friend of mine, Micah. During that time we wrote about 30 or 40 songs in a short time, and a half dozen or so were actually pretty good. He was a great rhythm guitarist who know a lot of chords and who came up with pretty cool, logical progressions. (That perhaps were a bit over my more punk/country oriented head.)
We performed them at a few open mike nights around Denver, and we were generally well-received.
We were excited to play the Mercury Cafe open mike night, as Mercury Cafe was known as a centre of artistic activity: I had read poetry there many times; there were punk rock shows upstairs. It prided itself on being one of the only venues that would host the Dead Kennedy’s back in the eighties and it still had a reputation as an artistic institution in 2000 — probably still does.
To our disappointment, the snowy night we played there, no one came. We were the only performers in the house and there were no patrons there but us and the runner o the open mike night.
So we decided to just turn it into a rehearsal and we performed all of our songs including a few ribald ones that weren’t really finished. One of them did have some lyrics with sexually frank lyrics, but I thought I had heard and read much worse than that there.
The next time we came we were told that we were not allowed to play there, as our lyrics were ‘obscene.’ I was surprised —shocked, in fact, that this bastion of artistic expression….did not allow us to play our songs. We left the joint. And I never went back.
Soon after that me and my friend’s songwriting partnership ended.
Written November 15
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