The Days of Denim and Leather

Boulder relives metal’s glory years

BY RYAN SMITH (Free Times, Vol. 8, Issue 7, Nov.3-9, 1999)

FORGET ABOUT THE new metal movement. The four guys in Boulder revel in the campy nature of their classic metal forefathers. This 8-year-old Cleveland group celebrates the glory days of heavy metal, the days when bands like AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath ruled the world in denim and leather. They’re a throwback to an era when heavy music fans and bands wore long hair, not Adidas warm-up pants and hockey jerseys.

True to their roots, group members aren’t shy about expressing their opinions on the much-hyped new metal. "They blow!" exclaims lead singer/bassist Jamie Walters, referring to the bands like Limp Bizkit that rule today’s heavy music world.

Nor is the band shy in any other way. The Rage of It All, Boulder’s recently released first full-length recording, sports a hilarious photo collage spoofing old metal’s tendencies for wild album covers. It features a misshapen half-woman/half-beast, dark clouds and other unexplainable occult activities. The bottom edge is being slowly consumed by flames.

Boulder’s music is as strong as their art. The songs on The Rage of It All groove more than anything the group has done in the past. Driven by classic metal and boogie rock melodies, the songs are topped off by Walter’s vocals, a hilarious, fueled concoction that combines gargling barking with the occasional silly howling. Unlike their cover art, though, the group’s music is anything but parody. Boulder takes their music very seriously.

"I hate people that say, ‘I used to like metal," says Walters with characteristic force. "That sucks, If you liked it so much, why don’t you like it now?"

Metal is a lifelong passion for Walters, as well as bandmates Patrick Munn (drums) and Terrence Hanchin (guitar), whom he met in the first grade. Their ties to second guitarist Mark Gibbs extend back to their high school years. As their friendships grew, so did their love of heavy rock.

"Even if we didn’t have the band, we’d still be friends," says Walters. "We grew up listening to the same music: Led Zepplin, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden."

It’s these bands that have influenced Boulder’s musical sensibility. But it’s acts that take heavy music even more to the extreme – Ozzy, Alice Cooper and even GWAR – that have helped shape the group’s live shows. And it’s in their live performances that Boulder’s real claim to fame lies. Boulder takes every bit of traditional rock and roll excess and body slams it into oblivion in shows whose renown has been entered into the history books of the Cleveland rock underground. Setting off fire alarms with smoke bombs, blowing out amps, riding mopeds onstage and playing a Star Wars tune for 20 minutes until club personnel turned their power off are just some of the antics in which Boulder has indulged.

"We just try to keep things interesting," explains Walters. "It really depends on our mood or the situation. Half of the ideas are spontaneous, the other half are planned ahead of time. If someone comes up with something stupid, we go for it…"

Ozzy and Alice would be proud.

Boulder: fucking up the program   BY EDEN GAUTERON (U.S. ROCKER/VOLUME 9/NUMBER 3/MARCH 98)

Boulder attempted to put on the loudest show ever at the Grog shop last December. The guys stacked up eight Marshall cabinets and three bass rigs until the Grog's small stage, which comfortably fits a four-person band, was literally overloaded with amps. Two of the stacks had to be turned at an angle just so they would fit. This gargantuan wall of Marshall stacks reaffirmed my faith in rock and roll. As the mountain of equipment was being hooked up, the band lit smoke bombs and threw handfuls of free Judas Priest cassingles into the crowd.

Finally, Boulder blasted off but only got through half a song when two of their stacks conked out. They got the equipment working again for another minute or two before it fell silent again. The massive ampage was tripping the Grog's circuit breakers and frying their extension cords. Boulder was clearly not going to be playing the loudest gig of all time. They turned off half the amps and played a short set ending with a cover of Judas Priest's "The Ripper" dedicated to local-boy-made-good, Tim "Ripper" Owens. Boulder's innovative absurdity kicks the rest of metal right in the pants.

"I'm kinda skeptical about interviews," says Jamie, Boulder's bassist and singer. "Who are we? Fuckin' pukes. You should interview someone entertaining."

Jamie is rather shifty when it comes to explaining his enigmatic band. He even got me to interview people who have nothing to do with the band.

"You should interview Basil," Jamie said when I first showed him my tape recorder. Basil, Jamie's neighbor, is a semi-senile man in his 70s with horned rim glasses and teeth so bad they're painful to look at. Jamie also turned me onto Morbid Stewart, a mentally-impaired Boulder fan who didn't seem that morbid to me, and Def Stone, a delusional dishwasher friend. Jaime is fascinated with these freakish characters and they inspire Boulder's songs.

Boulder came together in the fall of 1992. Jamie and Mark, who became one of Boulder's guitarists, were playing in a band called Procreation which they describe as "just ridiculousness." Around the same time, two of Jamie's longtime friends Pat (a drummer) and "the Chan" (a guitarist) left their hardcore band, Blatant Disregard. Pat was sick of retreading the same song over and over. "Every song had a fast part that sounded the same," he says. The four of them started practicing together as Boulder to create more inventive heavy music.

Boulder is uninterested in the superhuman speed that obsesses so many bands today. Instead, they take '70s heavy metal and hard rock riffage as their starting point. Their music is based on gritty Sabbath-like groves and the driving propulsion of duel lead-guitar Priest-type metal taken to its illogical extreme. Jamie's "singing" voice is more like the psychotic scream of a blissed-out fan at a Venom concert. Boulder, driven by the blackest of humor, reinvents metal by exceeding the excesses of classic metal.

From the beginning, Boulder has undermined tradition in a tradition-heavy realm. When asked if getting a record contract is a goal of the band, Jamie says, "I don't care one way or the other. If someone says they want to put out our record for free, sure."

Boulder's DIY punk-like ethic is the exact opposite of the hairfarmer-waiting-to-get-signed out-look. All of Boulder's records and tapes have either been self-released or put out by Flexovit, their friend Chris Smith's local indie label.

1994's cassette-only release "94 Jailbreak" (the title is a play on AC/DC and Thin Lizzy) begins with the snakey, bass heavy "Kick the Pregnant." On this song, Jamie screams what could be Boulder's manifesto, "Play by your own rules." About his lyrics, Jamie says, " I don't know if I write'em. I just steal them from what ever people say." On "Shifty," just when the grinding stomp gets going, the song mind-bogglingly switches into an upbeat country stroll and then a funk jam. This song also immortalizes one of the band's heroes with the line, "Def Stone is bad to the bone."

Every copy of Boulder's latest record 555, is stapled to some '70s or '80s metal album. The cover depicts Christ crucified upside down on a wall of Marshall stacks. Clearly, metal is their religion. Though the music is not as outrageous as their earlier stuff, the six-song 10" kicks the refined riffage of "Rage With The Dead" and "Full Throttle." The heavy hypnotic riff of "Love Honkey" causes involuntary headbanging. 555 is powerful neo-classic metal. However, it's Boulder's live shows that get them into trouble. This is where they blow shit up. Literally.

Boulder's legacy of spectacular low-budget live shows has earned them a lot of notoriety. At Studio-A-Rama a few years back, Boulder scared the shit out of the Case Western student crowd when Jamie, completely clad in Rob Halford-esque leather with his butt checks exposed, ripped onto the stage riding a moped. After dumping the moped into some bushes, the band tore into Priest's Hell Bent For Leather." At one of the final shows for Cleveland's former metal headquarters, Flash's, Boulder played the "Imperial Death March" From Star Wars for twenty minutes straight until the club cut the power.

Last summer, another infamous show went down at the Phantasy Nightclub. On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, the band played at a friend's party on Clifton Blvd. They were reluctant to play again that day, but the Phantasy convinced them to appear anyhow. Not wanting to lug all their equipment up the several flights of stairs to the Niteclub, the band brought along acoustic guitars and bongos instead. Since they were going to follow a gothic death metal band they devised a plan to counteract such "serious" evil.

Dressed in white robes, Jamie sang saccharine versions of their songs changing the "Kill the Captain" to "Save the Captain" and "Kick the Pregnant" to "Care for the Pregnant." Then the carcasses came out. The band's plan to blow up some roadkill with H-1000s onstage was stopped by the bouncers who were hip to their scheme. After the show, they did get to detonate the varmint corpses outside the club, making a huge mess and startling a member of the "serious" death metal band who partially inspired Boulder's antics.

"We always have the original plan'" Jamie says, holding his hand up at eye level, "and then the original plan gets scaled down," lowering it waist level. Boulder's ingenuity is that even when the plan gets "scaled down" it is still something that you would never expect.

Of course, the plan sometimes goes too well. When Boulder played at the Red Eye Rock Club, a bar/bowling alley in North Royalton, the plan for the night was to act like a hairspray metal band. This last-stand-for-cheese-metal bar was the perfect place for the band to live out a glam rock fantasy. Jamie wore chaps, the Chan had a huge blond wig, skin-tight jeans and cowboy boots, and Pat, also with a wig, had on a Whitesnake t-shirt and spandex. Pat admits, "We showed up looking like geeks."

Covered in eyeliner and bandannas, Boulder screamed, "We're glamsters from fuckin' LA." What took place after that is shrouded in mystery. There is a rumor that Jamie squatted down and took a shit on the monitors?" Not on the monitors," Jaime says. He would describe what happened as "stuff being broken and pieces of shit." The club had had enough of Boulder's destructive antics. The lights were cut. "This shit would never fuckin' happen in L.A.!" Jamie yelled. After the stage power was cut, the band thought that they'd push it further and demand that they got paid. Then the cops showed up and Jamie ended up getting a three day jail stint.

"That was our downfall -- we were being just like idiots the whole time" says Jaime in retrospect. "Stuff happened, whatever, then the pigs came." The North Royalton newspaper wrote it up as "Boulder hailing from L.A." caused damage to the club because they weren't allowed to bowl for free, which bands usually got to do. While this motive is not very accurate it makes the night into a better story. Jamie agrees, "That ruled! That made the story sound better -- "They wouldn't let'em bowl so they fucking DEMOLISHED the place!"

Stories about this band, I've found, vary from person to person. They get mutated and exaggerated in the retelling all the time. "Some of this stuff is better left as heard," says Jamie, "Not let the truth be known… It's a better story like that, you know, make up your own."

Epilogue

When I watched the band practice, Mark asked me if I wanted to sing a cover song with the band. Hell yeah! I picked out one that had been going through by head a lot lately, Priest's "Grinder." The song was fun to sing but I realized that I didn't know any of the words except the chorus that goes, "GRINN-DDERRRR."

When I saw Jamie a week later, I mentioned that it was great to sing with Boulder, but that I could only remember that one part.

"That's alright," Jamie said. "That's all you need to know."

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