KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS CULTURE Sex Pistol REBELLIOUS TALES FROM A FORT COLLINS PUNK-ROCK GIRL IN THE ‘90S. BY EMILY FERGUSON Jello wrestling. Raucous punk concerts. Making clay pipes in pottery class to sell to stoners. Playing hooky with a handle of vodka. Thirteen-dollar tattoos. Drugs, drinking, dancing. That was all part of Erin Barnes’s teen years in the white-picket-fence world of Fort Collins, which she chronicles in her latest book, Glory Guitars: Memoir of a ’90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl. Barnes is the communica- tions manager at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station, but she’s been leaning into her alter ego, Gogo Germaine, as the book’s October 11 release date through University of Hell Press approaches. She decided to use the Gogo Germaine byline in order to not con- fl ate her career and life as a mom with the PBR-swilling, headbanging, rebellious grrrl with punk-rock proclivities and two middle fi ngers thrust at societal expectations. Those middle fi ngers are still in the air, at least a little. “I fi rst sat down to write Glory Guitars in October of 2018. I just remember being so burdened with responsibility. I was a new mom, and I had to work a lot just to survive in this society, especially as a creative, so I had, like, eight jobs,” Barnes recalls. “It was an escapist thing to think about: The idea of running through a fi eld, ditching class as a teenager with very little responsibility, was just so magnetic to me.” She wrote the book in a matter of weeks during a residency at The Music District in Fort Collins, where she met with her old From Glory Guitars: Memoir of a ’90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl Let me tell you a story that will confuse your senses of what’s right. It begins with an epic band that plays music to rob banks to, music that’s naturally playing on some spiritual plane during each and every knife fi ght. This music is both campy and classic, yet there’s a vein of frenetic, full-throttled machismo; not the red-blooded machismo of Bruce nor aspirational douche machismo of Bono. It’s foundational guitar music, darkly romantic from times past. We’ll call them the Flames. For reasons that you’ll understand soon, that may be rooted in Stockholm Syndrome, I’m keep- ing them anonymous. Corinne and I enjoyed our dark pro- 14 Erin Barnes has a book reading and signing at Tattered Cover on October 11. crew to see what they remembered of their debauched antics. “I hung out with all of the girls that are in the girl gang,” she says. “I hung out with, like, my fi rst boyfriend, Johnny Gut- punch. I would just reminisce with them, ask them about their memories and talk to them about my memories. If they just totally didn’t remember it, I wouldn’t put it in the book. “Most people don’t know what it feels like to rob a bank because their morals stop them from doing that,” she continues. “But as a teen- ager, you can kind of explore the boundaries of clivities. Where other girls our age went to *NSYNC concerts, Corinne and I could be found at Type O Negative concerts. We were bewitched by Peter Steele’s subter- ranean voice and wine-swigging black romance, wind machines re-animating his long hair and goth metal bass riffs ravaging our nethers. We waited in the alley after the show among the heavily pleathered and begothed, meek souls lining up to be vampirically fucked by Peter. He waved at us with the passion of someone seeing a corporate coworker at a social event, then ducked into his tour bus. We weren’t aware that he was known as a misogynist and a do- mestic abuser, and even considered a Nazi sympathizer in some circles. His tendency to alternately worship women (“I am your servant, may I light your cigarette?”) and threaten to annihilate them in the same creating situations that are almost movie-like. When we ditched school, it felt like a movie, and it felt like we were getting away with something big, like we were robbing a bank.” The stifl ing atmosphere of Fort Collins was the impetus for her girl gang’s plucky, defi ant nature. In a chapter about skipping class, Barnes writes: “Your 15-year-old self might say you don’t need to explain what’s cool about ditching class, playing the drums, or subsisting on a diet of coffee, cigarettes, malt liquor, Lester Bangs, and smashy gui- song (“let me love you to death….the beast inside of me is gonna get ya”) was narcotic to our Baroque teenage passions. The back-alley meeting with Peter was our standalone attempt at groupiedom. It took a lot of sex appeal on the part of the performer to convince us to put ourselves out there as groupies. This type of self-offering required more appearance-based confi dence, and less innards-based confi dence, than I had. ... “Groupie” has always been a term I wanted to distance myself from. I worked in the music industry for over a decade, a music industry fi lled with musicians, who are unarguably the sexiest people on earth. During that time, I never so much as touched a single one of their guitar-strumming mus- cled arms or errant, perfectly messy hairs on their heartbreaking beauty-fi lled heads. ... Watching the Flames at the Starlite tars. It’s a natural predilection. The only reason people assume it’s indicative of emo- tional trauma is because you’re expected to like pink and cheerleading. The truth is that some people are happiest wearing black and listening to fucked-up music, and you’re one of those people. It doesn’t necessarily indi- cate a deeper emotional trauma, it’s simply the tendency to dig deeper and burn harder.” And she burned hard. Barnes and her skater- girl gang did their best to escape the boredom that thrives in subur- on a Saturday night, during a particularly life-altering show, I was blissfully fi fteen years old and had no career to be insuf- ferable about. Immediately after the show, while the crowd still cheered, the bass player of the Flames emerged from backstage. He had purple hair and looked like an aging punk. He grabbed my hand and pulled me back- stage like a rag doll, pausing to ask, “How old are you?” “Eighteen,” I immediately answered. A silent agreement. An answer that’s compli- ant and rebellious at the same time. He nodded, and we went backstage, my hand pulling Corinne along with me. Thus began a deviant, occasional court- ship that spanned three years between me, a 15-year-old girl, and Ezra, a 50-something rock star. continued on page 16 OCTOBER 6-12, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com GLENN ROSS
