21 OCTOBER 26-NOVEMBER 1, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | FIND MORE MUSIC COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MUSIC Murder, He Wrote MARIS THE GREAT RISES AGAIN... BEFORE GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL. BY EMILY FERGUSON A large, ghoulish fi gure is pacing inside the Cheesman Park pavilion, each stride exag- gerated with high leg lifts and stomps. Every now and then he lets out a dramatic snarl or growl, whipping his cape around his armor. With his fuschia mohawk, undead face paint and alarming white-colored contacts, Lord Maris the Great would be recognizable to many in the music scene. But not to a trio of tourists. “You’ve crossed into my lair!” he barks at them, then launches into a brief history of Cheesman Park’s beginnings as a cemetery. The only other person around appears to be on down- ers, a vacant look in his eyes. “That’s one of my guards,” Maris explains. “Yes, he looks like a normal mortal, but he, too, is undead, and he’s guarding my lair right now. You’ll see them here quite often. “She will remain unharmed!” he com- mands the clueless dude, pointing at me with his large zombie gloves, complete with hot-pink nail polish on the talons. He then gestures to a vent in the pa- vilion fl oor. “This is my lair,” he growls. “Back in the ’70s, it was a men’s restroom, where men would meet up to have sex and do drugs. The city found out and sealed it down there. The bathroom stalls are still down there, and I decided to leave them because it adds such a nice, quaint touch.” Maris has been wreaking havoc on — and bringing atten- tion to — the local music scene since 2000, when he rose from the dead and made it his mis- sion to “kill” all the bands that he considered competition for his own act. But he only has a few months each year to do so. According to his version of the undead legend, he must return to his lair on November 1, not to be seen again until he emerges in May. Otherwise, he could get in trouble with the big guy downstairs. “The only thing that’s limited is that on the stroke of midnight on what you call Hal- loween, I have to return to my lair. ... I return at the beginning of May during what’s called the months of darkness; they run through Octo- ber 31,” he explains. “That is when darkness and evil have the upper hand in your realm called Earth!” But before Maris re- turns to his lair, he has an annual Halloween blow- out with other rock, punk and metal bands, which traditionally involves re- uniting a Mile High band of years past. This year’s showcase happens at Herman’s Hideaway on Friday, October 27. It will be Denver drag queen Jes- sica L’Whor’s third time hosting the ghoulishly fun circus, which will include performances from Maris’s band, Maris the Great and the F.O.D.; Typhoid Mary (a metal band Maris once killed that’s reuniting for the occasion); Sin on Six; Honeybunches of Death; and A Vintage Future. The concert will also serve as a release show for Maris’s self-titled EP, which will be available on all streaming services the same day. L’Whor describes the event as similar to seeing a “battle of the bands, where you have back-to-back really amazing bands that are playing, and everyone’s dancing and jump- ing up and down and rocking out, and it’s really cool to see that progress throughout the night. Also, everybody know: There’s such an acceptance for major queer energy.” That can include drag queens tap-dancing to Maris’s signature gritty rock, touches that L’Whor says are “just so Maris.” “This is something that could not have happened twenty years ago, maybe even ten years ago. Audiences, pri- marily heterosexual rockers, would have felt uncomfort- able around a drag personal- ity,” Maris notes. “Now they eat it up. It shows how much things have changed within your society.” One of the openers, Hon- eybunches of Death, will be Maris’s fi nal kill of 2023, on Halloween. He’s already killed Gravedancer, Good Family and Space Corpse this year; they’re included in the 154 murders displayed on his website, along with the bands’ fi nal interviews. “I wish I could be around year-round. By the time I come back at the beginning of May, there’s a whole new crop of bands waiting to die,” Maris laments. Bands generally consider it an honor to be killed by Maris; it means they’ve been acknowl- edged as ridiculously good by a punk-scene veteran. “Everything begins with me being a fan fi rst,” Maris notes. “It’s all about that love and respect. I go check out the band. I even pay to get in. I’ll buy merch. Sometimes I go on Bandcamp and buy the album a couple times. If I like them, I start fucking with them. I threaten them, hit on all the members. I usu- ally fall in love with the drummer. I watch how they react, and if they roll with it and have fun, I know they’re a good candidate to die. If they take life too seriously or ignore me and hope I go away...I do. Sometimes I will stalk a band for quite a while before I ask them if they want to do a murder feature. Also, sometimes the timing is off and it just doesn’t work out. The bands that are on my website went through quite an ordeal to get there.” Back when he was a “mortal,” Maris moved to Denver from Montana in the early ’80s. “From what I remember, I was just an average gay man going to gay bars. But I did not fi t in within the gay community,” he recalls. “The gay community was centered around dance music. I was a headbanger. And this was before the internet, so there was no way to fi nd other gay headbangers. So I felt all alone. When I would go to the clubs, I would be thinking about Iron Maiden and Mötley Crüe and MUSIC continued on page 22 Maris the Great’s mission goes deeper than killing bands. Steak Diane, Donga Summer, Maris the Great, Kermit the Fag and Baron von Buttfucker make up the band. EVAN SEMÓN ANDREA THOMAS & SINISTER STAR
