After practice Sean dropped me off on the corner of Ellsworth and Broadway. It was a busy evening and there were a few people buzzing in and around Mutiny Information Café like flies. Scene of a carcass rotting in reverse.
It was load-in time. I saw a red-head in a plain tan t-shirt and faded jeans coming and going with gear.
Code Orange. Reba.
I hate to say this but she was part of the initial draw for me over a year ago. If there’s another girl out there playing heavy music, I’m immediately interested. There aren’t that many of us – especially not ones who throw down as hard as she does.
“The market is so saturated these days, every motherfucker has a band. Whatever. These kids, they came out… I was impressed. They look pretty young and unassuming. It’s very rare that we get to see something a little different – something new.”
– Mike Fleischmann & Tim Williams of Vision of Disorder /
Dead Bloated Morrison Podcast, June 20, 2013
Mike and Tim aren’t just talking about Reba, but the whole band. I heard Nothing (The Rat) at the end of that podcast, then Flowermouth (The Leech) on Youtube. And hit replay. And again. Then went and looked for every other video and watched interviews and found their Bandcamp and downloaded Love is Love//Return to Dust.
I knew their faces and Joe’s name and her name from the interviews and couldn’t help fangirling stupidly when she came out of the café.
“Code Orange.” No response. “Reba.” She turned and came over.
Oh shit. “Uh. Do you guys need help moving gear?” I asked.
“Um, nah, I think we’re good.” No makeup on, of course. She’s not an ornament or a gimmick. No other female musicians I know of snub the expectation quite this way. But what shape would my persona take? Most of us (The Herd) seem to think sex appeal is necessary to get noticed. Not her. And she’s like 20 years old.
I was glad I decided not to wear eyeliner after all. “You sure?”
“Yeah, we don’t have a lot. Thank you, though.” She went back to work. Some guys who had been watching from chairs lining the outside wall snickered at me as she walked away. Who do you think you are? What gave you the right? What makes you so fucking special? Because you’re in a band? What the fuck do you know?
Great. I probably creeped her out.
I moved on. Went inside and fidgeted. Sulked around looking at books, vinyls, comics. There were other lurkers. A guy sitting at the glass counter was staring out the big store-front window. I asked him where the stage was. “I think this is it,” he said. His gaze didn’t move.
“Damn,” I thought out loud. “Tight fit.”
We talked for a bit. He’d only found out about the show five hours ago. I was happy for him because of all the things one could do on Broadway on a Saturday night, he’d chosen well.
I wandered the narrow aisles some more, bumping into several people on accident – each of them apologetic as I was, which is unusual in Denver. I certainly didn’t expect it at a hardcore show.
Maybe we all felt strange and alien and figured that aside from our unique selves, only barbarians came to these kinds of shows; only weirdos with anger issues listen to or play hardcore and maybe we needed to reassure each other that we’re not all violent freaks. At least, not always.
Even the venue guys were super fucking nice. When I come as a musician to perform, people are civil but never this friendly. When we play shows I feel sort of like the narrator during the second verse of Bob Seger’s Turn the Page.
On the first leg of their tour to promote the new album, I Am King, Code Orange had to have been feeling the full effect of that song. A lanky kid in a tan jacket, jeans, and his curly black mop of hair tucked under a baseball cap went and politely ordered something from the coffee bar. He looked like a sincere geek – awkward and gentle – but it was Jami, Code Orange’s drummer/vocalist. A young man noted for his intensity as a performer.
Like the other three I’d seen loading in, he was – as V.O.D. had observed – very unassuming, but more so. They all seemed tired and stony, like dedicated professionals. Or awkward teenage prodigies before a recital. It’s really hard to say which.
How does all that power fit in you? I wondered. Where did you get it?
“We don’t want any limits on what it is we are doing creatively or personally and our record is generally about getting rid of the things inside of yourself and the people around you that try to stifle you from doing what it is you want to do. Becoming king of your own mind and own world and taking hold of it. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life battling my own perception of myself and others’ perceptions of me and this record is about the end of that. I like to think that people who like our band and really see it for what it is are Thinners of the Herd. At least in our book.”
– Jami Morgan, interview with Toxicbreed’s Funhouse
It was a hell of a night. The energy was unique, scattered – no one could predict it. There was no appropriate kinesthetic response; the moshers moved to their own rhythms because Code Orange doesn’t rely on conventional ones – the ones you’ve already heard hundreds of times.
Broadway’s polo-shirted pedestrians stopped to watch us through that big window as they grinned and ate frozen yogurt. We were strange and funny to them but it didn’t matter because the whole heartbeat of that scene belonged to us and it was so much louder than theirs. Our noise; the fury of the sound of breaking free – a riot against the reign of everything mainstream:
People who think sex appeal is the only thing that gives female bodies value. Those snickering men. Pedestrians who don’t understand the appeal of harder, faster, louder music. People who don’t care about art at all. People who think we’re animals.
Fuck it.
We were Kings.
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