When Colorado country-punk icon Slim Cessna drove from his home in South Park recently to be interviewed in Boulder, where he grew up, he tried to remember the last time he’d been here — and he couldn’t. There just isn’t a place for a band like Slim Cessna’s Auto Club (SCAC) to play in the city anymore.
But the lanky, passionate singer has fond memories of his hometown. From participating in Christian youth events to putting on punk shows with friends in the ’80s — not to mention meeting his longtime bandmate Munly Munly, who was working at the now-defunct Trade a Tape record shop — Cessna found a community in Boulder as a young man.
Those years were important for the fourth-generation Coloradan raised on country music, who says he can’t remember a time when he didn’t know who legends like Jimmie Rodgers and Johnny Cash were.
“We did have some records and I would obsess over them as a child, just staring at the Folsom Prison Blues album and being horrified and intrigued, from early on,” Cessna says. “I always knew what I was going to do.”
Growing up the son of a preacher, Cessna says it’s only natural that his first songs, chiefly with a group called Blood Flower, were laden with Christian imagery.
“That certainly is where I’ve come from, and everyone I played music with at the time, we were all in that same place. We all knew each other because of youth type of church-related activities,” he says. “We were the ones who listened to interesting music but were still part of that whole culture and background. I think it always kind of had that foundation, I suppose.”
Though the band might have been labeled goth if formed later, Blood Flower identified as “death rock,” influenced by bands like Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy. The outfit evolved into the Denver Gentlemen, which also featured David Eugene Edwards and Jeffrey-Paul Norlander. Edwards (16 Horsepower, Wovenhand) went on to introduce an adoring European market to what would become known as “The Denver Sound” or even “The Colorado Sound” — a sort of alternative outlaw country thick with biblical undertones.
For his part, Cessna moved on from Denver Gentlemen to form the Auto Club in the early ’90s and started touring like crazy around the turn of the millennium. This was a couple years after Munly and Dwight Pentacost joined the group, solidifying its vision. Cessna says the new personnel helped SCAC gel into the genre-defying powerhouse listeners obsess over today.
“I was trying to be a country singer and I wasn’t very good at it, and I think the reason for that is I’ve always been kind of weird and I wasn’t really like that,” he says. “It took having these other people with me who are really interesting, oddball people. We just dropped any idea of genre, and I think that is the most important thing of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”
Cessna says a major part of what the band has been able to accomplish is the development of a singular sound and presence. While Munly stalks the stage with a sort of Vincent Price vibe, the 6-foot-5 Cessna exudes a sort of reverence for both God and rock ‘n’ roll in concert, leading a kind of alt-country revival atmosphere in his trademark trucker or cowboy hat, glasses, boots and black clothes. Cessna’s voice is pretty high-pitched for the countrified death-rock SCAC plays, but it fits the revival-style peaks the band’s fans love.
Whether or not you’re a Christian doesn’t matter at all when it comes to enjoying the Auto Club, Cessna says. It’s about getting carried away, a quality he began to recognize in both spiritual and secular artists during his music education in the ’90s.
“I was just poring through albums and listening to the history of American music in a quest to understand what it was. So much of it is gospel music, and I love gospel music. Whether you believe in it or not, it’s going to take you to another place. It’s going to elevate you to a higher place, and that’s just what it does and that’s what it’s designed for,” he says. “Spiritual music throughout all cultures does that. Some people say, ‘I can get that same feeling at a punk rock show,’ and that’s absolute truth. You can. It is in there. God is in that, whether you’re listening to David Bowie or Mahalia Jackson.”
This spiritually transporting quality courses throughout 2016’s The Commandments According to SCAC, the band’s most recent album. It’s the first that the outfit produced and engineered all on its own, and touring in support of the record found SCAC not only returning to Europe numerous times, but even to Russia — twice.
Closer to home, SCAC has spent the last decades performing regular New Year’s Eve shows here on the Front Range. Nearly a dozen were held at the Bluebird Theater in Denver before bouncing around and settling at the band’s current home at the Hi-Dive. COVID gave Cessna his first New Year’s off since 1998, but he’s excited to be back in the saddle.
“It’s been awesome,” Cessna says of the time-honored tradition. “We’re doing two nights [this year] instead of three, just to feel our way back in, but we’re looking forward to it.”
ON THE BILL: Slim Cessna’s Auto Club with Midwife, Bleakheart, In the Company of Serpents, Snakes and secret guests TBA. 9 p.m. Dec. 30-31, Hi-Dive, 7 S. Broadway, Denver.
