Clayton Patterson and Kembra Phaler by Gerry Visco
Santos Party House lives up to its name. How in the hell else could it play host to a hard-core industrial Goth show and then, minutes later, host the F Word, presided over by Mistress Formika Jones and attended by every queer and drag queen in town? That’s quite a switch: piercing industrial noise to Lady Gaga, black-leather-clad kids shaking their fists in the air transforming into sequined, made-up and bewigged men in dresses judging a cupcake contest. The juxtaposition of punk and drag reminded me of Club Pyramid.
I wouldn’t say the two factions got along that well. “What was up with that weird music before 11, it kinda super sucked,” one of my gay boys said later. Out in front, I was air kissing the arriving fags and chatting up soon-to-depart, Goths. Singer Little Annie was hanging around, but she blended into both worlds.
The concert’s line up was kick-ass and studded with cult figures, some of who rarely come out to play. Assembling them all together was pretty damn rad: NON (Boyd Rice’s project), Prurient, Cold Cave and spoken word performances by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Kid Congo Powers, Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu and legendary tattoo artist and writer Jonathan Shaw. “I haven’t seen some of these people in the same room in years,” grizzled artist Clayton Patterson enthused.
This town’s only so big, and once in a while all of our little worlds have the chance to collide. There was Kembra Phaler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, apocalyptic painter Joe Coleman, performance artist Marti Domination and Cinema of Transgression filmmaker Tommy Turner. But there was also Amanda Lepore, Joey Arias, Sherry Vine, Cazwell and the usual partiers who come to enter or judge the regular “drag off” contest.
The man of the evening was undoubtedly Rice, the Industrial music pioneer who resides as a recluse in an underground compound in Denver. He once presented First Lady Betty Ford with a skinned sheep’s head on a silver platter. One of my friends calls Rice the “Antichrist,” but wedged in between Phaler and Domination, the man seemed quite nice. He even smiled—some of the drag queens could learn a thing or two from this Goth.
