independent venues

DENVER — Tennyson’s Tap was the kind of music club where, on packed nights, the lone frazzled employee serving drinks, running sound and manning the door might ask one of the bands to help out and collect the $5 cover charge. I know because I sang in one of those bands, Smaldone Faces, and our bassist Luke and I pretty much let everyone in for free.

The Tap, at 4335 W. 38th St. in Denver, specialized in whiskey and scruffy musicians of every conceivable genre — my two bands that played there did country, punk and metal covers, and we opened for screamo indie-rockers, jazzy improvisationalists and dreadlocked funk-and-reggae combos. The bar smelled like cigarettes and beer, and had a capacity of about 90, but when we drew our crowds of 20 or 30 people, it roared like Springsteen at the Roxy.

“It’s one of those places where everybody’s right in your face. You don’t just hear the music, you feel it,” says singer and guitarist Aaron Garcia, whose Denver band 78 Bombs played its first gig there. “It’s so comfortable, it’s like an old shoe — an old Chuck Taylor.”

A few weeks ago, I drove by the Tap and the beige-colored, shack-like building was now a pile of collapsed lumber and cinder blocks as tall as the nearby telephone poles. The band I’m currently in, Sid Delicious, played its last gig at the Tap on March 6, 2020, and we soothed our small crowd that was feeling nervous about COVID-19 through the healing power of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams.” Cody, the big-bearded sound guy, had assured us that, just as 9/11 had brought people together, live music would never die, and offered plenty of hand san.

The bar closed a week or so later, and remained that way. “LOVE,” read the marquee. Eventually, somebody painted “Thank you!” on the wall outside.

Through quarantine, Fauci, Trump, vaccines, anti-vaxxers and the triumphant return of live music, I drove by, waiting for the band names to reappear on the marquee. But the Tap, like B.L.U.E.S. On Halsted in Chicago, the Satellite in Los Angeles and, this year, Exit/In in Nashville, couldn’t make it — despite the Small Business Administration’s multimillion-dollar grants to thousands of music venues forced to temporarily shut down during the pandemic.

According to the National Independent Venue Association, more than 25 U.S. clubs have permanently closed in 2022.

“For a whole year, I kept that place open and legal and ready to open the doors,” says Dave Fox, one of the club’s co-owners, who also ran a recording studio as part of the same corner complex. “But it was really the landlord’s decision to not proceed with the corner.”

The neighborhood surrounding Tennyson’s Tap is a long-since-gentrified portion of Northwest Denver known as Berkeley, and over the past 20 years, condos and coffee shops have replaced the old hardware store, the family-owned window-repair business and the music shop that used to repair my keyboard after I banged the “E” key too heavily during the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The previous, longtime property owner suggested to Fox he could keep paying the Tap’s lease, but, according to Fox, new owners went in another direction last year.

(Representatives for the property, listed with the Colorado Secretary of State, did not respond to calls and e-mails about what they might do with the site of the former Tennyson’s Tap.)

In January 2011, Fox and a partner opened the Tap and began booking music. The odd national touring name played there, like metal-and-bodybuilding star Thor, but the club showcased mostly local artists, as many as five per night. A bartender, Cat Ackermann, was also a musician, and inaugurated a karaoke night; Leonard Apodaca, one of the club’s managers, had the idea to merge Taco Tuesdays and dance music, and it became a high-grossing, heavy-drinking success; the bar’s lack of genre discernment drew metal, ska, funk, jazz, reggae and, yes, punk-and-metal cover bands.

“We found the underlying grit in the DJ scene,” says Apodaca, who indulged me when I showed up at the bar on Tuesday afternoons to beg for new gigs, sometimes after we managed only 15 or 20 people at the previous ones. “All those people are used to going to clubs and paying a big cover. One night a week, they didn’t have to get all dressed up, they didn’t have to worry about going downtown. They can just be themselves. The girls would come out in sweatpants and backwards baseball caps.”

Sid Delicious hasn’t played a gig since that March 2020 night at Tennyson’s. A couple of our members were dedicated quarantiners and were reluctant to expose their young kids until they were eligible for vaccines. Then, last summer, we booked a date, but it was on a difficult night, in an inconvenient part of town, and, unlike band-friendly Tennyson’s, required us to rent our own PA, haul it in, figure out how to set it up and sound-check it ourselves.

We eventually canceled the gig. We’re figuring out how to move forward, but the band is adrift without the perfect venue, one like Tennyson’s Tap, where you could rock an hour long set on a tiny stage, closing with Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” after which Cody would hand you an envelope containing one or two crisp $100 bills. Of all the things we lost during the pandemic, a dingy old club with a back room for darts was not the most consequential.

Or, maybe, it was.

“It was just a community,” Apodaca says. “It’s all basically dirt now.”

What remains of the site of Tennyson’s Tap in Denver.

Steve Knopper