Velvet Cash

October 15, 2006, was a seminal day in the creation of Velvet Cash, although neither J.L. LeRoy nor Cody “Mick” Royale, the band’s founders, knew it. The pair of “Second Generation Punks” were at the time in the legendary Babihed, a rag-tag group that emerged from Colfax Avenue’s tempestuous gutters for the purpose of bringing much-needed social commentary a planet that has fallen prey to the sinister notion that Ashlee Simpson is some kind of New Age Joe Strummer.
On that October night, Mick was lost in New York City, as celebrated old-school punker Patty Smith was surrounded by a crowd outside the revered CBGB’s club. She was complaining about the future of music as the club closed its doors forever. New York City, which once helped spawn the creative revolution that inspired punk, among countless other worthwhile musical and artistic enterprises, it seemed, was longer the kind of place where artists could meet to do the kind of experimenting that leads to ground-breaking change. New York is too stuffy. New York has lost its edge. It’s classes are too stratified. A new artist can’t really afford to live in New York these days. And so on.

Of CBGB’s closure, Ms. Smith opined to the New York Times, “It’s a symptom of the empty new prosperity of our city.”

As CBGB’s was literally packed up and hauled off to Las Vegas to become a tragic tourist attraction, J.L. and Mick mulled a few thoughts. Mick said to J.L. that “the NEW New Yorks are going to be here, in the West.” And that inspired a lyric from J.L. — “Your Times Square has become a joke, so you head out West and become part of the choking, stinking masses…”

J.L., a Denver native, strummed a guitar (a rare sight) and London-born Mick turned off his distortion (an even rarer sight) and the two hammered out the notes for the song, “Head West,” a manifesto for the new digital era of music. And the list of songs the two assembled weren’t two-dimensional, in-your-face Babihed songs. They were darker — a kind of Americana-meets-surf-meets-psychobilly with a dash of psychadelia. Soon bassist “Poppin’ Johnny” Wade (Rorschach Test, Hero to Zero, Rocket to Nowhere) a Columbine High School alum and current A-Town resident, and drummer, Pete Sake, a Babihed and Royal Baby mainstay, joined the band, which shares its name with a legendary 1950s-era quarterhorse — VELVET CASH.

The band’s first show was at an art gallery in mid 2008. Wade’s past experience in the gothic/industrial band, Rorschach Test, melded strangely with Sake’s influences — all things Boston and Irish, like beer and soccer, with a strange hint of karate.

J.L. and Mick take turns singing Velvet Cash’s songs, which reach through timeless shadows, as if a runaway stagecoach en route to a forbidden Western ghost town filled with drunken angels who have just returned from voyages to the boundless and beautiful ethereal beginnings of time — empty-handed angels who saw their luminous treasures of gold and jewels of red and green and azure shatter on a dusty, broken earth, leaving only with a sparkling and mysterious melody that rumbles like the thunder of wild horses racing in the canyons beyond the horizon. Velvet Cash performs their soundtrack.