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How has Boulder changed since you were a kid?
Well -- that could fill a few volumes of an encyclopedia, now, couldn't it? The "new prosperity." To start, I saw Boulder go through three cycles when I was younger. First it was kind of a sleepy mountain and college town back when Canyon Blvd. was a four-lane gravel road called Water St. with a railroad track down the middle of it. A babysitter even took me horseback riding in a meadow where Crossroads Mall now stands.
Then by the late 60s and early 70s, it got really wild. The anti-Vietnam war fever was in the air, and there were as many as 10,000 or 20,000 hippies who descended on Boulder each year, and this was back at a time when hippies actually scared people -- and that was the most fun. And by the time I was old enough to participate in things like that, the 70s had hit, and no, it wasn't anything like That 70s Show or whatever, it was more disgusting and more stale in a way, some of the people who were more successful at dealing drugs and what-not began buying up areas downtown and opening their all-natural-$50-candle gift shops and things like that. And it was then that Boulder began to be a snooty, self-absorbed place, but the Aspen-ization has become more intense each time I've been back.
I wrote "California Uber Alles" partly in reaction to Boulder, and the same goes for "Holiday In Cambodia" and "Terminal Preppie." For "California" maybe I was a little off-base on the focus on Jerry Brown, but I stand by most of what the song says as far as escapist new age attitudes and yuppie consumption being a one way ticket to fascism and the terms "new age” and "yuppie” hadn't even been invented at that point.
When did you leave Boulder for good?
I left in 78.
What impact do you think new Republican governor Bill Owens will have on development?
You're going to see a lot more coming in, I think. The last Republican governor was John Love, who ran under the motto "Sell Colorado," and sell it he did. He and his developer friends made a butt-load of money as more and more highways and ski areas went up. To some degree, I suppose that was inevitable -- no one wants to languish in Southern California or New Jersey forever when they have the money to move somewhere else. But nevertheless, the corridor between Boulder and Denver is just one SoCal strip mall after another. And believe, me there's more to come. Even now, when you go on top of Flagstaff Mountain, instead of seeing splotches of light at night from little towns in this big black void, now it's one big soup of suburban street life.
Have you found any music back here in Boulder or Denver that you’re into? Have you heard 16 Horsepower?
One of the most interesting things -- anywhere in the world right now -- is 16 Horsepower. They're one of my favorite bands in the world.
Do you support the recent burning of a under-construction ski resort in Vail?
No. I think it was a colossal tactical error, because now the straight media is painting all kinds of environmental activists and direct-action groups like Earth First! as eco-terrorists. They immediately tried to pin the torching of that ski lodge on a lot of other people who don't work that way. When you do something like that, it sets the public’s support for radical environmentalism back 20 years! You're never going to get a majority of people in a comfort-obsessed country like this one supporting torching ski lodges in order to save wild cats!
What will happen to Colorado? Will the mountains be turned into huge parking lots?
Either that or the canyons will be filled up with the carcasses of SUVs that rolled off the road when their smug, know-nothing drivers who think they’re so tough in their yuppie Cadillacs that they don’t have to slow down for curves on icy roads, that the rules of the road don't apply to them. It's a common illness among SUV drivers.
Have you read about the recent cult member story with the connection to Colorado? You heard about this guy, Monte Kim Miller?
He comes across as the classic messianic con man to me. He doesn’t seem to quite have the sense of fun that David Koresh did, though. I can't visualize Monte Kim Miller defiling young girls beneath posters of Megadeth and Metallica in his bedroom.
Politicians and entertainers are really converging – look at Jesse Ventura.
I'm amused by the whole thing. Granted, Ventura may not be funny once he starts trying to govern -- after all, he's a right-wing Libertarian who doesn’t believe in gun laws or funding projects for the public good. But how strong a message is it that both the Democrats and Republicans are both morally bankrupt, pushing roughly the same corrupt corporate agenda? When people get so frustrated they go out and elect a wrestler as governor! That's a far heavier statement on the bankruptcy of our two corporate parties than the impeachment circus could ever hope to be.
How many years will it take before Americans want to rebel against Tweedle-dee/Tweedle-dum system?
I have no idea how it'll end up. The fact that people aren’t tuning in everyday and sitting on the edge of their chair like they did during the Senate Watergate committee hearings speaks volumes. It's just one more scene in a Fellini movie on the fall of Rome masquerading as the United States government. What really irritates me is that Reagan and Bush got away with so many really heavy bad-ass things -- and they did not get impeached. The same corporate media who are raking Clinton over the coals went out of their way to pat Oliver North on the head and crown him a patriotic hero and a real-life James Bond, and to let Reagan and Bush get away with assassinating hundreds of people in Panama and Nicaragua and turning a blind eye to people running drugs into this country to finance the Contras. Pentagon corruption on a scale that can scarcely be believed.
Maybe the real reason to impeach Clinton was he didn't pursue the scandals after he got in. All the investigation into that kind of corruption was dropped. That's one of 500 reasons to impeach Clinton, but of course, people picked the stupid one. Monica's magic orifice doesn’t bother me a bit. The reason you find his ratings so high in these supposed polls (and I've never met somebody who was actually called by a pollster) as soon as the Monica gets splashed across the tabloids, Clinton's ratings go up -- as if America's shouting in unison, "Sure, I'd fuck her, too."
No one is turned on by it more than the Republican Puritans. But they do it all behind closed doors.
I think the majority of America was relieved when they found Clinton had his Monica. After all, look what happens when you have a president who never gets laid: You get Nixon! Vietnam and Cambodia haven't even begun to recover from him.
What’s your current show about?
I call it double-barreled info-tainment. It's very information-oriented and talking in more detail about the stuff we've just talked about already. The slow but sure slide into what I consider to be corporate dictatorship at this point. And to some degree, what each of us can do about it -- or to at least survive it.
How has the internet changed things for Alternative Tentacles?
I’m not a net junkie myself; I don’t even have a computer. For other people it’s a great service. I think the information should continue to flow freely and uncensored but that also means that people have a responsibility to use it intelligently -- as in, don’t believe every damn thing you read on the internet! About a year ago, there was a hot debate on the net about my recent shooting death! All it takes is one idiot when you're dealing with small-town gossip on a world-wide scale through cyberspace. That's where people have to take more responsibility to be more of an equalizing power. If something sounds too good or too wild to be true, check it out! Get a second opinion, confirm it before you blab it to everybody else. Some people abuse it to the point that it reminds me of the CB radio craze in the 1970s. "You know, "Breaker, breaker good buddy! Am I talking to a real trucker?" How different is that from people sitting at home thinking, "Wow! Cool, I'm online with Courtney Love?"
Can you discuss the disagreement Alternative Tentacles had years ago with the magazine Maximum Rock and Roll?
That’s kind of old news by now, but they became much more orthodox, fundamentalist and lock-step conservative, and they didn’t want to advertise anything they didn't think was “punk.” And we were only allowed to advertise DOA after that, so we just pulled our ads. I don't support punk fundamentalism any more that I would support Focus On The Family.
Do you feel compassion for people less fortunate?
Uh, in some ways. Yeah, it's an ongoing battle between compassion on hand and total disgust for the human race on the other hand. Maybe the compassion fuels the disgust, I don't know.
Well, thanks a lot, Jello.
You left out the other big Boulder story!
Well, hey -- unless you did it, what else is there to say about it?
Well, I get asked about it by people who know nothing else about Boulder than Jon Benet Ramsey. They know nothing else about Boulder or Colorado but they're all interested in Jon Benet. I'm waiting for the movie with John Travolta as Pa Ramsey and Celine Dion as the mom! How the hell should I know what happened? They never invited me to their showy party! That's what creeped me out when I first heard about it --finding out how rich they were, and here they were six blocks away from the house I grew up in! I was like, "Oh my god, there goes the neighborhood! These people are loaded and dull! They don't belong here! In a way, they seemed almost too Boulder.
It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here ever again.
You’ve talked about “wealth addiction” before.
The part of it that scares me is the mentality that says, "Who cares if a few people die as long as I make money?" Crack addiction ain’t done a granule as much damage to the world as wealth addiction has. After a while, people who've made a butt-load of money get all paranoid about the people down below, number one, and they get bored, and the only game they have left that's any fun for them is how to screw over more people so they can make more money.
(Copyright 2010 by Jeffrey Charles Stratton. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.)
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