Michael Daboll is convulsing hysterically. Awash in sweat and seemingly possessed by a garage-rock poltergeist, Daboll’s eyes are floating into the back of his head as he flails at his guitar and shrieks, “You’re a dirty liar!”
Daboll and his neo-’60s garage band, The Omens, are bringing down the roof at Grand Champions, a Grand Lake club. And while they are surrounded by friends who are in town for a wedding, The Omens are also winning over the locals and tourists who just 15 minutes earlier were moving to Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and their dance-floor-filling ilk.
For more than 10 years, Daboll and his string of bands have been the heart of neo-’60s garage-rock in Colorado. He has fronted The Element 79, The Down-n-Outs and The Omens, the latter his charged vehicle for the past three years. The band releases its first full-length album, “Destroy the ESP,” at a party tonight at the Larimer Lounge.
“This guy is beyond art-damaged,” Omens bass player Matt Hunt said of his friend and bandmate. “He’s art-polluted.”
When Daboll is not brazenly crafting his sets – among the most sweat-soaked, passionate and ruinously loud in the local scene – he is collected and amiable. He doesn’t listen to garage music 24/7, but at the same time he has no problem bending your ear about the legendary Texas garage scene in the mid-’60s and little-known groups that recorded only one or two 45s, songs that are among his all-time favorites regardless of their limited distribution.
“This music is kind of dumb-in-the-head,” Daboll admitted earlier this week over a pint at the Irish Rover. “It’s like Link Wray, what did he say, ‘Why play something in 12 notes when you can play it in two?’ That makes sense to me.”
The unabashed simplicity of The Omens’ music is what drew drummer Forrest Bartosh from the art-punk band The Swayback and into The Omens’ fold about a year ago.
“It’s just straightforward rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s what moves me the most,” said Bartosh, a longtime scene veteran with The Gamits and The LaDonnas who replaced Greg Wildermuth, who recorded all of “Destroy the ESP” with The Omens before leaving the country. “It’s not pretentious.”
Hunt played with Daboll and a host of other local garage rock aficionados (including Jim Chandler of The Cramps and The Makers fame) in the Down-n-Outs for three years. He left the band before its collapse.
“(The music is) about being a cave man, a cave woman, a cave person,” Hunt said. “It’s about getting back to that primal part of rock ‘n’ roll and the simplicity of it all.
“We’re a party band, and we have no shame about it. We like it better when people are well-lubricated and when they’re giving back to us. It’s almost sexual like that – not physically, but there is an exchange.”
That exchange sometimes features organist Greg Dahl leaping off the stage with his red tambourine and sharing his sweaty love with the kids in the front. The give-and-take is intense – and extremely generous. It’s not unlike punk rock, where standing back, nodding your head and sipping your cocktail isn’t really an option.
You get involved because Hunt and Bartosh’s rhythm section refuses to be denied, because Dahl is a charismatic lunatic behind his blood-red Yamaha organ, because Daboll’s scream channels Roky Erickson’s 13th Floor Elevators days with a scary ferocity.
Named after several second-string bands of the ’60s, the group formed a few weeks after the Down-n-Outs broke up.
“Toward the end of the Down-n-Outs, it was less and less fun,” Daboll said. “So we had to start over, and it took a while.” The Omens played their second show ever in Las Vegas, a bad idea, and even though the band has toured Texas four times and traversed the West Coast and garage-loving Pacific Northwest four times, they’ve never had an album to peddle.
“It never felt right to record until recently,” Daboll said. “But we’re writing now and making up for lost time, and we hope to have another CD out by the end of the year.”
“Destroy the ESP” is a slasher of an album so fun and lively (and succinct) that it practically flies out the CD player. At 22 minutes and nine songs – only two of which top the three-minute mark – it’s an exercise in getting in and out and leaving a big red mark. “I Lost My Mind” is a rager benefiting as much from Dahl’s organ as Daboll’s practiced squeal. The instrumental “John Fante Blues” shows the band’s rare surf tendencies and multi-layered moods. “Give It To Me” tears apart the garage mold, giving Daboll space to strut his stuff on guitar.
Watching The Omens rule the stage or even listening to “Destroy the ESP” is an education in ’60s garage rock, especially since this music sounds little like the music of the supposed garage-rock revolution of the last four years.
“We were like, ‘What garage rock revolution?”‘ Daboll said. “We have a lot of friends making garage rock across the country, and none of them are benefiting from this.”
“And it’s not like we don’t like some of those bands,” added Hunt, talking about The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives and the other mainstream rock bands bearing the garage label. “It’s just that they’re rock ‘n’ roll bands.”
“For the last few years,” said Daboll, “I’ve just referred to ourselves as beat-punk because I didn’t like that word garage.”
But The Omens are far from purists.
“We’re not revivalists or traditionalists,” said Hunt. “We’re not holding ourselves up to any standard, but we do have direction.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
The Omens
NEO-’60S GARAGE|Larimer Lounge, 2721 Larimer St.; 8 o’clock tonight with Machine Gun Blues, The Symptoms, DJ Patrick Robinson and Jim Yelenick in support|$8|through BigMarksTickets.com.
