It was Scott Baio Army and 5 Day Messiah’s winter 2003 tour when Chuck Coffey asked his friends and tourmates about possibly adding horns to their young, irreverent garage rock side project Call Sign Cobra.
“We were talking about what we could do to help us stand apart,” Coffey said earlier this week, sipping on a giant cup of coffee on the patio at St. Mark’s Coffeehouse. “The idea for the horns kind of came from Rocket From the Crypt, and then Zach and Mike liked the idea of basic horns, just like The Sonics.”
Call Sign Cobra was growing. The group recorded its eponymous debut record as a seven-piece. But the band found the right mix in early 2004 when, after losing one of the horns, they brought in two of their girlfriends for vocal and tambourine tricks. The lawless track “Eight Piece Rock Band” on Call Sign’s second record, 2005’s “Call Sign Cobra II,” was a chaotic tribute to the crew – singer-guitarist Zach Brooks, bassist Mike Howard, baritone sax player Nick Krier, trumpeter Mike “Mad Dog” Taylor, guitarist Don Bersell, drummer Coffey and singer-percussionists Lauren Shugrue and Jenn Callaway.
The result was a bullying brew of boozy horns, untidy guitars and guttural vocals set against a bellowing rhythm section and intoxicating, seductive female doo-wops. And as the band plays its final show tonight at the Larimer Lounge, the group should be proud of its accomplishments – including keeping an eight-piece band together for nearly four years.
“It was hard to keep everybody on the same page,” said Coffey, who runs the excellent Not Bad Records indie label, which distributes Call Sign and other local rock luminaries. “But with the girls and the horns and the rest of the band, it helped push the sound. It gave people a reason to come see us.”
Call Sign has never been a band that aimed to please. Many find its live shows confounding or offensive – especially when they toured. (Listen to “Stillwater, Oklahoma” on its second record for a tale of vomit, broken railings and a police officer telling someone to keep their pants on.) But its fans appreciate their stark honesty, their freight-train passion, their unbridled enthusiasm.
“It was never in our mind to create a band that people liked,” Coffey said. “The main reason we practiced was so that if we were totally loaded onstage, at least we sounded like we were actually in a band.”
