A mural of devilish rams adorns The Black Sheep, perhaps an unexpected image for the leading incubator of the Colorado Springs music scene.
“Having small places for people to get started is really important,” said owner Geoff Brent. “The main driver for your local scene is the opportunity for people to go see other bands getting started. It inspires them to do that themselves.”
In recent years, an ecosystem of venues has sprung up around The Black Sheep with the opening of sister venue Vultures and record store What’s Left Records. They each specialize in something unique, be it big gigs, cozy vibes or high-energy mosh pits.
With July 19 — a date representing the Colorado Springs area code — falling on a Saturday in 2025, Brent decided it would be the perfect chance for a trial run: three music venues organizing a festival of 19 local bands.
“[Colorado Springs is] often looked at as an evangelical Christian, military town, but with any extreme culture like that, there’s going to be an extreme counter-culture,” said Bryan Ostrow, co-owner of What’s Left Records “There’s hip-hop bands that’ll hang out with metal bands that’ll hang out with punk bands that’ll hang out with indie bands. We all support each other.”
In anticipation of 719 Day Fest, we’ve highlighted three local acts to look out for.
‘LES MIS’ AND FROG PEOPLE
Alex Bates was a music teacher at Peyton Elementary when he first encountered the children’s folk song “Go Get the Ax,” which includes lyrical gems like, “Who… dug up Fido’s bones to build the sewer?” and “Peeping through the knot-hole of grandpa’s wooden leg.”
It seems fitting that “Go Get the Ax” inspired the name of a band whose sound is so bemusing.
Get the Axe’s latest single, “Mr. Pyramid,” seems to be typical metal fare until the two-minute mark, when an elevator jazz breakdown begins, with ethereal synth, bouncy bass and congas taking center stage. The section originated as an ad-lib of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.”
The musical backgrounds of the members of Get the Axe range from marching band to wind ensemble. Bates pulls his full-body singing from a cappella and his theatricality from Broadway, especially the vocal style of Ramin Karimloo.
Get the Axe’s discography is a rock opera set on a prison planet designed by higher beings with no real understanding of human history. A mishmash of anachronistic aesthetics — Western saloons, neon signs and Roman architecture — fill the space. The members of Get the Axe have notebooks full of maps, backstories and timelines, clearly inspired by their love of “Dungeons & Dragons.” So far, the band has told the story of a riot against the wardens on one of the planet’s subcontinents, only for the inmates to create a much crueler regime in its place. It’s very “Les Misérables.”
“Hopefully, one day we’ll actually get to flesh it out and make it understandable, rather than just our insane ramblings with our notebooks,” said Bates. “But we haven’t figured out the best way to do that yet. So for now, it’s diddling on guitars.”
“There’s also frog people,” chimed in drummer Reyn McBride.
“Hey,” Bates laughed. “That’s the next EP.”
Get the Axe will perform at The Black Sheep.
CIRCUS COSTUME PARTY
Glitter Porn concerts have always been costume parties — the crowd dressed as kaiju, zom
bies or the survivors of a nuclear disaster — but the band only recently committed to the clown aesthetic.
“Since the start, we’ve always tried really hard to be visible,” said bassist Alek Clark. “Nothing is more visible and distracting than a clown.”
In April, the art rock band released their circus-inspired debut album, “Polari” — named for the coded language used by circus folk, the LGBTQ+ community, sailors and the criminal underworld in the United Kingdom in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The album is rich with sonic experimentation. The album’s hit, “Fool,” is chock-full of Foley sounds created in-house.
“When we were recording that, we got up to such ridiculous s**t with the music that we were doing that we felt the need to take pictures of it to prove that it happened,” laughed vocalist Marlowe Doll. “There’s a picture of [keyboardist Finch Gortz] with a pot full of water and a wine glass and a stick.”
The album’s lyrics are just as ridiculous and experimental, from “Mary,” a recounting of the 1916 lynching of a circus elephant, to “The Hideous Gill Freak,” a seven-minute saga that uses the plot of the third “Creature from the Black Lagoon” film as a metaphor for the suffocating control often exerted on LGBTQ+ people.
Surrendering that control and embracing the strange are at the heart of Glitter Porn’s artistry.
“[Circus] performers are people who are weird everywhere except the stage that they perform on,” Doll said. “We perform because we love seeing the biggest parts of ourselves. That’s what we do as Glitter Porn, is we group all of those people who feel like the big parts of themselves are invisible, and we put them in a place where those parts of them are given room to breathe and to dance and to thrash.”
Glitter Porn will perform at Vultures.
BRAZEN BULL
In 2010, Che Bong, Nato Lucero and ZETfree fused hip-hop groups TooTone Taurus and Made Up Minds into a new trio, Bullhead*ded. The new name was both a reference to the original groups and a reflection of the members’ stubborn dedication to musicianship. As for the asterisk wedged between syllables, ZETfree joked: “We like to make it difficult for people to find us.”
Despite Bullhead*ded’s loyalty to the underground, they’ve shared stages with household names like Mos Def, Public Enemy and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. It’s not what the members would’ve expected 15 years ago, when no venue in Colorado Springs would let them onstage.
Hip-hop concerts had negative connotations in Colorado Springs at the time, in no small part because of a fatal shooting after an E-40 show in 2009 and stabbings at a TECH N9NE show in 2011. Bullhead*ded cut their teeth on shows in Pueblo and Denver. Union Station was the first Colorado Springs venue to pass the mic to Bullhead*ded.
Bullhead*ded released their first album, “4Play,” in 2013. The track “Fly” introduces the world to Bullhead*ded as they rap over a looping trumpet sample and high-energy drumbeat.
“Boiled Bones” and “Heartstones” followed in 2018 and 2019, respectively. The albums form two parts of a three-part story about the struggle of the artist, as told in occasional narration. 
Each album is paired with accompanying comic books with art by tattoo artist Mike Garcia.
The third album in this story has been recorded, but not yet released. The COVID-19 pandemic and raising children have kept the members of Bullhead*ded busy.
The members of Bullhead*ded refer to the arc as “The Brazen Series,” named for the brazen bull, an ancient Greek execution device. A person would be placed inside a statue of a bull, and a fire would be lit under it, slowly roasting them alive.
“Inside of the bull, there was a device that would convert the screams into the sound of a bull’s call,” explained ZETfree. “For us, it’s the story of the fires that you put yourself through to be an artist.”
Bullhead*ded will perform at What’s Left Records.
IF YOU GO | blacksheeprocks.com
When: Saturday, July 19, 2 p.m. Tickets: $23.33
Where: The Black Sheep (2106 E. Platte Ave.), Vultures (2100 E. Platte Ave.), What’s Left Records (2217 E. Platte Ave.)