Denver’s Hi-Dive Lives by Punk Ethos, Not Profit: ‘You Want to Bend the Rules a Little Bit’

Hi-Dive in Denver has a reputation. When Bay Area punk band Trash Talk came to play the less than 300-capacity club, the lead singer did a front flip off the bar, and owner Matty Clark watched in awe as the room was suddenly filled with parkour enthusiasts.

“I realized that it was like a cue for all the kids to jump on the bar and jump off. I was like, ‘Time out, time out,’” he recalls. Clark and a cohort of Hi-Dive employees had purchased Hi-Dive from its original owners only a few years prior, in 201,2 and they didn’t need anyone getting hurt. “You do want to bend the rules a little bit. We’re rock and roll.”

It’s not uncommon for kids in Denver’s punk scene to get rowdy, thrash or stage dive, Clark explains, “but these kids police themselves and take care of the space. We’re lucky that people have enough ownership [over Hi-Dive] that they don’t want to see it get trashed.”

That respect for the institution, which has been around as the Hi-Dive since 2003, is important for the space — one of only a handful of independent venues in a music-loving city of over 700,000 and a major thoroughfare for tour routing. As its name implies, the club on South Broadway is a bit of a dive, with a shotgun bar covered in ephemera and old beer signs. There are aging flyers on the wall and posters of iconic artists Sade and Kate Bush.

Renovations over the past 20-plus years have been minimal. There’s been the occasional paint job, but the owners have focused a lot of their efforts on improving the stage. They popped out the low ceiling to give the room more space, installed state-of-the-art lighting and upgraded the PA system for better sound quality (and so the speakers would no longer sit on wooden tables).

“I remember a show — I don’t think I was working there yet — where the PAs were just on the table, and a guy in the audience was holding one of the PA mains up because it was shaking so much from everybody dancing. Super frightening,” laughs Clark.

The PAs are now professionally hung from the trusses through the ceiling, but recently, a member of the punk band Cop Killer climbed the PAs while performing. “It looked aesthetically very cool, very punk,” says Clark. “I know it’s probably fine, but I gotta have my liability antenna go off and say, ‘Maybe that kid needs to get down. I don’t know the last time anyone has put weight on it.’”

A few years ago, Hi-Dive also tried to address the increasing summer temperatures by getting AC splits in the bar, as the cost of installing central AC units on a structure built in the early 1900s would be astronomical. “I don’t know if we got sold a lemon, but [the splits] just do not work,” Clark says.

But the fans don’t seem to mind the occasional sweaty show in the summer. In fact, the first time Clark really fell in love with Hi-Dive was a 100-degree show. In 2006, Clark attended a Liars gig that was so hot the lead singer started undressing and, on his way out, Clark recalls thinking, “That place rips.”

He started working there a year later, eventually moved up to become a manager and, when original owners Matthew LaBarge and Allison Housley decided to sell the place, purchased the venue with a group of fellow employees.

Like most smaller venues, Hi-Dive is not a money-making endeavor (“It’s 100% a labor of love,” Clark says), but they did not buy a lemon. They bought a business with a reputation — a really good reputation.

Prior to being Hi-Dive, the space was a venue called Seven South in the 1990s, welcoming artists such as Mazzy Star, Neutral Milk Hotel and 311. Seven South closed in 2001, and for a handful of years, it was a Dead Head bar called Quixote’s True Blue that sold bootleg Grateful Dead CDs out of the green room.

When LaBarge and Housley took over in 2003, they hired talent booker Ben Desoto, who landed early gigs from MGMT, St. Vincent, Fleet Foxes and The National. Desoto brought all his contacts from working as a talent booker for a corporate promoter and “made the Hi-Dive what it is right off the bat,” says Clark, who recalls working one of those shows when there were only 50 people in the room, all journalists and music industry folks. Clark recalls getting drunk with the drummer and teasing him about their silly band name: Vampire Weekend.

Hi-Dive has kept up with expertly curating its concert calendar. According to Clark, Denverites enjoy a spectrum of genres, with EDM being one of the most popular — but Hi-Dive stays in its own lane.

“We’ll do music that is punk or metal or outlaw country, as long as the ethos is there,” says Clark. “We’ll do interesting DJs or avant-garde rap or hip-hop or R&B. We’ll do stuff as long as it fits in our box of the punk ethic.”

With a capacity of less than 300, many of the bands booked by current talent buyer Maggie Moody are gambles, but the venue helps turn locals onto the emerging artists by creating playlists. The playlists are on at the Hi-Dive bar that’s open seven days a week “in the hopes that if you’re there having a beer in the afternoon and you like the band, we can be like, ‘Great, they’re playing here next month,’” says Clark.

“If you have something weird and you want to flex your artistic muscles and you don’t know where to do it, we’re totally open to doing it,” says Clark. “That gives us a bit of a leg up over places that are doing it for profit, whereas we want to see art thrive in the city.”

Gambling on the smaller acts has paid dividends. Sylvan Esso did an underplay at the Hi-Dive after members had played the venue in separate bands. The Velveteers brought their album release party to the club. And when the pandemic hit, shuttering all live shows, Denver star Nathaniel Rateliff made sure to book Hi-Dive for taped performances so the venue would get the rental fee.

With music venues shuttered, people flooded one of the few independent venues they had with merch sales, and local bands stepped in to help. Denver punk band Spells recorded a song about drinking at the Hi-Dive and donated all the online sales from Bandcamp to the venue. A band called Colfax Speed Queen made t-shirts, hoodies and crewnecks and gave the proceeds to Hi-Dive.

“It was a reset, reframed us a little bit to realize, we’ve been doing it for a while, and you can get bogged down in the day-to-day minutiae of doing any job,” says Clark. “It is hard to be independent in a world where it feels like everything is going to be owned by one company in the next 10 years. But we’ve done a good job of being that counterculture, being the answer to that. It’s okay to play Live Nation venues. In fact, it’s great. That means you’re doing something right, but come to the Hi-Dive too. We’re here for you.”