Nicky Alfred (Pro-Choice, Weekend Dad, Van Hagar, The Back Alley)

Photo by Hudson Luce

The drive out to Hays is long and littered with stretches of road and signs warning drivers against getting abortions. For many, Hays is a college town and the last beacon of what you could call civilization until you reach Denver when you travel westward on I-70. Since its inception, punk has always secured a place as a direct reaction to Bible Belt evangelicalism and war mongering neo-conservatism, making Hays, KS a fertile ground for those shunned by a community of close mindedness and conservative thinking. I first met Nicky Alfred when I was 13 and like him, I was seeking out something that validated my worldview growing up in a similar small Kansas town. For me, the Hays punk scene was THE Kansas punk rock scene at the time. It was filled with people who felt the same type of alienation I had felt in my own community and inspired me through it’s attitude towards inclusiveness and showing me as a young punk that it was possible for kids in small conservative communities to do cool things. At the height of the Bush administration, the Hays scene more closely resembled what you would see from the politically charged punk of the 1980s. It was defined by being a response to Christian fundamentalism, a period of fear generated by a bogus “war on terror,” and rampant police abuse towards punk kids attending shows. Nicky started playing punk music in Hays during the early 2000s where he met a ragtag group of individuals also looking to play and throw shows. They threw shows in park buildings and DIY venues across town, evading police misconduct and offering weird western Kansas kids a way out through music and skateboard culture. Nicky’s time fronting the Hays punk outfit, Pro-Choice, might have been the peak of the Hays punk rock scene. Nicky and his peers were growing more and more dissatisfied with the culture of fear and a town that protested a woman’s right to choose in a city that didn’t even have an abortion clinic. Pro-Choice channeled this frustration through an eclectic version of 80s hardcore punk revamped for the Bush era political climate. The acceptance that Nick had felt from older punks as a young kid going to his first punk shows was lifesaving. Pro-Choice established a home base, at the Back Alley, a DIY punk venue in the basement of the White Chocolate skate shop where they put on exclusively all ages shows for local and touring bands. It was here that Nicky and Pro-Choice drummer, Derek Hadley, worked to establish an oasis of inclusivity and DIY culture for kids looking for something more to do in a town that had very little. I remember going to my first show in Hays to see Pro-Choice play. Nicky sought me out as one of the younger kids there, with my two friends and my dad, to thank me for coming. Every time I went back to see a show there, Nicky always, made me feel welcome. He encouraged me to always come back, bring my friends, and start my own bands. Punk is a community and for outsider kids growing up in a rigid conservative landscape because that community might be the only one they feel part of.

Where did you grow up and how did you get started playing music?

I grew up in Hays, KS. My dad was a professional drummer way before I was born. By the time I was around he had gotten a day job. He had 3 kids and I was the youngest. But he still played in local bands. I remember seeing him play when I was little and it kind of appealed to me. I just asked if I could play his drums and have him show me some stuff. I was a latchkey kid so I had a few hours where I could play on them by myself without someone looking over my shoulder and just teach myself stuff. I would go with him to jam with his friends so I could watch. I was really interested in music just by being around him. He got me into classic rock from his record collection when I was little. By the time I was in 5th grade or 6th me and this kid named Jordan were really into playing together and he was like a prodigy. He would play Red Hot Chili Peppers bass lines too fast. We would play a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers because that was what he was into and we played all of the time because bass kind of just carries those songs, so you didn’t really need a guitarist. Other than that, I really just played on my own because there weren’t a lot of kids my age that were into playing. By the time I was in the 8th grade I answered an ad at the local music store for some band who needed a drummer. They were in High School and I was in Middle School. They were all into nu metal and I was not into nu metal at all. We played for the High School talent show and I was like, “I’m not doing a fucking Korn song,” but classic rock was kind of the middle ground that we all liked so we ended up doing “Paradise City” (laughs). I got to know the rhythm guitarist of that band and we had a lot more in common. He was really into Nirvana. I was into Nirvana and Green Day and the Ramones and kind of just all that pop punk stuff you would find on VH1. Growing up in Kansas there wasn’t really like a live music scene. I didn’t know what punk rock was outside of what the TV showed me but luckily on VH1 they had these really good punk documentaries that explained really well the history of punk and bands to look into. This is also pre internet, so if you wanted to get into music, you would have to spend like 20 bucks on a CD and being young and poor it was really hard to find out about new music without there being like a local music scene.

When do you finally attend your first punk show?

It would have been 2002. The summer before my 9th grade year and I came across a flyer at the local music store with a bunch of local punk bands I had never heard before that were around Kansas. Back Seat Girls was one of them, also Last Ride Out, but The Impregnators were the local one and they were putting on the show. At first, I didn’t think I’d be wanted there. I was a little kid and I figured that I wouldn’t be welcome, but I saw on the flyer it said, “NO DRUGS, NO ALCOHOL, ALL AGES EVENT,” and I ended up going to the show because the flyer said “ALL AGES” on it. I would have felt like I wasn’t wanted there if the flyer hadn’t said it was an All Ages show. I always made that a point to put that on flyers to make sure people knew it was all inclusive. It was life changing to be in a roomful of people hearing music that I liked played live which I had never seen before. There were only like 20–30 kids there, but they were all pushing pitting and helping people up when they fell. It was just a really positive energy, and everybody was just really fucking cool.

How did you get into booking your own shows?

I started playing in this other band with some guys who were a little older than me. We played stuff that was kind of in the vein of Nirvana, Silverchair, and all of that 90s stuff. We played some punk stuff, but the guitarist wasn’t really into it. Me and the bassist were getting really into the Impregnators. After that show, they had kind of broken up, but we had all the CDs they had put out, so we just drove around town listening to them. We played some shows and there was this other band in town called DSS who were kind of the preppy kids in town that found out about Blink 182 and started a pop punk band. We were all friends with them. They were all really nice dudes who also wanted to play and host shows. I hate to say it, but they were all better off than us; we were fucking poor and when it came down to paying for a building, they would always help pay for it which was rad. They helped us out a lot for shows. We would rent out this building on the edge of Hays called the Tupperware Building and it was called that because they would host Tupperware parties there. It was like $150 and you got like 50 back if you didn’t trash the place. But they would put the money up and the exchange was that we would bring our PA and run sound and run the door and clean up. There would be like four local bands on these shows and we would only charge a dollar, maybe 2, but we would end up making their money back through the door, so there would be at least 100 kids showing up for those shows throughout the night. I think it wasn’t until like 2004 or 2005 where Myspace happened and it became really easy to network with other bands, so bands that were coming through on tour would message you and ask you to help them out with a show. We became DIY promoters out of just being the only punk bands in town that were on Myspace. Hays is a really small town and a lot of the kids that came for shows then were kind of coming for the social aspect. A lot of these kids weren’t really into punk rock. We kept shows sparse and only did it like once a month so when we did it, it was a big event.

At some point there was a local metal band that rented out the Tupperware building and had like a kegger and trashed the building, and because of that, the owner said he wouldn’t rent it to bands anymore. I ended up contacting the local parks department and they had all these park buildings. It was perfect because it was away from all the houses. I thought the cops wouldn’t really fuck with us if we did stuff out there. We had to make sure no one was drinking there but we knew better than to drink in the park underage so everyone would go to the show and party afterwards. After doing one or two shows and cleaning up after, they were just happy that someone was using the buildings, so they stopped making us pay a deposit and let us use them whenever I wanted. We did park shows for like 2 years. We had bands from Denver play and a couple of other out of town bands. There wasn’t really any way we could charge people so we kind of had to just tell people out of good faith that were trying to charge 3 to 5 dollars for the touring bands. For the most part people were really respectful of that and they would pay if they could. Then it got pretty insane. I was tipped off that the police in town were having meetings about these shows and they were trying to shut us down however they could. They would always show up at 10 PM when the city ordinance for sound was to make sure it was over and follow all the kids out of the parking lot and pull them over. The cops were deadest on shutting it down but couldn’t find any legal way of doing it, so they actually went to the Parks Department and told them they weren’t allowed to rent it out to us anymore.

So where did you guys go next?

At that point we didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Derek Hadley, who was in the Impregnators, ended up drumming for my band, Pro-Choice, and he was managing the local skate shop, White Chocolate. They had a basement they weren’t using, and the owner said if I cleaned it up and took care of it, I could use it for shows. That’s how we got the Back Alley started as a venue. The entry way was the back door of White Chocolate and there was also a pun there connected to Pro-Choice and back alley abortions.

How long was the Back Alley a venue?

I want to say it lasted for 2 years. It wasn’t a very long run, but it was nice to have a place where the cops couldn’t fuck with us the way they would at the park. The most the cops would do was complain if people were standing in the street. We would primarily do shows on the weekends, but we would do them like once a month. We stopped doing it because I had moved to Lawrence and Derek didn’t want to run the place alone.

Why did you think it was important to call your band Pro-Choice and have that kind of stance?

I don’t really know why, but that was always kind of a hot button topic in the Midwest. Kids weren’t able to wear our shirts at school that said our band name on it. We were still just young and dumb kids, but we just knew better. When we saw all these people in town protesting abortion in a town that doesn’t have an abortion clinic and there isn’t one within 300 miles, we would just call them out. At a young age we just knew that it was HER choice that it was HER body. So, for us the Pro-Choice thing was just a commonsense approach to understanding autonomy. And to this day especially in Kansas it’s such a hot button issue and we offended so many people with our band name, but it was just something we all agreed on.

On the way out to Hays there’s so many anti-abortion signs and I always love making that drive and thinking about Pro-Choice forming all the way out here in such a culturally conservative part of the state especially.

If you ride these little roads between Great Bend and Lyons and all these little towns you’ll find the homemade signs and it’s never made sense to me why someone would make these signs and put them up on these roads that no one drives on. It’s insane to be so passionate about taking away a woman’s right to her own body.

How do you think the small-town conservative Kansas mindset developed your tendency towards punk rock?

There was a lot of stuff going on at the time that I didn’t agree with. I didn’t really party or do drugs. I don’t think I really drank until I was like 18 and even then, it was on and off. I had a lot of neo-conservative, Catholic family. I had gone to Catholic school and by the time I was like in 4th or 5th grade I didn’t really buy into it anymore. Even if you wear uniforms, it doesn’t take kids long to figure out who the poor kids are. Basically, me and the other four poor kids at the school were our only friends because the rich kids had cut us out. I felt like if I wasn’t going to be welcome there then I was just going to find my own thing. I guess what really drove me to punk musically was just the messages. You would hear songs that were just about growing up poor or growing up in shitty communities. I couldn’t even walk down the street in a band t-shirt and a pair of jeans without someone driving by and calling me a “faggot.” Finally, I just embraced it, if wearing jeans and t-shirt was enough for these people to hate me, then I was just going to go all out with it. I was going to dress how I wanted to dress and do what I wanted to do. The political stuff really hit me when I was younger too. I was at the age where I could start forming my own opinions and I was growing up around 9/11 and watching George Bush start this war and I had a pretty good understanding of what was going on. Punk Rock at that time was right there with it. You had all these bands writing songs about everything that was happening and it was just a perfect storm of shitty circumstances and a genre of music that was just addressing it. It made you feel like you weren’t alone.

Can you talk a little more about how Pro-Choice got started and what you guys were listening to at the time?

I had been playing drums up to that point, but I started playing guitar when I was 15 just so I could learn more about writing songs. I ended up meeting this kid named Jason Swart who played drums and I finally had an excuse to jump on guitar. So, me, and Jason and this kid named Josh Wasinger started playing together and that was the original Pro-Choice line up. Musically I know Josh was really into Anti-Flag, Dead Kennedys, and Bad Religion. I was listening to a lot of street punk like the Unseen and the Casualties and all of the older punk bands like Suicidal Tendencies and Misfits. Jason was really into Nirvana and the Melvins, Dead Kennedys, the Beatles, and a lot of weirder shit that we hadn’t really been into yet. We just kind of mixed all that crap together and played for fun. I think we played like a show or two and Jason got caught smoking weed and was grounded from hanging out with us. That’s when we got Derek to play drums for us. Josh had this other band he was focusing on, so he quit, and we got our friend Kirby Schlyer to play bass for it. I think Pro-Choice was a band for like 4 or 5 years. It was always me and Derek as the main members of the band and we had like a revolving door of bassists. Me and Derek would play like 2 or 3 times a week. I think at one point we had like 50 songs. I think it was just too much for teenage bass players. Jason actually ended up back with us on bass for a long time, as well as honorable mentions Justin Stegman, Brandon Kahrs, and a short stint with Ryan Wong on guitar and me on vocals.

Yeah you guys had like 3 albums or something like that, right?

Yeah, we would play for like an hour or 45 minutes if we were headlining but we always wanted to have a different set whenever we played. We would play out of town a lot like in Wichita or Lawrence and we didn’t want to play the same set whenever we came to town so we tried to keep our sets as interesting as we could.

Can you talk a little more about the local Hays music scene after you guys got started?

Before I got involved there was a little bit of a local scene but that was like a good ten years before I got involved. There weren’t a lot of straight forward punk bands. There was an original rock band from Larned called Noxfate. Their singer Jared Miller went on to do some awesome solo stuff too. Th were was Sudden Death Syndrome (death metal) and Tactical Defiance (punk), both out of Great Bend but played Hays often. Our friend Cole Morse was also doing singer/songwriter solo stuff. There was a short lived emo/screamo band called Under Our Chairs, a psychedelic band called My Uncle Is A Cannibal. And from lacrosse a punk band called Playdough Masochist. I hope I’m not forgetting anything. We all got along okay enough, despite musical differences. The one thing I really take away from being in bands in a small town is that there wasn’t enough of us to be clicky. If you only wanted to hang out with people that listened to punk rock, it was you and three people. If you wanted fucking friends, you had to learn to get along with each other and accept each other’s differences. When I moved to the city there were people who grew up knowing 50 other kids who were just into punk rock and that’s all they hung out with. As a result, those scenes were really clicky. The punk kids didn’t talk to the metal kids and the metal kids would never play with the emo bands. In a small town there wasn’t any room for that. You had to book the acoustic guitar guy, the jam band, the metal band, and the punk band and you had to learn how to get along and you had to tell all your friends to get along. That was another thing. The kids that didn’t like the pop punk band would go turn the power off on them while they were playing. We would have to tell our friends that they couldn’t do that and that those guys were our friends even though they were playing music that we didn’t like.

Maybe that cross-pollination of genres made the music more unique because you were constantly being exposed to different types of music.

Oh yeah, definitely. And oftentimes you were playing for audiences who were not there to see you at all and winning them over was a big challenge. There wasn’t that echo chamber of playing punk rock to a bunch of people who also liked punk rock. Like half of them are only into metal and half of them are there for the jam band. But you were playing for a crowd that might fucking walk out if your set sucked ass. It wasn’t just a roomful of people who already agreed with you. You were always playing with different people.

What other bands were you in around that time?

While I was in Pro-Choice, I also played in a local band from Great Bend called Tactical Defiance. They were a little younger than me and I think we met them playing a show in Larned. Then they started playing with us at the Back Alley. They had drummers that kept quitting on them, so I started playing with them. I was also in a band that started as a joke band called Mouthful of Glitter and we were like a glam rock band. After that I started my one-man band, Hot Neon Crotch, which again, I started kind of as a joke. I did some ambient noise stuff. I started getting into circuit bending and no wave music. I was just recording that in my room and was just putting out records with nonsense on them. I actually built a guitar with a keyboard attached to it and wrote an entire set just with that guitar. I just did that as more of an outlet for creativity and I carried it on for a little bit when I moved to Lawrence.

I want to talk about Lawrence a little bit, but I also want to touch on other towns in Kansas. I remember catching you guys in Hutch and I know you guys played all over Kansas. What were some of the scenes like in some of those other towns?

We had some friends in Hutchinson. My friends Matt and Steven were in a band called Green River Gary. They put on shows at the Homebuilders Shelter there. Of course, in Hutchinson they always had really cool house shows that we played. They had a few other bands. Low Oriole was another one. Skylar Marshall was in that band. Him and Steve had a few bands that they would start that never really lasted long but they always had really unique and cool sets. I remember seeing Bike Huddle there and Knifewound who was from Wichita and they’ve been around for a long time. Whenever we played in Wichita, we always played at Kirby’s which was always really fun. In Larned we played at the VFW Hall and whenever we played Lawrence, we would play this crust punk house called the Haunted Kitchen that had been around forever. It was a great place and everyone there was always super nice.

How was Lawrence different from Hays?

Lawrence is like the liberal-hippie backlash to the rest of Kansas. There was a really cool punk scene there and there were a ton of bands. There were a lot of little dive bars and they had an established local music scene. They have local bands and touring bands playing all of the time. They also have bigger venues. That’s the biggest difference because it’s still not a very big town. There’s just more culture there. There’s a lot more left thinking individuals. Like a lot of hippies and punks. It doesn’t really feel you’re living in Kansas when you move to Lawrence. The first band I started when I moved to Lawrence was Weekend Dad which was a powerviolence band. I was also in a band called Beta Max which was more like an 80s hardcore throwback band.

Then after Lawrence you moved to Nashville then Richmond?

Yeah, I moved to Nashville and my partner at the time I started a band called Van Hagar. The band ended up moving to Richmond and playing for a few years. I came back to help my dad out while he was undergoing chemo treatment and COVID hit so I’m just waiting that out and saving up money before I can go back to Richmond.

It’s a bummer that COVID had to hit because it sounds like Hays was starting to have some shows again.

Jordan Rome from the Impregnators has actually been putting together a band for the past year called The Action Boys and he’s also doing a country project that I’m playing drums with him on. He kind of got back into it and started putting on shows at the Sip n Spin. And there’s a couple of other bands around here too. There’s one called Tree Kitty. I don’t know any of the members but it’s just cool that there’s stuff still going on around here. Hopefully when COVID is over, I can play some shows before I move back. It would be fun to play around Kansas again.

Well my first punk show was seeing you guys play in Hays when I was 13 and I just remember how encouraging and welcoming you guys all were and that was incredibly important to me as a kid getting into punk.

Growing up, I knew I had the older crowd that always made me feel accepted. So when I started throwing shows I always made it a point to find those kids and thank them for coming, tell them to tell their friends, let them know that their parents can come if their parents are weird about it. I always wanted to make them feel welcome because punk is a community, and they should all feel welcome.