From left to right: Tom Uharriet, Bob Pickett, Bill Martinez & John Maul.

Maul and The Cutups… one of Denver’s mile-high-hair bands from the 1960s, along with Johnny Green and the Greenmen (green high hair), Aurora’s The Flames (red high hair) and Denver’s most-famous high-hair act The Fantabulous Jags.

Maul and the Cutups were a show-band going on 6 years when these pictures were taken in 1966!

The Rossonian, Denver’s historical jazz hotel, located on Welton in Five Points.

The Rossonian was one of the few jazz stops west of the Mississippi and east of California to host black performers like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole from the 1930s through the 1950s, at least until the Cotton Club opened in Colorado Springs.

As you can see in the photo above, the building was originally the Baxter Hotel which opened in 1912. It became the Rossonian in 1929.

It is also well-known as one of Jack Kerouac’s Denver haunts of the 1940s and was a primary film location for the 1995 all-star film Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.

While technically a San Antonio band, Mando and The Chili Peppers played Denver so much that many fans thought they were from here. All-Hispanic rock and roll bands weren’t the norm back in the ’50s, and for the band to put an album out, and it’s a great album, in 1957 no less, seems like a miracle! And just look at that album cover!

Golden Crest’s head honcho Clark Galehouse discovered the band in Denver while stuck here in a snowstorm. He also released local jazz-tenor great Phil Urso’s album The Philosophy of Urso shortly after the Chili Peppers LP, so he must have spotted Phil around the same time.

Listen to one of the great traveling rock & roll bands of the 1950s:

Mando and The Chili Peppers – South of The Border