After more than three decades of hellfire sermons set to banjo and pedal steel, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club are calling it quits. Slim Cessna himself broke the news on his personal social media, though no further statements from other band members have surfaced at time of publication.
Formed in Denver, Colorado in 1992, SCAC rose from the ashes of The Denver Gentlemen — a band that also spawned David Eugene Edwards and Jeffery-Paul Norlander of 16 Horsepower — making it a genuine cornerstone of the Denver Gothic Americana scene. The sole constant throughout the band’s entire run was Slim Cessna himself, who built the group into one of the most singular acts in American roots music.
The band became one of the pillars of what critics called the “Denver Sound,” blending country blues, gospel, and folk with apocalyptic and religious imagery, stories of violence, alcohol, and broken relationships. Jello Biafra once described them as “the country band that plays the bar at the end of the world,” a tag that stuck because it was simply true.
The group released their self-titled debut in 1995 and spent the rest of the decade building a fierce regional following before releasing Always Say Please and Thank You on punk stalwart Alternative Tentacles in 2000. Co-frontman and multi-instrumentalist Jay Munly — aka Munly Munly — joined as banjo player and co-vocalist in the early 2000s and became the other half of one of the great dysfunctional preacher duos in live music. Slim’s own son, George Cessna, formally joined the band in 2018, making it a family affair right up to the end.
The Auto Club never had a clean genre home, and that was the point. They were cowpunk, gothabilly, Gothic Americana — whatever you needed to call it to explain what you’d just witnessed. Whatever the label, there was nothing else like them. They will be missed.
