Between 2011 and 2015, Kansas City, Missouri, was Party City, USA.
This was all thanks to a band named Lazy, a vibrant art-punk outfit who embodied the city’s spirit in their music, especially with their show-opening anthem “Party City.”
Having originally formed in Lawrence circa 2009, Lazy quickly lit a fire in Kansas City’s bohemian creative scene. Their short, energetic songs became a staple at dive bars and house shows, in the back of pizza parlors, in basement art spaces and windowless neighborhood pubs. As long as you knew where Lazy was playing that night, Party City was never far away — a sporadic, intoxicating moveable feast.
Led by Brock Potucek and Sarica Douglas, Lazy’s performances were intense and unpredictable, marked by both musical brilliance and onstage tension. Despite the occasional chaos, their sound, akin to The Clash or The Buzzcocks, resonated beautifully. As one friend put it, Lazy managed to sound loose and incredibly tight at the same time.
The band’s tireless touring and underground releases eventually caught the ear of Robert Manis, a former Drag City associate whose Chicago label, Moniker, launched Lazy’s debut LP in 2013.
Like their live set, “Obsession” wasted no time, with 11 songs and a running time of 23 minutes, filled with angular guitars, blistering drums, and upfront vocals, as well as tape warps, mumbled samples, and other effects. The album is full of crisp, electrifying songs, including the melodic “Childhood Wonder” and the epic, Television-esque “Bring It Up.”
The band also made a music video for “Party City,” a cheeky and hilarious send-up of urban art-school decadence. In the video, the band and a faded entourage lounge around a dim apartment, make poolside drug deals on banana phones, light firecrackers in the streets, and snort lines of candy crushed up with a Taco Bell gift card.
It’s a wonderful glimpse of a grittier era in Kansas City, a time just before sports championships, the streetcar, and the explosion of self-referential T-shirts. At one point a convertible spins through the Crossroads, a neighborhood where art spaces and light industry have since given way to upscale hotels, hair salons, breweries, and churches. Cody Critcheloe (the audiovisual artist known as SSION) and Peggy Noland (LA-based artist and costume designer) both appear in the video, along with two dozen other artists and musicians, a street-cred time capsule of a band described by its label as “an art-fucked troop from Kansas City.”
What exactly does it mean to be “art-fucked”? You know it when you see it. Smashing a cheap guitar at a Monday night show at the Finn’s Irish pub. Spray-painting the band name across an entire building. Recording a live album upstairs at Rico’s Tacos Lupe (I never quite knew if that was true or not, but am choosing to print the legend). While other artists sold kitschy watercolors of the neon “Royal Liquors” sign at the Strawberry Swing, at least two Lazy band members got jobs there.
The sound and fury all coalesced in their live shows, which by that point totaled in the hundreds. None of it seemed especially sustainable, at least in my outside estimation, so the only thing to do was enjoy it while it lasted.
The band’s disappearance from playing live shows left a void, though sporadic releases as a new outfit, “BB Gun,” hinted at ongoing creativity. As the members went separate ways, many of the venues where they played have also since closed down. Even the unrelated chain store named “Party City” went bankrupt, in part due to the inflation of helium prices, which seems both funny and poetic.
Fortunately, Lazy left a rich trove of recordings on their Bandcamp page, a testament to their outsize impact in a relatively brief public stint. Listening to their music now is a raw reminder of how important it is to pursue your passions before the punk rock passion and childhood wonder fade. Lazy’s own commitment to rock and roll didn’t save them from obscurity, but those of us who saw them will never forget the way they always left it all on the stage—even when their wasn’t a stage to speak of.
I’ve tried many times to write an appropriate tribute to Lazy, but it’s always devolved into show-by-show highlights or murky personal insights. I emailed Brock with an interview request back in 2016, but by then he’d already left for a fresh start California. The only thing drummer Bill Belzer would say to me on the record was that he was “glad they gave themselves over to the anarchy of rock and roll.”
Just this past year, however, Brock finally replied. He hinted that he was working on new creative endeavors for public consumption, without specifying whether it would be visual art or music. As Kansas City transforms and evolves, the era of Party City has ended, possibly making way for something new.
lucas wetzel 