Musician and guitar craftsman branches into moviemaking
By Eric Peterson
John Rumley is a jack of lots of creative trades.
The Denver-based Renaissance man makes guitars and repairs all kinds of stringed instruments. He’s also played all kinds of stringed instruments in a wide range of alt-country and rock bands. He even hosted his own warped late night talk show.
And now he’s wrapping up an epic film starring a cast of puppets. The project has been his passion for nearly a decade.
His father, Jerry, helped lead him into the arts. He was the director of the University of Denver’s dance department starting in the 1960s, and sometimes cast his kids as extras in productions.
Around 1980, John started playing bass in an experimental Denver band, Urban Leash, and that started his long career in music with such acts as Marty Jones and the Pork Boilin’ Poor Boys, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and Tarantella. He still sits in on gigs with Friends of Slim Cessna, and is working with longtime collaborator Charles Cuthill on a new band dubbed JC Superstar. “I like to do it because I get to see my friends,” said Rumley.
He fixed up a banjo and brought it to the Denver Folklore Center on Old South Pearl Street in the early 1990s, and ended up getting a job repairing stringed instruments. He’s now worked there for three decades.
Rumley started making showpiece guitars for his bandmates in Slim Cessna’s Auto Club around the same time. “I’ve built instruments since ’93,” he said. “This is another art form, another creative thing. I never set myself up as a business.”
He specializes in one-off relics with personality: colorful Telecasters as well as artsy jazz, rockabilly and gypsy jazz guitars. Rumley estimated that he’s made about 400 guitars since he got started with the craft.
“It’s all made from scratch,” he added. “And it’s all pretty much in my garage.”
He doesn’t take on many custom jobs because it doesn’t scratch his creative itch.
“I build stuff I want to build,” he said. “When you do custom this and that, it doesn’t work out. I do what I do, and if you like what I do, great. I don't want to be snobby about it, but they just come out better.”
His 30-year career building and repairing instruments has provided a basis for Rumley, 64, to focus on other creative pursuits as a second job, and there have been a lot of them. Beyond the bands and guitar-making, Rumley moved into film and video production with a web series called “Late Night Denver,” circa 2012.
The musician-guitar maker-talk show host is now taking his multi-hyphenate game up another notch with a project he’s been working on for the last eight years: a Western movie starring dozens of marionettes Rumley has crafted by hand.
The Sergio Leone-inspired spectacle is called “Don’t Come Back Until You’re Dead.”
“It’s basically like a ’60s biker movie,” described Rumley. “It’s two rival gangs, jealousy, betrayal.”
The genesis is rooted in his love of the genre.
“I’d always wanted to make a Western, but I knew that was impossible,” Rumley said.
But a marionette Western? He just needed to build puppets, turn his garage in south Denver into a scale-model saloon, and start filming. “My main goal is to make it, and make it with all my friends,” Rumley said. “We work on it twice a week. I’ve made like 40 puppets by hand.”
The finished product, around 45-minutes long, is expected to premiere by early 2025. “I just need to build a town on the side of my house,” laughed Rumley.
While the final scenes of “Don’t Come Back Until You’re Dead” might be shot outside, the garage remains the center of Rumley’s creative universe. Beyond his workshop and the aforementioned puppet-scale Denver City Saloon, his bands have used it as a practice space over the decades and it served as the well-disguised set for “Late Night Denver,” complete with velvet curtains and all the trimmings.
Fittingly, he added, “I call my production company, Rumley’s Garage.”