By Kyle Harris | October 25, 2018 [Please note Mr. Bianchi’s response] Club owner Jay Bianchi had a violent start to the week, punching his staff and attacking musicians. Now the music community is blasting him and his Grateful Dead-themed venue, Be on Key Psychedelic Ripple, online.
It began on the afternoon of Monday, October 22, when Bianchi’s staff dragged an overdosing man into the green room of his club. While the man was ultimately taken to the hospital and saved, Bianchi says the situation sent him into a rage. He screamed at his club’s doormen and repeatedly punched them, he says.
Seeing the guy on the brink of death brought back memories of his brother and his brother’s girlfriend dying from overdoses at his home in 2016, Bianchi says.
“We did punches,” Bianchi confesses to Westword. “But I hit like a girl. I did punches to them, but it was not the strongest punches, and it looked worse than it was.”
Bianchi maintains that he has strong relationships with his employees despite the attack. “They’re friends,” he says. “Most of my friends, I’ve had fights with. We’ve had punches and are like, ‘Okay, cool.’ It might look bad to someone else, but I don’t think that’s bad.”
After the afternoon fisticuffs, things simmered down at the bar — at least for most of the night, until guitarist Aidan Pagnani, lead of the Aidan Pagnani Band who’d played at the venue before and was headlining his first paid gig for the Mystery Mondays event, found himself in a tiff with a bartender.
READ MORE OF THIS STORY AT THE LINK BELOW…
https://www.westword.com/music/grateful-dead-themed-denver-club-owner-jay-bianchi-attacks-staff-and-musicians-10940855
Author Kyle Harris quit making documentaries and started writing when he realized that he could tell hundreds of stories in the same amount of time it takes to make one movie. Now, hooked on the written word, he’s Westword’s Culture Editor and writes about music and the arts.
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Bianchi took to Facebook with his own explanation of what had happened:
Normalize, normalize, normalize.
July 14th, 2016 I get a phone call from an anonymous number saying you should check on your brother, we were partying hard with him and just check and see if he is okay. So i walk into his room and walk into the bathroom and he is face down in the bathtub and his body is cold. I pull him up and blood is stuck to his face, a pool of blood is on the bathtub, dark and sticky. It is congealed mainly. His face is blue. He is dead. His friend Challys Maybee had just died the week before on the patio. She had needles in her arm. It wasn’t his fault, but he asked me, he asked me if people thought he killed her. He adopted her as a friend, gave her a place to sleep, tried to save her, he wanted her to be happy. I wanted him to be happy.
Sometimes we can not make people happy.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE FOR MR. BIANCHI’S COMPLETE RESPONSE…