There is no hint from the well-manicured lawn that inside the modest suburban ranch home is a recording studio named after a hallucinogenic wormwood liqueur that has been outlawed for more than a century. And certainly not from the smiling face of the sweet elderly woman who greets visitors at the door.

Betty Ferbrache is the proud mother of Bob Ferbrache. Or, as his friends call him, "Big Bad Bob." Ferbrache's Absinthe Studios, located in the basement of Betty's home, is responsible for some of the most successful and subversive music to come out of Denver in the past decade.

Ferbrache has recorded live performances by national acts such as Dick Dale, Ben Harper, Cake, Bush, Built to Spill, Ani DiFranco and Squirrel Nut Zippers, and has remastered dozens of basement tapes for the Tommy Bolin Archives. He has engineered albums for dozens of local bands, from the Fluid and Foreskin 500 to 16 Horsepower and Slim Cessna's Auto Club, making him perhaps the most sought-after recording engineer in town.

When The Denver Post recently ranked Colorado's top underground bands, Ferbrache had worked with eight of the top 10.

"Any band in Colorado right now would be very lucky to get Bob's interest, not only because he's so talented behind the board, but because he'll get obsessed with it and work it until it's right," said John Rumley of Slim Cessna's Auto Club "He'll go down in the underground scene as being one of the most important people out there."

Ferbrache also plays guitar, keyboards and organ, and over the past 20 years has played in many bands including the Soul Merchants, Human Head Transplant, Blood Axis and 16 Horsepower. His latest band is Tarantella, which opens Friday for the Czars at the Gothic Theatre in Englewood.

Big Bad Bob Ferbrache is big and, he would have you believe, bad. He wears his hair in a menacing ponytail, is seen in public wearing only black leather and, when asked his title, responds with a wink, "Der Führer." His most notorious recording, for Blood Axis, brought death threats in 1995.

The only problem is, it's something of a facade. After all, this is a guy who built a shrine to the Carpenters.

"There's only one side to Bob, and that's a soft side," said concert promoter and manager Chuck Morris, chief of SFX Music's Denver operations.

But there are many facets to Ferbrache, who is self-taught in everything from photography to geology, guitar and even his chosen profession, audio engineering.

"He's brilliant," said Morris. "Kooky and brilliant."

"Bob the Day Man"

Ferbrache, 44, graduated from Westminster High School in 1974 and got a job cleaning floors and bathrooms at Morris' legendary rock venue Ebbetts Field, which hosted Lynyrd Skynyrd and Richard Pryor in its heyday from 1974-77. Another legend came out of Ebbetts Field: The man they called "Le Hombre de Dia," or, "Bob the Day Man."

"Back then I would only hire people if they looked like freaks and if they could name the original members of the Byrds," said Morris. "He knew everything about everything, and even though he was cleaning floors, I always used him as a sounding board."

Ferbrache was a janitor by day and a freelance rock photographer by night. "I don't actually remember him being that smart," joked Ebbetts manager Craig Cochran, who now runs radio company Clear Channel's Wyoming operations. "It's not like I thought he would become a geologist."

But that's what happened when Ferbrache took a job as a delivery driver for a geology firm. He was soon used as an actual engineer, even though he had no academic training in the field.

"I felt bad when they started laying people off," he said. "People were coming in with their suits and ties and their four-year degrees from School of Mines, and here I was getting the job over them."

Ferbrache moved to San Francisco from 1980-81 with a band called the Healers, then came back to Denver and began recording. In 1988 he met Boyd Rice, one of the first experimental artists to use turntables and tape loops. Ferbrache played piano and surf zither for Boyd's 1990 "Music, Martinis and Misanthropy," which was popular in Europe. The pianist on that project was gonzo journalist Michael Moynihan, who would play a large part in Ferbrache's future.

But by the end of 1990, "I had no idea what I was going to do," Ferbrache said. He sold all of his equipment and moved to Seattle, where he became a member of GX Jupitter-Larsen's performance-art noise band, the Haters.

"It was all about creating chaos with industrial noise," he said. They toured the world, threatening audiences, lighting stage furniture ablaze and setting off smoke bombs.

In 1992, Ferbrache moved to Egypt and got a job repairing primitive government-owned data-card computers with bubblegum and paper clips. It was there he had an epiphany. "The plan was to buy properties in Egypt and turn them into brothels and restaurants," he said. But the plan was scuttled by a law that required land to be majority-owned by an Egyptian national.

Two days after Ferbrache returned to Denver in 1993, a friend dragged him to one of the first shows ever performed by 16 Horsepower. "It absolutely floored me," he said. "They were the best band I had ever seen before or since." Within a week, and for the next six months, he was the band's lap-steel guitar player. "Then they kicked me out," he said with a smile.

At that time, record companies were bugging his friend Moynihan for the first full-length album from Blood Axis.

"At that point Bob no longer even had a studio, and I had to encourage him to get back into recording again," said Moynihan, who now lives in Vermont. His advance became the seed money for Absinthe. "Bob set about pragmatically putting together a decent analog studio, piece by piece, while we recorded the album. I would like to think that doing our album was a key impetus for him getting back into recording."

Their 1994-95 collaboration, "The Gospel of Inhumanity," is a disturbing atmospheric epic that combines the words of Pound, Nietzsche and Longfellow with the classical music of Bach and Wagner. It also includes horror-movie samples, animal noises and human screams to create a sense of gloom.

"Doing the album was a challenge, and Bob was inspired to rise to it," Moynihan said.

The track that landed Moynihan - author of "Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Underground" - on a published hit list was a track including his chilling jailhouse conversation with Charles Manson. On it, the serial killer rambles about his Vietnam experiences, backed by somber church organ funeral music.

"That just sort of happened," Ferbrache said. "Michael is primarily a journalist and he wanted to talk with Manson for something else. He happened to be here when the call was forwarded to the studio, so I just hit the record switch. I was as surprised as anyone. Manson had to call collect, and since he was calling from the prison it was $400 for a three-hour call."

Ferbrache made only one live appearance with Blood Axis, in Sweden, so he missed most of the fallout. "Some obscure ne'er-do-well Marxist group on the West Coast decided Blood Axis would spark some kind of totalitarian revolution if every teenager in the country listened to the album," Moynihan said. "This was a bit ironic, coming from a group of totalitarians. They did get a few of our concerts canceled by phoning in death threats to the clubs. We financed a whole tour with money from canceled shows we didn't even play."

"Gospel" was an instant cult classic in Germany, Ireland, Russia, Norway and Portugal. "That album is the reason everything here exists," Ferbrache said of his studio. "That was the most publicized and biggest-selling of anything I've done, and it was all completely underground."

Go to your room

To think "Gospel" came out of Absinthe Studios just by looking it takes some imagination. It is configured in a basement any suburban kid in the Denver area the past 40 years would recognize.

Ferbrache's basement just happens to have a collection of rare guitars and world instruments lining the walls and a cubby hole that serves as a studio control room. Thanks to the wonders of computers, he can do in this tiny room what once required a multimillion-dollar studio.

Hanging on the wall next to his collection of mounted gargoyles from Notre Dame is a gold record by the Carpenters for their single "Hurting Each Other," part of a collection of Carpenters memorabilia that includes more than 1,000 singles. Nearby are encased absinthe filtering spoons, which were commonly used by 19th century artists and writers who believed the liqueur stimulated creativity and acted as an aphrodisiac. There are candy dishes everywhere ... filled with guitar picks.

Ferbrache engineered 10 albums last year, including 16 Horsepower's "Secret South" and live "Hoarse" releases; Slim Cessna's groundbreaking "Always Say Please and Thank You," which took more than a year to complete; Rice's "Eternal Flame"; DeVotchKa's "Supermelodrama"; and various techno works for the Austrian label Base Records.

He has just completed a disc by the local punk band La Donnas for an Aug. 10 release, and he continues to record national tours for public television's Denver-produced Music Link series.

"I think there's a part of Bob that enjoys freaking people out," said Music Link's Mike Drumm, who has known Ferbrache for 28 years. "I think there is some unresolved anger from somewhere that makes him more attracted to edgier fare. But underneath it all there is just his passion for music. That's all that motivates him. And now he's shifted his focus to Tarantella. Bob is loath to promote anything, and he's actually excited about it. "

Tarantella, named for a whirling 18th century Italian folk dance that was said to cure the victim of a poisonous tarantula bite, is the brainchild of Rumley and bilingual vocalist Kal Cahoone. They are joined by violinist Kelly O'Dea and Rumley's Slim Cessna bandmates Ordy Garrison (drums) and Danny Pants (bass).

After Friday's show, Tarantella opens for Kristin Hersh June 14 at the Gothic.

It was Rumley, who describes the sound as Latin meets spaghetti-western cabaret, who wanted Ferbrache to join Tarantella. "At first I told him I'm too old and I don't want to do this," Ferbrache said. "Then I heard it and I thought wow, this is fantastic. I loved it ...

"But if we get popular, I'm have to find a way to get out of touring. I am too old for that."

But not too old to cause trouble.