Punk rocker Ben Roy and his band SPELLS had an opening set scheduled to start at 8 p.m. sharp on Saturday, Jan. 25, at the Oriental Theater.

Comedian Ben Roy is part of a renowned local comedy trio that had a standing show slated to start at 8 p.m. sharp on Saturday, Jan. 25, at the Bug Theater.

Something had to give – and it was Roy. He gave it a whirl, he gave it his all, and he gave separate packed audiences two very different kinds of shows 2 miles apart.

Punk rocker Roy, the band’s frontman, whipped about 650 into a frenzy at the Oriental with a rapid-fire, 10-song set that Roy spent almost entirely among the crowd, hugging them, moshing with them and sweating all over them – often with his body parts inserted into theirs.

Less than 30 minutes later, Comedian Roy was delivering a 12-minute set of new and untested material, including riffs on the sweet interactions he had just had with a 9-year-old SPELLS fan named Colin back at the Oriental.

It was a fun and funny, sort of stupid and undeniably impressive demonstration of one hyper-driven artist’s ability to fully shift gears on a dime and tap into a completely different part of the secret sauce that is his creative brain.

Watching him try to pull it all off was a unique opportunity to watch a performer who has only one switch – and it goes from mad to manic. His anger, his love and his mania inform his music and his standup comedy, which are both pretty hardcore, said SPELLS co-founder Rob Burleson. He needs all three.

“I feel like Ben’s mania helps drive him,” Burleson said. “That is kind of his driving force. It is part of who he is. It’s part of his comedy routine. It’s part of his music. It’s part of his daily life. It’s his therapy.”

What made this evening’s challenge all the more daunting is that Roy’s comedy group, called The Grawlix, have a standing rule when it comes to their monthly comedy meetup: Members Roy, Adam Cayton-Holland and Andrew Orvedahl can’t repeat past jokes. Which means no mailing it in. Ever.

That’s the first thing Roy says when I meet him at 6 p.m. at the Oriental for SPELLS’ sound check. He will say some variation of that very same thing 14 times between now and 8:51 p.m., when he will be racing into the Bug Theater.

It didn’t suck. It was actually kind of astounding, given what all went into it. Here’s some of how it all went down:

Roy wakes up at 8 a.m. and by 9:30 is heading to the gym. Roy, a practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, works out for a good hour and a half, running possible material through his head as he pounds the treadmill.

He’s home by 11 a.m. and starting to dial in on his material. “I try to run my set in my head – what I’ve written so far – over and over again,” says Roy, who walks around his home in Mayfair holding a microphone, just as he will tonight on the Bug stage.

At noon, it’s time for an hour-long nap. “And then I get up and do more of that,” he says. By 5, he’s showering, getting his stuff together and heading out into the light snow toward the Oriental in his Nissan Altima. “I want to give myself plenty of time because of the weather,” he says.

By 6 p.m., Roy has joined Burleson (drums) and co-founder Chuck Coffey (guitar) on the Oriental stage with co-singer Dawn Nock and bassist Don Bersell. They’re all veterans of the Denver music scene who have been playing as SPELLS since 2013 under delightfully idiotic stage names like “Little Stevie Sh*thead” (Roy), “Dusk Monarch” and “Peter P. Bohner.” Burleson and Coffey carry much of the creative load, with Roy providing lyrics to songs like their infectious anthem to slackerism, “80% is Good Enough,” and their current closer, “Past My Prime,” with Roy scraping the very bottom of his guttural larynx. “My vocals are kind of gruff,” he fully owns.

SPELLS is all in good fun for these 40-and-up rockers who have found their musical happy place together. The cheeky fun starts with “the look.” The band will take to the stage wearing matching tracksuits that can only be described as neon tigers. Burleson’s wife found them on the internet, and he was all in for the impulse buy. (“I may have taken an edible,” he says with a laugh.) Wearing his, Roy says he’s often mistaken for the president of Irish mixed-martial artist Conor McGregor’s fan club.

Onstage, the tigers will soon give way to a classier, Polo kind of vibe. “Chuck and I thought that we should have a collared look to represent the old soul days, where people would dress up and wear ties and stuff,” said Burleson. “It was time to up our game. They even turned to local tailor Eugene Rooks to design them.

SPELLS’ music is pretty instantly ear-catching, but you’d not know just what that sound is from the witty way this “five-piece rock juggernaut” self-describes on its website. They call their sound “vacation rock,” which in truth is not a thing by any definition.

“The reason we call it ‘vacation rock’ is because when we tour, we only want to play in cities we would like to go visit on vacation,” Roy said. “We just want to go hang out on a beach.”

At 7:15, Roy and Bersell are trying to get a quick pre-show bite from the packed Swing Thai restaurant across the street from the Oriental. As we wait for the delayed food they are going to have to take with them for a few quick bites at the merch table, Roy talks about his path to both music and stand-up, with the roots to both running back to his high-school theater days in Maine.

Bersell isn’t at all surprised that Roy can move between comedy and standup as easily as Bersell changes a chord.

“Ben just likes the stage,” he said, “and I think he could thrive in any medium as long as there is a stage.”

I ask Roy why he said yes to the Ted Leo offer when he has a longstanding commitment with The Grawlix on the last Saturday of every month. He said yes because his comedy pals were cool with starting the Grawlix show without him, and because who says no to opening for Ted Leo? And one other thing.

“I’m always in,” Roy said. “I just want to play. If there is any way to not say no to something, I am going to figure out a way to not say no.”

Mindful of Roy’s need to bolt at the end of his set, the Oriental crew has SPELLS starting on time at the strike of 8. Roy and Nock are almost immediately singing ferociously in and around the fervid crowd. Soon a mosh circle forms, and it’s on. Roy is giving it his all, putting his head on fans’ shoulders and, occasionally, his fingers in their ears and mouths. That’s Ben doing Ben, who has been known to do the same while performing standup.

“The thing that I relate to most about hardcore music is that the line between audience and performer is blurred,” he says. “I love bringing that same energy to standup, because it doesn’t feel as expected there.”

This is an all-ages show, and Roy takes notice of a long-haired 9-year-old boy straight out of “Dazed and Confused.” He’s sporting ear-protecting headphones the size of an air-traffic controller’s. For the set’s big finale, Roy returns to the stage and takes the kid with him. After what looks to be some kind of inaudible negotiation, Roy gently sets the kid atop the outstretched arms of those in front for a brief crowd-surfing ride. The place is going insane.

At 8:36, Roy apologizes for needing to rhyme and dash. In true sloppy punk-rock style, he implores the audience to spread love and tolerance. By 8:42, he’s out the door and hopping into a friend’s car for the icy, nine-minute drive to The Bug.

He uses every second of it to test his material. He says he’s got a bit about “The Masked Singer” being “peak disappointment television,” and panics a bit when the car’s other two passengers don’t laugh. We apologize, not knowing we were his barometer. He sticks with the bit, which will soon turn to gold when he teases the idiocracy who think the mystery singer is somehow going to be Oprah or Barack Obama when, chances are, it will turn out to be “retired Minneapolis Twins third baseman Clay Schilling!” We laughed.

But what owns Roy’s focus at the moment is his interaction back at the Oriental with Colin, the 9-year-old with the oversized headphones. “When I told him, ‘You’re going to jump into that crowd, he looked at me with sheer terror in his eyes,”  said Roy.

“He was so adorable,” our driver says as we cross Federal Boulevard on 38th Avenue. “You just changed that kid’s life.”

Roy wonders aloud: “Should I have made a joke about that?” In about 10 minutes, he will.

We find a lucky parking spot and are walking into the Bug at 8:51 just as Cayton-Holland is delivering the final, knockout punch to his set and then calls Roy to the stage.

That’s the last thing Roy mutters to me as he passes. And in short order, it’s clear – he knows exactly what he’s going to say. “Why does everyone seem so awkward?” he asks the crowd. “Is it because I’m so clearly wet?” He delivers the “Masked Singer” bit perfectly, down to the syllable, as if it’s been branded into his cerebellum like aged wine. The crowd loves it.

He tells them all about Colin and what he muttered when he took to one knee and spoke into the boy’s ear:

“We were standing on the edge of the stage, and I was like, ‘Jump!’” Roy says, holding for a beat. “And the kid went, ‘(Bleep), no!’ And I was like, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine.’ And then he leaped off and he flew and they (bleeping) carried this kid around, crowd surfing at 9 years old. And then they put him down so gently, which – if you’ve ever been on top of a crowd is not how they treat an adult. We put people down crowd surfing like you put down a cat you don’t want to hold anymore. But this kid got the coolest sleigh ride down to the ground. And the whole place is going nuts. Balcony is full. And he’s like, (‘Bleep), yeah!’”

“And then I stopped and I pointed at him and I was like, ‘I just changed your (bleeping) life – and I’m not sure it’s for the better, I going to be honest with you.’

“That kid could have gone and cured cancer or something. But instead, 30 years from now, he’s still going to be at dilapidated Denver theaters writing songs about his dad, which is what I’ve been doing.”

Gold-plated comedy.

Afterward, Roy allows himself to consider that maybe he really did pull it off.

“I liked my Grawlix set,” he says. “I was comfortable and loosey-goosey.”

So … you have to be feeling pretty good, right?

“What I am feeling right now is relief,” he says instead. “But I will tell you this: I am not going to sleep tonight until after 2, because turning off my brain is absolutely the hardest thing for me to do. I do feel good that the shows went well, but I’m already in, ‘OK, what’s next?’ mode. Which used to annoy my ex-wife and everybody around me, because I really should just enjoy it more.”

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