Donald Rossa thought the six adults crowded around a small table at Dazzle Restaurant and Lounge looked a little out of place. Unlike most of the patrons in his chic Lincoln Street club, they weren’t drinking, and they weren’t talking too much. Mostly, they were staring intently at the jazz…
Imagine it’s 50,000 years ago. You live in France, paint oxen on cave walls, start fires and sharpen arrows, which you, a clever Cro-Magnon, just invented. You’re accustomed to the big, silver circle that lights the sky at night, but one day you see something that blows your prehistoric mind:…
Once Lorenzo discovered he had HIV ten years ago, after a friend suggested he should be tested for flu-like symptoms, he began coming to grips with the AIDS virus and the role it would play in his new world. “Life goes on…and it doesn’t have to be a totally negative…
It’s a sticky Friday night in Katie Wirsing’s cramped Capitol Hill walkup, and “Puff the Magic Dragon” is turning into a real pain in the ass. “You’ve got to keep it silly, silly,” says Ted Vaca, sipping Sierra Nevada as he sits on a gigantic inflatable couch, absentmindedly clicking the…
Peopled with local anarchists, artists, radicals and muckrakers, the Breakdown Book Collective (1409 Ogden Street) is a refuge for alternative lifestyles, political viewpoints and artistic expression. So it seems a fitting place to reveal the more roving, experimental side of songwriter/guitarist Roger Green, who recently stretched out into the solo…
SAT, 8/2 Slap on your saddle shoes, pile on the pomade, and head directly to LoDo where the sparks are flying at today’s Built for Speed: The Art of Kustom Kulture. The hep cats on 15th and Wazee streets are hooding the meters today and jamming the block with hot…
Sellout. Fake. Phony. Career killer. Catastrophe. Those are some of the words used recently to describe Liz Phair, the artist, and Liz Phair, the June-released album from Capitol Records. In the annals of the New York Times, Time magazine and Pitchfork Media, among many others, it’s been decided that the…
Rich and Brock begin their Saturday mission with a 7:30 a.m. wake and bake. “We need a little Colorado kind bud to get into the proper spirit of things,” Brock says, lowering his Bic over a packed bowl of green. “You need to have your mind focused when you embark…
FRI, 7/18 If your joke repertoire includes more references to penises and priests than puppies and Pollocks, head straight to the Buntport Theater for tonight’s premiere performance of Kinky Comedy, a show by the Sick, Twisted & Wrong Comedy Troupe that’s based on America’s favorite taboo subject: sex. “All of…
India.Arie hails from Denver — she lived here until she was thirteen, when her family relocated to Atlanta. But her roots have a more musically exotic flair: Arie’s parents hail from Memphis and Detroit, home of the R&B, blues and Motown sounds that percolate to the top of the young…
Megan Smith was really just a girl when she attended her first Ladyfest three years ago. At fifteen, the Thornton high school student persuaded her mother and her grandmother to hop on a plane bound for Chicago, where Ladyfest Midwest sprawled and squalled through the metropolis like one of the…
On Saturday afternoons in a dark bar on Colfax, a group of boys in baseball caps convenes to drink cheap beer, smoke cigarettes they’ve given up on giving up, and argue their particular philosophies of Music Thus Far. Hunched over Budweisers, they weigh the relative merits of Bowie, Bruce, Bob,…
The city of Denver wet its collective baggy pants at last week’s announcement that Def Jam founder Russell Simmons would bring his Hip-Hip Summit to Denver sometime this year. In town to launch a new credit card designed for low-income and debt-scarred individuals, Simmons made the spontaneous decree while sharing…
About a month ago, Marilyn Megenity walked into an auto shop in lower downtown and posed a somewhat unusual proposition. “I just bought a diesel-engine Mercedes, and I’m hoping to convert it to run on vegetable oil,” she told the mechanic. He paused for a moment, looked at Megenity, looked…
Last fall, Sean Kelly was ready to pump gas for a living; he felt like things had gotten that bad. The list of creditors to whom he and his band, the Samples, owed money had sprawled like Southern moss. And in November, three of his bandmates — longtime drummer Sam…
Note to the jam-band contingent: Leftover Salmon is not really one of you, despite appearances to the contrary. The band is sunny and string-heavy, yes, but its music comes out of the bluegrass tradition — a stop-on-a-dime style that’s driven by songs instead of elongated instrumental spaceouts. “The jam-band thing…
SUN, 5/18 Among the 1.4 million individuals who regard him as an essential part of their weekend, This American Life host Ira Glass is officially famous: Since graduating from the tape-cutting room at an NPR station in Washington, D.C., where he began as a bumbling intern at age nineteen, Glass…
My Morning Jacket, which appears Tuesday, May 20, at the Fox Theatre, with Detachment Kit, aims to restore dignity to the oft-maligned genre of classic rock, albeit with an entirely modern sensibility that’s both organic and studio-enhanced. Hooky and exultant, with occasionally countrified flourishes, the music suggests what might have…
Trace Reddell spends a fair amount of time figuring out ways to make his computer more like a person. A musician and educator who teaches both undergrads and graduate students in the Digital Media Studies program at the University of Denver, he uses computers as tools of art as well…
The City and County of Denver publicly unveiled its new Red Rocks Visitor Center on May 3, meaning the place is now officially a geological theme park. Replete with interactive exhibits and a hello-Cleveland feel, the sprawling center chronicles the sandstone space’s evolution from dinosaur habitat to world-class concert venue…
Slim Cessna hasn’t forgotten you, Denver. For starters, he misses sliding his lanky cowboy frame into a booth at Taco de México. After all, it’s hard to find authentic Mexican food in Cranston, Rhode Island, where he’s lived since late 1999. It’s also hard to replicate the feel of Colorado’s…
Evan Nelson answers his phone at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning. This act may not seem all that unusual — until you consider his occupation. For the past seven years, Nelson has presided as host and innkeeper of Skunk Motel, a weekly fete as notorious for its longevity as…
