About twenty minutes before Jack White took the stage at Red Rocks, a hard rain started falling and lightning flashed to the east. Fog machines on the stage were fired up and the wind was blowing the haze, tinted hues of blue from the stage lights, around. For a moment…
Nirvana songs played at the Gothic Theatre before the opener, Toronto-based July Talk. Singer Leah Fay kept nuzzling her head against her bandmates and yelling about pizza. “It’s hard to open for the Presidents of the United States of America” she said as she tried to coax fans to come…
As the old saying goes, “Any show that starts with a giant singalong to Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall pt. 2’ is going to be a good show.” Okay, that’s not actually a saying, but it probably should be after Portugal. The Man began its Larimer Lounge show…
In 2012, Thadeaous Mighell, Mitchell Pond and David Moke came up with the idea for an interactive arts festival after meeting at the now-defunct DIY space Unit E. Soon after, Moke — who organizes events for the Denver Theater District non-profit — helped get the ball rolling and Blacktop was…
Ark Life has accomplished a staggering amount in its first year and a half, playing over 150 shows across the country, including a headlining show at the Boulder Theater and an opening set for a sold-out Film on the Rocks at Red Rocks. The band will finally release its debut…
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Planet Bluegrass is nothing if not durable. That durability became a widely-disseminated story as the ranch and music festival operation in Lyons rebuilt when a historic flood utterly wrecked it last September But this weekend’s Rocky Mountain Folks Festival proved another kind of resilience, one that relates not to backhoes…
Spread across two venues two blocks apart, four stages between them, Denver Psych Fest, in its second year, proved a memorable experience. The walk between the Larimer Lounge and the Savoy Events Center — as well as the Big Wonderful Sustainability Park between them — was easy to navigate, and…
This week’s crop of shows includes a busy lineup at the big venues, including guitar heaven at Fiddler’s Green with ZZ Top and Jeff Beck. Elsewhere, the Coathangers return to Denver after a short time away, Styrofoam Sanchez plays Rhinoceropolis and, yes, Huey Lewis and the News are in Colorado…
People throw all kinds of things at Deer Tick in order to express their love of the gritty rock-and-roll band from Providence, Rhode Island. At the quintet’s sold-out show at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, they threw half-full beers, shoes, even themselves. Even before the group, led by John McCauley,…
Deep in City Park on Saturday, past the father and son playing catch and the picnicking family, in a fenced off area, was a sea of “Keep Calm and Chive On” shirts and neon green. It was the first Chive Fest, and after several hours of music and revelry, a…
You might have thought that Beck’s Red Rocks set would be a slowpoke, folksy affair akin to his latest studio album, Morning Phase. Nope. The night was a twenty-plus year retrospective, covering everything from 1994 mega-hit “Loser” to his recent foray into Nick Drake territory…
Genre-defying five-piece dance and jam band Lotus will be playing its annual Red Rocks show on September 19. The set was originally targeted to support of the band’s most recent album Gilded Age, but after the group debuted a successful new Talking Heads tribute set, featuring Gabriel Otto of Denver’s…
Somewhere on West Colfax in Lakewood is a strip mall, virtually indistinguishable from all the others on any given stretch of the meandering 26-mile boulevard. The only thing that differentiates this particular strip mall — for music fans, anyhow — is that it is now the home of Chain Reaction…
Rodrigo y Gabriela will headline Red Rocks on Sunday, but it’s the undercard we’re most excited for: Namely, Nathaniel Rateliff, who hasn’t played his own stuff around here in a while. We’d also like to make sure you’re aware of Vail Rocks, which supports the exceedingly worthy Love Hope Strength…
Ed. Open Music Sessions is an ongoing collaboration between Open Media Foundation, Greater Than Collective and Westword to create videos based on regular live tapings of exceptional bands from Colorado and beyond. In our debut Open Music Session, blues-rock band Dragondeer played a sinewy set in the Denver Open Media…
Baseball fans will wear their favorite player’s name across their back, as adults, before and after Halloween. They will fill their bookshelves with histories and biographies and fantasy guides the size of the yellow pages, and they will keep them long after the actual yellow pages have been recycled or…
All told, the entire incident was more embarrassing than scary. In 2006, Rick Roberts, songwriter and singer of the country-rock-blues sensation Firefall and the Flying Burrito Brothers, stumbled on a rug in his home, sending him head-first into a kitchen island…
Chive Fest will bring two stages and eight bands to City Park this weekend. It’s one of the first conventional music festivals to use the space, although other concert promoters have tried and failed in the past. In this week’s music feature, now posted on the Backbeat blog, Gina Tron…
Summers are made for big name band package tours, bills sold to audiences as pairings meant to fill outdoor venues by combining fan base forces. These tours are also usually made up of bands consisting of old rock dudes. (For examples, see the 2014 summer tour package circuit: Rod Stewart/Santana,…
It’s a well-known fact that in order to be a true Coloradan, a yearly prescription of outdoor adventure must be filled. This weekend, I went to Buena Vista to do just that: kayaking, rafting, rock climbing, mountain biking, etc. But when I loaded the car and set off on the…
The largest and brightest moon of the year shone down on Earth this weekend. The phenomenon, called the Super Moon, occurs when the moon is full on the same day as its perigee — the point when its orbit is the closest to the our planet, resulting in a moon…
