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…
This week brings the surprising and powerful pop-punk revival to Englewood with a double-bill featuring Fall Out Boy and Paramore (whose leader recently skipped two dates on doctor’s orders). Elsewhere, guitar hero Eric Johnson stops through, Sheryl Crow finishes off the Chatfield portion of the Botanic Gardens concert series and…
Although Derek Vincent Smith, also known as Pretty Lights has played Red Rocks five times before, this weekend’s show was different. The unique set up, featuring not only live band but also thirteen members of the Colorado Symphony, was the first time Smith has included a full string section in…
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I’d bet money that Ryan Adams was on Ritalin as a kid. And I say this not only because he has that kind of manic genius about him that so many hyper kids have, but because for the entirety of last night’s show, he was grabbing spare attention any way…
This weekend’s best shows include rapper Redman releasing a new album poolside in RiNo, Xiu Xiu bringing its newest noise to Larimer Lounge and “Jessie’s Girl” to Fiddler’s Green. There are plenty of other good ones in the next couple days — the rest of our picks for the weekend…
When a music-geek favorite such as Jolie Holland comes to town, the Larimer Lounge on a summer Thursday is pure Denver: tattooed, homegrown punks hanging at the bar and (mostly) transplants — hippies, middle-aged alcoholics, young white-collar music lovers and everything in between — milling around on the back porch…
