How Blucifer’s First Rodeo became Denver’s most-anticipated festival

For more than a century, creators have argued that the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” — coined in 19th-century France by the bohemian Victor Coisin — is shallow. Albert Camus said art should be political and confrontational. George Sand said it should be for “the sake of truth…for the sake of the good and beautiful.”

Essentially, art should make an indelible impact on both the creator and the viewer. Arguments to the contrary are derived from a mindset of idleness and self-satisfaction, at least according to Frank Lloyd Wright, who derided the phrase as “a philosophy of the well-fed.”

And Denver’s local music scene has been hungry.

Independent venues bring in capital, but they’re by no means thriving. Local creatives have been frustrated by larger music promoters taking stakes in smaller-capacity venues and festivals, only to platform their own national artists. “People are telling each other what they want,” says Mike Young, “and none of us want what we’re getting fed.”

That’s why he and fellow local musician Gillian Pasley founded Blucifer’s First Rodeo, a new music festival named after the infamous blue mustang statue outside of Denver International Airport that will make its debut July 23-26. And for the dozens of musicians behind Blucifer, art is about creating community and filling a void of local opportunities.

“People rag on Colorado and Colorado music, about not having the industry here,” Young says. “And it’s true. It does suppress opportunities, and there’s no doubt about that. But it also provides the grounds for us to export a newer and cooler and more equitable vision of the music industry.”

That’s the goal of Blucifer’s First Rodeo. The monumental effort will showcase 259 local acts at 17 independent venues and businesses stretching from Broadway to South Broadway, as well as 17 Baker neighborhood house shows and five DIY venues. The festival is entirely artist-run, with people who already work multiple jobs on top of their creative projects donating time to make the four-day event happen.

And clearly there was an appetite for this type of festival: Weekend passes for Blucifer’s First Rodeo sold out within weeks of its announcement.

“We’re definitely not in it to just make money, or something,” Young says. “The idea of it being a collective art project — this idea that we’re all truly having a lot of fun doing it together, and the idea of the sanctity of that fun — is also part of the vision for it being sustainable. When we started talking about it for real, I was, like, ‘I don’t want to do it if it’s just a one-off thing; I want it to be sustainable.’ And its sustainability is powered by the fact that we’re all having fun doing it together.”

“This is how music should work”

For 25 years, there was a different festival along Broadway with similar beginnings: the Underground Music Showcase, which announced a surprising move to RiNo, where it will take place the same weekend as Blucifer. After UMS announced that last year’s iteration was likely to be its last — a move that was reversed in February — Young, Pasley and some other local musicians began mulling over how they could retain the spirit of the weekend, which had been treasured by the music scene and surrounding businesses.

“When we all heard that UMS was going away forever, we started texting each other,” Young says. “Last summer, Riley [Merino, of Horse Bitch] was like, ‘You should do a music festival.’

“So it’s all Riley Merino’s fault,” he jokes. “But we weren’t saying, ‘Oh, UMS whatever.’ We were saying, ‘Here we go again, something that frustrates us about the music industry.’ … We have fun on this street, we have fun throwing shows, and so what some of us were feeling at that time was that this is a void. We’re always complaining about this or that, so why don’t we take this void and, maybe, do something with it?”

Attendees and participating bands had complained for years that UMS was diverging from its original mission of platforming locals and was too focused on national pull. At the very least, it was apparent that the DIY spirit that ignited the festival had fallen by the wayside. Still, when Blucifer was first announced, there was considerable speculation in the local scene: Was this a spite-fest?

Neither Young nor Palsey say that was their intent. Rather, they wanted to deliver an event maintaining the gritty, creative culture that reflects the scene they love.

“Denver is cool, but Denver is not the whole fuckin’ world, right?” Young says. “I see any music festival in a city like Denver, and the problems with those music festivals, as symptomatic of larger problems within the music industry — a corporate consolidation of live music, the way we access recorded music, whether it’s through radio or streaming. Those patterns manifest themselves in these local examples. The local examples are symptoms of a sick industry.

“What we have been trying to do with Blucifer from the beginning, because we all come from this mentality in one way or another,” he continues, “is something that’s actually older than any music festival, that’s older than Denver. It’s a really basic human tradition of getting together with your neighbors to make culture. And what is culture? Culture is the creativity we do together that teaches us who we are. That’s it, and I think we all come to that instinctually. … There’s something deeper inside of all of us, I would say, that’s like, ‘This is how music should work.'”

From the ground up

Young moved to Denver from New Mexico in 2020 before forming the band Clementine Was Right, but he has been throwing DIY shows since he was sixteen. He later met Pasley, who moved to Denver from Massachusetts in 2022 and fronts the band Caspar Milquetoast, at a house show Young was throwing with his partner, Gion Davis, a social media coordinator for Blucifer.

“That was a show where I met a lot of people who are now some of my best friends,” Pasley recalls. “I feel like that kind of stuff can be so much more meaningful, making connections, when it’s organic like that.”

Friendships and connections make Denver’s scene singular. Both Young and Pasley had lived in different cities before making a home in Denver, and “compared to those places,” Pasley says, “there’s just such a fucking lack of clout-chasing here.”

That’s evident if you hang out enough at local venues, where odds are you’ll find many other members of the scene in the crowd to support the bands and artists onstage. That also has to do with the quality of the music itself: Talent recognizes talent, and in such a large, landlocked state, that support is necessary when you can only go so far on tours. So Blucifer isn’t necessarily about bringing the music industry to Colorado, but about platforming what already exists here, highlighting the strength of our local musicians and showing what happens when they all come together.

“The thing that people who are trying to do music seriously in Denver and Colorado complain about the most [is] it seems to be a place where people tend to just stop and don’t know how to break out of Colorado, and people get really anxious about it,” Young says. “But it’s also sort of a fertile model on how to truly do it differently and do it more equitably. Because there is this we’re-all-just-hanging-out mentality of skepticism about all the other models, it’s not a fully passive rejection.”

“I think your connections here matter so much,” Pasley adds, “so it helps us build something here that’s really strong. … The island nature of [Colorado] makes it challenging for bands. But it also really breeds creativity and community.”

The team for Blucifer involves both musicians and local music scene veterans with plenty of experience at Denver venues or hosting shows. The core crew, aside from Pasley, Young and Davis, includes LK Konkoli (booking team and media coordinator), Sam Seymour (booking team and artist relations), Lauren Borders (design and merch coordinator), Andrea Hoang (house show coordinator), Jamie Sieb (volunteer coordinator), Mitchell Gardner (backline coordinator) and Cole Helman (whose title shall be known as “Thunderhoof”).

The lineup for discovery

“The sanctity of fun, which is a term we apparently just coined, has been so empowering for me to see,” Pasley says with a laugh, “especially in all these side quests that we’re doing.”

The light-hearted mindset has included lineup drops and promotions, which began in March at Skylark Lounge, where “we carried our announcer in on a rocking horse,” she says. Then there was the next drop at the hi-dive, where a 40-foot scroll unveiled the next announcements.

More shows followed, including a preview at Wax Trax for Record Store Day that included sidewalk performances by Blucifer bands Ritmo Cascabel, Fruta Brutal and Team Nonexistent, as well as a schedule drop at HQ that featured an enormous game of Twister. And then there was the “fuck-ass horse,” as Pasley calls the wonky-drawn cardboard horse that was carried around a Broadway venue crawl.

The playful nature drew people in from the jump, with Blucifer quickly earning the stamp of approval from legendary local acts that signed on, such as Wheelchair Sports Camp, Bluebook, Colfax Speed Queen, 2MX2, Cheap Perfume, Dressy Bessy and more. Longtime local musician Julie Davis, who fronts Bluebook (winner of Best Band in the 2026 Best of Denver issue), was enamored by the festival’s spirit.

“We wanted to play Blucifer’s First Rodeo because we love the idea of a festival that grew out of a community collaboration,” she says. “It’s the kind of grassroots, homegrown event we love — a festival created by Denver musicians and artists showcasing the rich local music scene.”

Newer Denver artists were also excited to take part in such a monumental event. Eman El Saied, who performs as sunstoney and recently got a shout-out from SZA, was also impressed by Blucifer’s collaborative nature, calling it “the most authentic thing happening on South Broadway.”

“I applied to Blucifer because a festival started, built and supported by artists, musicians and creatives felt like an interesting power being taken back,” says El Saied, an occasional Westword contributor. “Blucifer hasn’t even happened yet, and the amount of activations, collaborations and volunteer work happening within the indie ecosystem to execute this fest is genuinely impressive. Even as I look at the lineup, it is 100% an accurate representation of the music scene happening in real time.”

The lineup showcases an array of genres from punk to folk to hip-hop, R&B, metal and more. There’s the indefinable group Horse Bitch, which consistently puts on the most raucous and enigmatic shows in town; The Whimsies, a newer group that crushed it at the hi-dive recently and is as whimsical as its name implies; DVNEHPPY, one of the city’s best current hip-hop artists; Fruta Brutal, a Latin-infused indie group you never want to miss; Frail Talk, which effortlessly pulls you in with a shoegaze sound; and Cobranoid, a powerful metal trio that may break your neck.

And that’s just a small handful.

The event will be spread across the four days, two of which have their own unique offerings. It’ll all kick off on Thursday, July 23, with shows held at DIY venues Seventh Circle, Ante Up, D3 Arts and Squirm Gallery. (These venues are pretty spread out, so it may be best to post up at one for the evening unless you spring for a rideshare, have a designated driver or stay sober.)

“The DIY stuff is really important to us,” Young says, “like, all these sober spaces in the ecosystem. Not to be all wonky, but it’s like prefigurative politics: What if the world as it is just didn’t exist, and the world that we want did, and we just do it as though it exists? That’s so fucking cool and empowering.”

The co-founders even say they’ve gotten word that Blucifer has inspired other scenes across the country to found their own festivals, with people spotted in Blucifer shirts around the country. So it’s easy to see that this festival is so much more than making art for its own sake.

The Denver music scene deserves to be celebrated, and local creatives have earned the spotlight. It’s been strenuous work, but it was done all for the love of the community — and to create something sustainable that pays artists well and equitably, and brings business to independent venues working to do the same.

“We said from the beginning that we have two big goals, and one of them is to get folks not just out to, but inside of live local music year-round,” Young says. “That first goal is bound up in this idea of [how] live music doesn’t just happen at the football stadium with Taylor Swift, right? Live music can happen and does happen in beautiful ways every single night, at hi-dive and Skylark and independently owned venues.”

The second goal, he says, is to uplift Denver’s creatives: “We want to empower artists. We want artists to have more power in the music ecosystem, and we want to see more respect and value for creative labor.”

It was a scary feat at first. Would their friends be on board? Would the community go for it? Those were the questions Pasley was asking herself. Watching the support pour in has been overwhelming, and underscores that this is just the type of event the Mile High City needs.

“It’s not like anyone is more qualified than anyone else to be at the center of this thing; somebody just had to do it,” she says. “And to see the community rally around it and make it their own in this way, and to come together? … When you are brave like this, we’ve started to see that we don’t have to be begging the industry for scraps. We can be that. We can do it ourselves. And that’s DIY on a pretty large scale.”