Storied Local Music Venue Starts a Third Chapter, This Time In Cherry Creek

Frank Schultz spent the last year “getting my ass kicked,” he says.

But now he’s back, working that ass off on a couple of projects. Next week, Otre Vez, the Mexican cantina he opened at 610 16th Street back in 2017, then closed during the pandemic, will finally reopen. And then Schultz will bring back the Soiled Dove. No, not to the space at 1949 Market Street, where it originally opened almost thirty years ago, and not to the legendary Lowry location built from the ground up two decades ago that permanently shut its doors in 2024.

Instead, the Soiled Dove will land in Cherry Creek, at Chopper’s Sports Grill, Schultz’s popular bar at 80 South Madison Street, where he’s adding a stage and a state-of-the art sound system. Two months from now, he’ll launch a lineup of live music there most weekends, starting with the Railbenders on May 9, with an Opie Gone Bad reunion the following weekend. “We’ll start booking it slow, then getting it rolling. We’ll get back into some of the portfolio we had before,” Schultz says.

The Soiled Dove started out in LoDo in 1997 with dueling pianos, then became a live venue in 1999, when you could see Bruce Hornsby for $50. “Today it costs $50 to park there,” Schultz says. “It was a cool place in the wrong spot.”

Schultz turned that spot into the Tavern Downtown in 2006, when he built a classy new music venue at 7401 East First Avenue, in the up-and-coming Lowry area. It opened with the Lowry Tavern on top and the Soiled Dove Underground below, with crescent-shaped seating that held 300 people and a then-state-of-the-art sound system. “It’s been my baby since the ’90s,” Schultz told Westword when the venue debuted almost twenty years ago. “We built this from the ground up, and I made it exactly how I wanted it to be. One of the biggest complaints I heard about the downtown location was the lack of parking, and now we have that problem solved.”

But other problems emerged in the partnership between Schultz and his mother, and the Tavern Hospitality Group started closing what had grown to eight locations and selling off property. The Soiled Dove Underground closed in May 2024; the Lowry property was picked up in May by a local doctor who plans to open a music school, venue and restaurant there. THG recently sold the former Tavern Littleton for $2.4 million; the Uptown Tavern was foreclosed on by John Elway, after it defaulted on his $5.4 million loan. Other properties remain for sale, including a shuttered Tavern in the Denver Tech Center and more LoDo properties.

But Schultz still has Chopper’s. The bar got its start as Rick’s Cafe back in the late ’70s, when it was one of the city’s first fern bars and showed off its solar-powered dishwasher to then-President Jimmy Carter. It then turned into Chopper’s Sports Grill, named after beloved Nuggets trainer Bob “Chopper” Travaglini. THG took over management early in 2015, then bought the property outright in May 2015 for just over $4 million. Schultz has run it ever since.

And now he’s making some major modifications so that it will be ready to host live music. “The same guy who did the sound in the beginning, he was at the warehouse the last three weeks, rebuilding everything we had at the Soiled Dove, getting it prepared for the install at Choppers,” he says. “A lot of the same pieces and some new stuff.”

He’s working with an acoustic designer — “the room’s different, it’s going to sound different,” he notes — and soundproofing the building. He’s even bringing over the city sound engineer early to make sure neighbors have no reason to complain.

But what’s to complain about? The musical lineup will be an “expanded version of the Soiled Dove, with what’s hot today as well as tribute bands,” Schultz says. And to make sure “the sports piece is still there,” he’s not planning on having opening acts so that people can still drink and dine before the music starts, then clear out before the music starts. When there are big games, he’ll just juggle the schedule.

“We’ll only book when there’s something worthy to put in there,” Schultz promises. But with the new Soiled Dove he’s hoping to give those bands a worthy place to play.