Two Seminal Bright Eyes Albums Are Officially of Legal Drinking Age, and the Band Celebrated With a Concert at Red Rocks

When Bright Eyes kicked into “Hit the Switch” off the band’s 2005 album Digital Ash in a Digital Urn — a paean to hard drinking (“‘Cause there’s a switch that gets hit/And it all stops making sense/And in the middle of drinks/Maybe the fifth or the sixth/I’m completely alone at a table of friends/I feel nothing for them/I feel nothing, nothing…”) — the night got a bit meta.

Not that frontman Conor Oberst ever required legality for his own thirst — some 30-ish years back in a first encounter, this reporter bought the then-underage indie phenom a bottle of Old Grand-Dad bourbon before a solo show in a Phoenix art gallery. But the band’s members — the core is Oberst, multi-instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott — seemed beyond sober, with the appropriate intensity for a Red Rocks debut as they played through the folky I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash.

Bright Eyes was starting a trio of 21st birthday shows for its two albums released on the same day in 2005; the May 12 Red Rocks show was the first of the albums-are-old-enough-to-drink celebrations. The band will offer full performances of both records at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on May 23, and then at Forest Hills Stadium in New York on June 6.

The Red Rocks show had been scheduled for May 6, but it was canceled in advance of last week’s snowstorm. It could have been a sparse crowd six days later, given that many ticket buyers didn’t live in the area, but Red Rocks was still mostly full of reverential fans.

Appropriately, the band launched with “At the Bottom of Everything,” whose spoken intro by Oberst describes a man telling a woman “happy birthday, darling” as the airplane they’re on is crashing towards the ocean. Mimicking the music video, a parade of what looked like teenagers carried cardboard props of a jet door across the stage.

After an in-between set by Ben Kweller, and once the sun was down, Bright Eyes came back onstage to play through Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, the electronic-ish darker companion to I’m Wide Awake. As the evening wore on, the band’s politics were on display quite literally, with banners behind the musicians calling out the Trump family and Benjamin Netanyahu in stark lettering.

For the encore, the band played “America the Beautiful” before launching into fan favorites “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” and “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and to Be Loved).” For Bright Eyes, it was a monumental first show at a holy music venue; for the fans, it was a tent revival where everyone raised their voices in praise.

See more photos below.