Mile High Makeout: Crazy for you

photo courtesy of Lori Wolfson"It just makes me crazy!" my friend said as we watched the local star-studded family affair that was Born in the Flood's second annual holiday extravaganza on Friday night. And she meant it in a good way. As members of Meese, Dust on the Breakers, Dormir,...

By Eryc Eyl

December 15, 2008

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photo courtesy of Lori Wolfson

"It just makes me crazy!" my friend said as we watched the local star-studded family affair that was Born in the Flood's second annual holiday extravaganza on Friday night. And she meant it in a good way. As members of Meese, Dust on the Breakers, Dormir, Astrophagus, Bad Weather California, d. biddle, Machine Gun Blues (R.I.P.), Bela Karoli, Monofog and many more joined our favorite sons on the Bluebird's beautiful stage, crazy was certainly a perfectly reasonable thing to feel.

Shows like last Friday's are exactly the kind of thing I'm always going on about when I talk about how collaborative and non-competitive our little city's febrile music scene is. When a rising band like Born in the Flood can share the stage with lesser-known acts - and even shady bookers and inimical music critics - it conveys an overwhelming feeling of camaraderie, community and abundance. It's not about Born in the Flood, or any of the other bands. It's as if the scene itself is paraphrasing Stephen Covey, saying, "There's enough musical success to go around, and then some, no matter how you define it."

And one only needed to look at the dopey grins on the faces in the Bluebird crowd to realize that that attitude of infinite winnings and wisdom infects the audience as well. Sure, it's a love-in, and consequently, perhaps it's lacking in the kind of self-critical analysis and hard-nosed weeding-out that turns a local hiccup into a national phenomenon, but who cares? National notoriety is not the endgame for the self-actualization of the scene. If we want to see a Denver music scene we can all be proud of, let's look at what it's doing for itself, not for the rest of the country or the world. Let's look for the purple banana until they put us in the truck.

Let's go crazy. --Eryc Eyl

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