The night before Minutemen played in Denver for the first time in 1984, at the now-defunct Rainbow Music Hall with Black Flag, the punk progenitors made up of singer and guitarist D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley endured what Watt called a “seventeen-hour hell ride” right after…
Shabazz Palaces is the adventurous hip-hop outlet of former Digable Planets MC Ishmael Butler and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Mariare. Based in Seattle, the group is signed to the historically rock-centric Sub Pop label. We talked to Butler before Shabazz Palaces’ show tonight at the Fox Theatre about consumerism, the innate power…
Riot Fest is bringing some loud bands along with the spirit (and hay) of May Farms to Sports Authority Field parking lot this weekend. It also comes with a carnival complete with games and rides. This could have been our only chance to ever ride a Ferris Wheel while a…
Failure is slated to perform at Riot Fest this Friday, September 19th. Though the band enjoyed a great deal of popularity during its first run before splitting in 1997, its influence has loomed large on a good deal of guitar rock that has come along since. If someone writes a…
While a lot of the focus during Riot Fest this weekend will be on the headliners playing the May Farms stage and the Byers General Store, the festival includes up and coming bands, local and otherwise, worthy of attention. These are generally not the bands riding in large tour buses…
The winners of the 2014 Unsigned Only Music Competition have been announced, and the Fort Collins band You, Me & Apollo won in the Americana category for its song “I Don’t Want to Be Loved.” The competition received more than eight thousand entries with a finalist group presented to a…
Now in its fifth and final year, Albuquerque’s Gatas y Vatas experimental music festival is preparing for a grand finale this weekend. Founding performer and festival organizer Marisa Demarco says that it was her experience as a performer and audience member at Denver’s Titwrench music festival inspired her to create…
Les Claypool and Larry Lalonde will be signing copies of Primus: Over the Electric Grapevine, an oral history of the band, at Tattered Cover on Thursday, September 18, at 7 p.m.. Primus is also slated to perform at Riot Fest on Friday, September 19. Formed in 1984 in the San…
Denver rapper Demario “Lil Bad” Gentry has been busy recently, releasing The Colfax District, Bad News and Shark Syndrome 2.0. He’s also played shows all over the country, from Los Angeles to Miami, and he hasn’t always found support for his home town during his travels. “This is my home,…
Paul Banker, aka electronic-music producer Real Cosby, is a homeowner. Not because his occasional live show and handful of EPs have made him any real money, but because he has a full-time job and a family and all the responsibilities associated with those things. While that same litany has been…
Allout Helter began in 2008 as a melodic hardcore band with some metal chops. In 2010, the group put an ad on Craigslist for a lead vocalist and attracted the attention of Ross Hostage. Hostage had spent the previous decade playing in Action Friend and Suburban Hostage. He brought a…
You might hear Rubedo anywhere. In its four and a half years of existence, the Denver trio has played at bars in San Diego and rallies in Civic Center Park. It has played a dance music festival in the shadow of an NFL stadium and an art festival on the…
For Joseph Pope III, who’s played in a number of local acts like Born in the Flood, the Wheel, Fairchildren and is now the front man of Miss America by Wheary, songwriting is like falling in love. “It’s like you’re in this honeymoon period, and you’re just so infatuated and…
Wolf Eyes is among the most well-known bands to have come out of the world of noise music. But the act was never strictly noise; its music, even early on, included experiments in texture and atmosphere that could terrify and inspire. What started as Nate Young’s solo project now also…
When it comes to playing the music industry game, sometimes it is easiest to take the industry out of the picture altogether and do it yourself. This is the ethos behind GravesEnd Records, a self-proclaimed old-school punk label started in 2009 by a musician and Colorado transplant who goes by…
If there is a strange request that a concert promoter can make of a musician, it’s a safe bet that Scott McCaughey has heard it. He co-founded the Young Fresh Fellows in 1983 and played with R.E.M. for close to twenty years. Lately, he’s been on tour with the Baseball…
After thirteen years together, the Fruit Bats played their final shows last November. At the time, frontman Eric D. Johnson didn’t have any immediate plans to write another album. He figured he’d keep composing film scores — something he’s done for the past three years — and continue to produce…
1. They Come From Everywhere Phish’s following will literally follow the band anywhere. Many in attendance over the weekend at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park flew in from all over the country. Some fans drove from Massachusetts and Vermont, in some cases without tickets, hoping to score some in the parking…
It didn’t take long to run into weed at the Phish show. Within thirty minutes of going into Dick’s Sporting Goods Park on Saturday, we saw concert-goers generously sharing hits on their pipes and puffs on their joints and vape pens. THC wax and shatter were also being passed around…
Editor’s note: A writer sent us this essay on her experience at one of this weekend’s Phish shows at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park — the first with recovering-addict support she’s seen since she stopped drinking six months ago. We’re publishing it anonymously to protect her privacy. When I tell people…
Phish returns to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park this weekend for its 84th, 85th and 86th shows in Colorado. I know that thanks to the meticulous documentation available at phish.net. Also thanks to phish.net, I can tell you when the band first played in Colorado (July 28, 1988 at the Roma…
“It was really cool, like completing a circle,” says Adam Revell of the first time he realized he already knew Stephen Thurston, a fellow keyboardist he’d begun to collaborate with. Years earlier, Thurston had taken piano lessons from Revell, formerly of the funk/jam colossus The Motet. Revell didn’t remember Thurston…
