My first Red Rocks show was also my loudest. It was the summer after I graduated from high school in 1991.
Alice in Chains, Megadeth, and Anthrax opened up for Slayer. Ten rows back, the noise was unbelievable. Slayer was so loud I literally could not hear anything at the 7-11 in Castle Rock after the show. My pummeled eardrums healed in a few days, maybe a week.
I've tried to see a show a summer there for the 23 years since. It's typically the first place I take out-of-towners when they come to visit me in Denver. I love wandering the seats and the stage, imagining all of the seminal rock and roll moments that echoed here in years past, and checking out the exhibits in the visitor center up top.
On a whim, I went to Red Rocks to see Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails a few weeks back. Hearing Kim Thayil rip through a ferocious "Jesus Christ Pose” ranks pretty high on my lifetime list of concert experiences.
Another Red Rocks highlights for me was a Wilco show where the city and suburbs below were alive with Fourth of July fireworks as huge thunderheads painted the horizon with lightning out on the plains.
I've seen DeVotchka play with the Colorado Symphony, Tenacious D cover U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday," and the Flaming Lips perform with a bunch of alien-masked Santa gals dancing onstage.
And some lowlights: I peed in a vodka bottle amid a mosh during Anthrax, I spilled a massive Coke on the woman in front of me at Reggae on the Rocks, and then there was that unfortunate incident in a port-a-potty before the Ween-Flaming lips show.
Alice in Chains got booed off the stage -- Slayer fans are a tough bunch. So did Dread Zeppelin -- Jimmy Cliff fans do not like their reggae mixed with goofballs, Elvis, and Zep.
After the sun went down during Nine Inch Nails' set, I got to thinking about how music offers a portal from the mundane. The city lights twinkled below. I could see downtown Denver, the Rocky Mountain foothills, ant-sized cars in the city, a world away. I could almost make out my neighborhood. My day-to-day problems seemed quite small as the music played.
Music is a religion. I've loved music since I was a kid snapping up every novelty rap cassette I could find, then got into metal in high school, and my horizons broadened in college, and they continue to broaden. I've been in punk bands and experimental electronic bands since the 1990s, I wrote about music for Westword from 2000 to 2006, and today I am half of a hard listening duo sometimes known as Weird Al Qaida.
There are the rock gods and the musical prophets, true and false, and their messages spanning the whole of human experience. There are the devotees, the fundamentalists, with tattoos on their arms and lyrics in their minds, those who seemingly never miss a show, and a Red Rocks show is the most unmissable show of all.
Owned by the city of Denver, the place has been a music venue since 1906, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the stage and tiered seating in the 1930s, but things didn't really get rolling until the 1960s. There was a bit of an auspicious start -- The Beatles famously didn't sell the 9,450-seat venue out, the only non-sellout of their first U.S. tour, and a riot at a Jethro Tull show in 1971 led to a five-year ban on rock concerts -- but by the end of the 1970s, Red Rocks had won the music world over.
It subsequently won the Pollstar award for Small Outdoor Venue so many times they named the award after it. The holy trinity of red rocks -- Creation Rock, Ship Rock, and Stage Rock -- form a natural amphitheatre with some of the most renowned acoustics on the planet. There is no other place I'd rather see a concert, not the Gorge, not Bear Creek, not the moons of Jupiter.
It's easy to dismiss things in your own backyard. I've met Memphians who have never toured Graceland and New Yorkers who have never been to the Empire State Building.
But neither Graceland nor the Empire State Building will ever be the site of a face-melting guitar solo, a moment of collective musical joy, or an epiphany that your ever-so-distant problems in the city below could use a dose of perspective.
Header image courtesy Visit Denver; concert image courtesy Steve Crecelius, Visit Denver
Eric Peterson / August 2014
Alice in Chains, Megadeth, and Anthrax opened up for Slayer. Ten rows back, the noise was unbelievable. Slayer was so loud I literally could not hear anything at the 7-11 in Castle Rock after the show. My pummeled eardrums healed in a few days, maybe a week.
I've tried to see a show a summer there for the 23 years since. It's typically the first place I take out-of-towners when they come to visit me in Denver. I love wandering the seats and the stage, imagining all of the seminal rock and roll moments that echoed here in years past, and checking out the exhibits in the visitor center up top.
On a whim, I went to Red Rocks to see Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails a few weeks back. Hearing Kim Thayil rip through a ferocious "Jesus Christ Pose” ranks pretty high on my lifetime list of concert experiences.
Another Red Rocks highlights for me was a Wilco show where the city and suburbs below were alive with Fourth of July fireworks as huge thunderheads painted the horizon with lightning out on the plains.
I've seen DeVotchka play with the Colorado Symphony, Tenacious D cover U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday," and the Flaming Lips perform with a bunch of alien-masked Santa gals dancing onstage.
And some lowlights: I peed in a vodka bottle amid a mosh during Anthrax, I spilled a massive Coke on the woman in front of me at Reggae on the Rocks, and then there was that unfortunate incident in a port-a-potty before the Ween-Flaming lips show.
Alice in Chains got booed off the stage -- Slayer fans are a tough bunch. So did Dread Zeppelin -- Jimmy Cliff fans do not like their reggae mixed with goofballs, Elvis, and Zep.
After the sun went down during Nine Inch Nails' set, I got to thinking about how music offers a portal from the mundane. The city lights twinkled below. I could see downtown Denver, the Rocky Mountain foothills, ant-sized cars in the city, a world away. I could almost make out my neighborhood. My day-to-day problems seemed quite small as the music played.
Music is a religion. I've loved music since I was a kid snapping up every novelty rap cassette I could find, then got into metal in high school, and my horizons broadened in college, and they continue to broaden. I've been in punk bands and experimental electronic bands since the 1990s, I wrote about music for Westword from 2000 to 2006, and today I am half of a hard listening duo sometimes known as Weird Al Qaida.
There are the rock gods and the musical prophets, true and false, and their messages spanning the whole of human experience. There are the devotees, the fundamentalists, with tattoos on their arms and lyrics in their minds, those who seemingly never miss a show, and a Red Rocks show is the most unmissable show of all.
Owned by the city of Denver, the place has been a music venue since 1906, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the stage and tiered seating in the 1930s, but things didn't really get rolling until the 1960s. There was a bit of an auspicious start -- The Beatles famously didn't sell the 9,450-seat venue out, the only non-sellout of their first U.S. tour, and a riot at a Jethro Tull show in 1971 led to a five-year ban on rock concerts -- but by the end of the 1970s, Red Rocks had won the music world over.
It subsequently won the Pollstar award for Small Outdoor Venue so many times they named the award after it. The holy trinity of red rocks -- Creation Rock, Ship Rock, and Stage Rock -- form a natural amphitheatre with some of the most renowned acoustics on the planet. There is no other place I'd rather see a concert, not the Gorge, not Bear Creek, not the moons of Jupiter.
It's easy to dismiss things in your own backyard. I've met Memphians who have never toured Graceland and New Yorkers who have never been to the Empire State Building.
But neither Graceland nor the Empire State Building will ever be the site of a face-melting guitar solo, a moment of collective musical joy, or an epiphany that your ever-so-distant problems in the city below could use a dose of perspective.
Header image courtesy Visit Denver; concert image courtesy Steve Crecelius, Visit Denver
Eric Peterson / August 2014