Dexter’s first concert at Red Rocks headlined Tears for Fears touring behind songs like Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Shout. Le bon fils must have been around eight years and we were close maybe the twelfth row and right before his favorite group comes on the stage the drinkin’ druggin’ fool behind us upchucks and gets escorted away and security cleans up: a fine start to the Red Rocks grand tour of flaming concerts. He’s attended a score since including the Warped tour in ’96 when the sweet girl in front of us lamented Don’t Disrespect Pennywise after all the audience punks threw beer cups on stage. But this is supposed to be about my experiences at Red Rocks, and they weren’t all concerts.
Growing up bikes were our kick, bikes for making money delivering papers, bikes for riding the back roads along canals and streams and rivers where maintenance vehicles accessed head gates and blowing through suburban hoods that wound around too much for our destination seeking summer races, bikes that took us up to Red Rocks where we climbed the cliffs and explored the caves of the Morrison foundation along Dinosaur Ridge. The amphitheater built in the 1930s was wide open, and we freely spelunked the shallow caves. Never heard about any music in house except maybe the symphony or sunrise services on Easter which I never attended in my youth since I was Catholic and Easter was the ultimate altar boy privilege to serve at midnight Mass for the Resurrection, Body and Blood of Christ. My mom brought me to a piano recital of a blind girl in her house, one of my mom’s patients as she was a receptionist for the brotherly trio of Italian doctors in town and had played harp when she was young and once Helen Keller touched her strings to sense the vibration and that was as close as I got to classical music since my mother was widowed by her first husband and abandoned by my father raising three teenage daughters and me the love child on her own so the blind piano player made a memory but didn’t incline me to music outside appreciation.
Everybody cites the fact that Red Rocks was the only venue the Beatles didn’t sell out in 1964 because there was no public transportation to the amphitheater, but I can tell you that the $6 ticket price was beyond my means and I may have been at Tahosa Scout camp although I remember singing A Hard Day’s Night that summer with other scouts when we were decorating our tent sites with rock borders like good North Denver Italians but more likely we preferred the Beach Boys to the Beatles and it was to see them years later that my boy took me to Mile High Stadium on Father’s Day. He was so disappointed that they weren’t BOYS.
Finally got to Red Rocks for shows my junior year of high school, Peter Paul and Mary, Dionne Warwick, Jimi Hendrix with Vanilla Fudge, and then Aretha, a no show. and since I had brought the tall blonde to Reverend Gary Davis at the Folklore Centre she was cool going to the Rocks, but there was a riot that erupted after Franklin came on stage and said ‘The Man Didn’t Pay Me My Money’ and walked off, we just sat under the fusillade of bottles and fires in the brush so I remember the chaos more than any cancelled concert. Like Pennywise, Aretha deserved respect.
For my first concert of Peter Paul and Mary who were the generational swing between Folk Music and the Rat Pack that my older sisters liked and Bob Dylan who I cheekily testified in company that PP&M MADE BOB with their cover of Blowing in the Wind, I brought a huge black balloon and blew it up to toss around the crowd—we thought ourselves so cool but I probably got the idea of a balloon representing our freestyle community from The Red Balloon which I had seen a few times as a kid. With my best friend who tried a girl at Lutheran High but eventually came out I saw Dionne Warwick in white chiffon singing all those Bacharach David tunes. Saw Erasure in 1990 with my BFF a band he loved and I learned to hear.
Red Rocks was the second time I saw Hendrix and it was not much better than the first where he blew the breakers at Regis College gym. This time the wind was blowing from the south and took his sound out to those caves where I caverned as a kid. Vanilla Fudge with their organ playing You Keep Me Hanging On clotheslined Jimi for their set. When I finally afford myself a little stereo, KLH speakers, and amp turntable built together after my freshman year of college, I played Hendrix for my mom in her court apartment on South Sherman to let her hear the separation of sound called stereo. She thought I was as nuts as when I became a gardener after graduating from college.
The best concert ever at Red Rocks was Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band on an August night full moon in row 6 with a band of 20 friends just juicing it. We may have roped a dope or two but we were ’30 Somethings’ when that TV show was popular, professionals, entrepreneurs, laborers enjoying the next big thing in rock n roll and my future wife and I orchestrated the event. They played I Fought the Law in rehearsal we heard waiting in line early and again as an encore. I had wanted all my friends to see Bruce after I saw a show in Chi-town, but a few held onto their Procol Harum and Kerouac tastes, only going for the freneticism of James Blood Ulmer or Ornette Coleman — not Red Rocks fans were they.
We saw the Clash at Red Rocks but it was too big a place for punk unless you filled it with two stages and a lot going on like the Warped Tour. I was bringing a bunch of my son’s friends to the concert and we did this over many years and the guard at the gate to a car filled with teenagers and two blissed out gentlemen asks us if we have tickets and we’re in a line where we already showed some jamook our tickets, and this guy answers his own question “Naturally” and that became our anthem for many years when asked a stupid question — Naturally.
David Byrne brought through his Rei Memo tour in the nineties, and hardly a soul there, so we moved halfway up the arena because it was too loud. Guess we were getting old lost it at a Spiritualized concert at the Boulder Theater. Paul from Twist and Shout loved it, so we had crossed that line of hearing. Don’t have the aids yet, just want to do implants. But David Byrne in 2018 was grand, probably his first iteration of a marching band, everyone playing their instruments in real time, choreographed, a great concert that he’s been repeating on Broadway and Off.
Missed the Sex Pistols in ’96 on their revamped tour without Sid because le bon fils on his 16th birthday got arrested for picking up illegal pills for his boss at the skate shop where he worked. Another memorable missed concert. The White Stripes in 2005 ranks up there as one of the best ever concerts at Red Rocks but everyone has their favs like Willie in 2006 and Bob Dylan doing his version of Willie in 2007. Rufus Wainwright played with Pink Martini and the Colorado Symphony in 2013 and a dove flew over his piano while he sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah hitting that secret chord. For the 21st century, Queens of the Stone Age and Gogol Bordello singing their Feel Good Hits of the Summer in 2013 was a total blast with family and friends up front tapping their street shoes to two of the top bands of the year.
Last concert I went to at Red Rocks was in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic with 175 people in attendance at a venue that seats under the flagstones 9000 people for a quarter of the symphony playing an acoustic concert. COVID rules made the world sit up for music how it can be played in the world’s best amphitheater. Everyone knows it’s true, but the menagerie have discovered it, and so this musical play during the plague was a true treat, one for the ages.