Jimmy Ibbotson joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1969. He left the group in 1976, and his solo career got off to an admittedly slow start. “I had no act,” he explained. “I’d get to the place where it was time for an instrumental solo, where I’d turn around and say ‘Take it,’ and no one took it. After about three months, Jimmy Ratts showed up in the Keystone ski area and announced that I was now in a duo with him. He had a big van and a PA system and would print up posters, and that sounded irresistible to me. We toured the Colorado ski areas for about three years, making a circuit between Breckenridge, Telluride and Aspen. Then Jim Salestrom showed up and started playing with us.”

The three formed Wild Jimbos.

Ibbotson returned to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1983 and remained a full-time member, playing a pivotal role in the group’s emergence as a country act. Jim Ratts took his Denver-based band, Runaway Express, all around the US and into Scandinavia, opening for such acts as Steve Martin, the Earl Scruggs Review and Pure Prairie League. Starting in 1984, Runaway Express began a 25-year run of Saturday shows at Evergreen’s Little Bear plus a 7-year run of Saturday morning performances at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Salli Severing would become Ratts’ wife and singing partner. Runaway Express won Westword magazine’s readers poll for Best Dance Band and Best Country Band. Jim Salestrom toured the world, working over 250 dates a year as lead guitarist and harmony singer in Dolly Parton’s band.

Nevertheless, Wild Jimbos continued to convene, with Salestrom on lead guitar, Ratts on bass and Ibbotson playing just “the feet” of a drum kit—the bass drum and high-hat cymbal—while holding a guitar in his lap. “The thing that’s fun about Wild Jimbos onstage is that you can tell they know a few songs, but the rest of the time it’s like a jam session where people who have seen us and probably have better memories than we do suggest songs that, in their confusion, they thought the band had done.”

For their 1991 self-titled debut album, Wild Jimbos enlisted the help of Sam (Sambo) Bush, founding member of the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival. They had a hit video of the single “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” in heavy rotation on CMT and TNN cable TV; Ralph Emory of the Nashville Now TV show played along with their lighthearted antics. Bush was taken by Ratts’ song “Howlin’ at the Moon,” which he made the title track of his 1998 bluegrass album. It went to #3 on the National Bluegrass Chart and held there for 3 months; Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine ranked it the #79 bluegrass song of the decade.

Wild Jimbos reunited in 1994 for the acoustic-based Americana album Wild Jimbos Two. They also made a cameo on Runaway Express’ Buddy Holly tribute album, 2000’s Yeah, Buddy! Ibbotson again departed the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 2009. Salestrom passed away in 2023. Runaway Express continues to play occasional shows while making new music in Ratts’ home studio. Runaway Express’ long history of recording includes a series of early ‘80s cassette releases, several country rock albums of Buddy Holly covers and presentations of multi-layered audio collages (2020’s Celebrate Woodstock).

GALLERY: Classic Rock of the 1970s

Photography by Jon Newmark

Jon Newmark grew up Applewood, Colorado, and began shooting Denver-area rock concerts in early 1974. Thanks to a job at the ticket outlet Budget Tapes & Records, he photographed the classic rock bands of the day from the first few rows until security crackdowns required a photo pass to get a camera through the door. Newmark shifted his focus to landscape photography and has resided in Washington State since 1991. He has released a sampler of his favorite images exclusively for Colorado Music Experience.

A founding member of the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir passed away on January 10, 2026, at age 78.

Within a few years of its founding in 1965, the Grateful Dead became a force within the counterculture, its style shaping rock music. The San Francisco band’s storied history in Colorado began at Denver’s Family Dog and a “Human Be-In” in City Park in 1967, the Summer of Love. “There was a mini-Haight Ashbury in most every place we went, but Colorado had a pretty thriving one,” singer, songwriter and guitarist Weir recalled. “A lot of crazies, a lot of bands.”

In 1969, a gig took place at Reed Ranch, a barn outside of Colorado Springs. Weir had a special connection to the city—he attended Fountain Valley School as a sophomore in high school, but he was asked to leave after a year, he said, for being “too rambunctious.” He was a member of the football team and met John Barlow—“He was the waterboy.” The two became lifelong friends and songwriting collaborators.

The members would go on to play the state’s legendary venues, with generations of Deadheads gathering to connect with them. In 1972, the Grateful Dead performed before approximately 32,000 fans at Folsom Field in Boulder, the band’s first stadium show in Colorado, marked by torrential rains and, at one point, hundreds of lids of pot were tossed into the air from the crowd and from the stage. “That was a crazy gig. It rained rain and ounces of marijuana,” Weir laughed. “Some generous and well-to-do benefactor, probably in that business, made sure that everybody got all the weed they could handle. And it rained the kind of rain that you expect fish would swim by. And we almost burned down the place—at one point, there was St. Elmo’s fire on the piping that held the stage up. Everything was enormously electrically charged (Owsley Stanley, the band’s wizard electrician and stage manager, had his own ideas about electrical grounding). But we lived.”

With the group’s first-ever performances at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 1978, the Dead started becoming synonymous with the renowned outdoor venue. Weir and his bandmates considered Red Rocks “a sacred place” for their music, likening it to Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt. “I was awestruck by the place when I walked in,” he said. “You can use all the ‘power’ you can get up there, because you’re basically gasping for air if you’re singing, or playing a horn—you just don’t get a lot of air to work with up there.”

To celebrate the Grateful Dead’s 15^th anniversary, Deadheads made the pilgrimage to Boulder’s Folsom Field for two shows—and the median age couldn’t have been more than 20. “I relate to those kids more readily than people who have grown old and stodgy—something I hope I haven’t done,” Weir explained. “If our older fans have outgrown us, I would pity that, because we’ve tried to keep a fresh approach to our music and life in general. If they’ve outgrown us, I welcome the younger fans. But that’s hardly true. We’ve got lots of fans in their 40s, and I like to think our music maybe has less of an age barrier than other presentations.”

The Dead certainly had the reputation, as Weir put it, of “putting on a helluva live show.” The band members never went onstage knowing what they were going to play, and their vast repertoire guaranteed that you could go to a Dead concert on consecutive nights and not hear songs repeated. “We’re getting better that way in that we’re more consistent,” Weir admitted. “That’s why people keep coming. But as far as how we generate so many new fans, I still don’t know how that happens. It’s a mystery to me.”

In 1985, a three-night stand of sell-out shows at Red Rocks marked the 20^th anniversary of the Dead. While many of the uninitiated remained baffled by the band’s appeal, the Dead had sustained devotion among Deadheads still obsessed with the ineffable combination of music, ambience and other intangible factors that kept the live experience so compelling. Weir conceded what a long strange trip it had been—“We’re the exception to just about every rule in the entertainment business.”

In August 1992, Weir had just wrapped up his own tour when he called the Grateful Dead office and learned that leader Jerry Garcia was sick. It broke a long-standing tradition of nearly nonstop touring—the band canceled concerts and put other plans on hold to give Garcia time to recuperate. The lead guitarist rested at home, and the Dead resumed touring with two concerts at Denver’s McNichols Arena. No one had diffused the intense anxiety of Deadheads, so Weir patiently addressed the issue. Garcia had suffered a physical breakdown brought on from heart and lung problems.

“We lost track of what we were up to,” Weir noted. “You get involved in what you’re doing—what’s important becomes what’s happening onstage or in the studio. And you don’t look around and check out the other conditions of your situation—you’re getting tired, gaining or losing weight. I was starting to get pretty thin myself. There’s more to it than that. You have to keep your mind and your body in shape.” Weir kept busy while the band was idle. He and his sister Wendy, an illustrator, completed work on Baru Bay Australia, the follow-up to Panther Dream, a beautiful book for children about the African rain forest—Baru Bay Australia focused on Australian reefs and Aboriginal culture. He fought the Montana Land Management bill, which would have given 5 million acres to the US Forest Service to do with as it pleased.

In 1995, the Grateful Dead saw three decades of uninterrupted touring end with the death of Garcia. Everyone speculated about the future of the legendary band’s surviving members and millions of Deadheads. But the legacy lived on in the Furthur Festival, a traveling road show in the tradition of the Dead’s caravans. The event was highlighted by the presence of co-headliner Ratdog, Weir’s new band. Weir said he didn’t grieve for Garcia as much as he communed with his spirit. “This is just fun, same old deal. That’s what we’re out here to do, and by God, that’s what we’re going to do—have some fun.” The broad avenue of blues, jazz and R&B, the American music Weir grew up with, was near and dear to Ratdog, a collaboration with bass virtuoso Rob Wasserman, Matthew Kelly (a member of Kingfish, a hippie C&W blues band that Weir led in the ’70s), Jay Lane and the legendary Johnny Johnson, Chuck Berry’s original pianist. “We heard that Johnny was available—he’s still out of St. Louis—so we gave him a ring to see if he was up for it,” Weir enthused. “He’s a monster; he plays blues and jazz with an authority you’re just not going to find elsewhere. We’re jamming on songs he did 40 years ago like ‘Promised Land.’”

Ratdog’s influences moved from blues and Grateful Dead tunes to improvisational jazz. 2000’s Evening Moods was Weir’s first non-Dead studio release since the early ’80s. “It took us a while to get around to writing, because we were in a state of flux—every time a new guy would come into the band, we’d spend all the time we had teaching him the old book,” Weir explained. “Once the personnel stabilized, we got to it straight away.”

In 2001, Weir organized a bill similarly themed to Furthur dubbed So Many Roads, featuring Ratdog. The tour hit Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Weir had hurt his left hand a week prior when he fell through a glass table; he received four stitches and had played shows since. Weir founded and played in several other bands during and after his career with the Grateful Dead, including Bobby & the Midnites and Furthur, which he co-led with former Dead bassist Phil Lesh.

In 2015, Weir, along with former Dead members Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, formed the band Dead & Company; the band performed multiple dates at Folsom Field, Red Rocks Amphitheatre and other Colorado venues. “People make a point of setting up vacations so they can come and hear us play in Colorado,” Weir said. “That adds to the event quality—it’s a big occasion for a lot of people. They’re in a glorious celebratory mood. That helps! We feel that vibe, and we work with that. And aside from that, Colorado has always been my second home. I love the place.”

Joe Ely, the highly regarded pioneer of the ’70s Texas progressive country sound, died December 15, 2025, at age 78.

Raised in Lubbock, Texas (just like Buddy Holly), Ely began playing in rock ’n’ roll bands at the age of 14. Looking to broaden his horizons, he hitchhiked and freight-hopped all over America, guitar slung across his back. “I made the mistake of picking up a bunch of books by Jack Kerouac and decided I was going to be a roving songwriter,” he said. Ely soon found himself back in Texas with a suitcase full of songs via a job with the Ringling Bros. circus as the custodian of two llamas and the world’s smallest horse, “a mean little bastard about knee-high—every day, I had fresh bites on my knees.”

Around 1972, he and follow Lubbock singer/songwriter/guitarists Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock formed the Flatlanders, managing to record one album’s worth of all-acoustic material in Nashville. Released in limited numbers—mostly on 8-track tapes—the band’s novel amalgam of country, folk, blues and rock styles quickly disappeared, shunned by the Nashville establishment.

Attaching to the live music scene in Austin, Ely released his self-titled debut album in 1977. He packed honky-tonks, juke joints and concert halls from coast to coast, while his music began evolving away from country to a more rock-oriented sound. Onstage, Ely became a manic firebrand with a contagious ear-to-ear grin, offering ferocious energy and borderland romanticism.

His status as an opening act provided him with a lot of variety. He appeared on the same bill with mainstream performers ranging from Linda Ronstadt to Merle Haggard to the Rolling Stones; he shared the stage with the Charlie Daniels Band at Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena in 1981. In England, the countrified Ely became an overnight cult phenomenon, palling around and touring with the members of the Clash during the band’s punk heyday. “They look at everything upside down over there,” he said. “They love music like rockabilly and Carl Perkins, and they just latched onto me as someone who was maintaining some sort of tradition.”

America was on the verge of discovering Ely in a big way. Souping up his songs for his fifth album, 1981’s Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, he expanded his rock and country fusion into a larger scope that reflected his hard-living attitude. “The last few years on the road came together on the record,” he said. “I think it’s reflected in the titles—‘I Keep Gettin’ Paid the Same,’ ‘Musta Notta Gotta Lotta’—it’s all reflective of a working man’s rocking attitude.”

Ely hoped the edge of his newer material and his outstanding band would translate his appeal to a more contemporary level. “Yeah, it’s funny looking out on the dance floor when I play sometimes,” he said at his Austin headquarters. “Either it’s hardcore country or some fella with his hair dyed green and yellow. It makes things interesting, that’s for sure. But I try not to make distinctions. If people like what they hear—critics or kids on the street, English punks or cowboys—then that’s all that matters. ’Cause that’s all I’m gonna be doing anyway—makin’ people jump.”

But Ely never received his commercial breakthrough, despite the series of excellent albums and drawing a sizable, loyal following. His genre-bending music was perceived as too rock to be country (that is, the grab-and-release dynamics of his songs) and vice versa (at various times his bands had included steel guitar and accordion), which bewildered record labels and radio programmers. Was he new-wave country? Punkabilly? Crazed Cowboy?

On Hi-Res, his 1984 release, Ely attempted to integrate synthesizers and drum machines into his sound. While the album had its bracing moments—“Cool Rockin’ Loretta” stood as one of his finest guitar raveups—it failed to attract a new audience and only confused his old fans. “It was a departure for me, but I needed a departure at the time I was writing it,” he said. “I had a few things happen. The drummer died, the band had kinda broken up, so I had to look into other things. I wrote that album as a screenplay first, to be an all-video album—I wrote visual things and then wrote music to it. But the video part never came out.”

By 1987, the Steve Earles and Fabulous Thunderbirds of the world were getting more exposure than Ely ever did with similar brands of roots-rock. But Ely wasn’t the type to be bitter—he stuck with what he did best. “That’s guitar, bass and drums, a pretty straight-ahead kind of country rock ’n’ roll,” he said after a late night in his home studio.

Ely kept working, albeit with a lower profile, “doing behind-the-scenes stuff.” He produced a debut album for Will & the Kill, a band led by Will Sexton, Austin’s latest guitar hero and younger brother of former darling Charlie Sexton. He also put two efforts for a new record label in the can and performed solo gigs on a coast-to-coast tour, including a date at Arnie’s Broadway in Denver. “When I was writing the last album, I just decided to go hit the road, me and my guitar. I hadn’t done that in quite a few years, and it used to be all I ever knew when I first started performing. It’s pretty scary after you’ve gotten used to a band, but I wanted to play songs for people without all the arrangements, the beat. It makes every verse and guitar riff stand out—there’s nothing to hide behind. Once I did it, I realized that was a part of me I’d been missing all along.”

With each passing year, Ely’s natural lyricism and ear for rock hooks helped push a new type of progressive country to the forefront of the Texas scene. He collaborated with Bruce Springsteen, Uncle Tupelo, the Chieftains and many others.

In 2002, almost 30 years after their lone album, the Flatlanders delighted Americana fans with a series of performances. It was a supergroup reunion—or was it? The band had never really broken up, because it scarcely was a band to begin with. Hooking up in their early twenties in Lubbock, roommates Ely, Hancock and Gilmore wrote and played music together for friends, going public only when they got desperate. “We played more porches than stages, but it was about all we did—we never made a penny, but we had a lot of fun,” Ely said.

At the time of its release, the Flatlanders album showed none of the lyrical artifice or lamentable overproduction of country music. The recordings featured dobro, fiddle, mandolin and even musical saw, but the guys never thought of themselves as a country band. “It’s the fact that we came of age in the ’60s, when every kind of music was crashing into the other,” Ely said. “We always thought if that Flatlanders record had been recorded or promoted in San Francisco or New York instead of Nashville, it would have found an audience.”

It took decades, but the recording—a harbinger of the alt-country movement—finally found its niche. As the three musicians’ individual status as critics’ darlings grew, so did the legend of the time when they were together. Reissued in 1990, the original Flatlanders recording became a cult classic, as the record label appropriately named the disc More a Legend Than a Band. The Texas troubadours wrote and recorded new material as a team, in Ely’s home studio, and released Now Again in 2002. An infectious air of merriment emanated from the songs and a lengthy tour. “We’re trying to keep it so it doesn’t turn into work,” Ely said prior to a concert at the Boulder Theater. “When this is over, we’ll go back and do things we normally do.”

Tireless journeying had earned Ely the nickname Lord of the Highway. “It’s what keeps me going,” he said years earlier. “If I was always aware of myself onstage playing to a crowd, I’d never, never go on. I’m fairly self-conscious as it is, and I’d just disappear. I think it’s mostly schizophrenia!”

Singer Jimmy Cliff, reggae music’s first international hitmaker, died November 24, 2025. He was 81.

In the ’80s, reggae music had an exotic influence on pop music, but in the opinion of Cliff, the style was too offbeat for the American mainstream. “The passing of Bob Marley left a gap, and while musical leadership has continued in the Third World, it hasn’t in the developed world, where reggae needs to be promoted,” the singer-songwriter said. “I can say this because I came in at the stage when the music was being formed—it didn’t even have a name yet.”

Back in 1962, Cliff quit school to pursue a musical career and had a No. 1 hit in Jamaica at age 14 with “Hurricane Hattie,” inspired by the storm which swept across the Caribbean. At the time, Jamaica was playing ska music, an early form of reggae with a strict, mechanical emphasis on the offbeat. Ska took off modestly in the US with Millie Small’s hit “My Boy Lollipop” in 1964

“Ska had a faster beat because it developed out of the people’s spirit—it was the beginning of Jamaica gaining independence from Britain,” Cliff explained. “When we realized what managing ourselves meant, the music slowed down to the more rhythmic ‘rock steady.’ And when we wondered where our independence would lead to, people started looking to the roots of our culture, to Africa and Marcus Garvey. Rastafarianism came in and the music became known as reggae. There are different stories about the origin of the word—the closest is that the music came out of the ghetto, a ragged environment. ‘Ragged’ became ‘reggae.’”

Reggae might have remained an isolated phenomenon, but Edward Seaga of the Jamaican parliament (later prime minister) was eager to promote the music. His efforts led to Cliff signing an international record contract and moving to Britain, where he found himself in a pioneering role as “the shepherd of reggae music.” In America, Cliff was best known for his lead role in the 1972 movie The Harder They Come. He portrayed Outlaw Ivan, a Jamaican musician coming into Kingston from the countryside, unable to find work and frustrated in his attempts to gain just compensation for his music. In the end, growing more and more alienated from the music scene, Ivan becomes an outlaw, a hero of the oppressed masses, and is finally gunned down by the police in the last seconds of the film. The Harder They Come remained a huge cult favorite, almost single handedly turning reggae music into hippie-chic. Cliff’s gorgeous rendition of the song “Many Rivers to Cross” converted Ivan the gangster dope-dealer into a sympathetic figure, and it made him a star in Europe, Africa and Latin America.

Jamaican working-class culture was virtually synonymous with Rastafarianism, the religion that revered the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. But Cliff didn’t sport the traditional reggae dreadlocks image—he wasn’t a Rastafarian, but a Muslim. He went into seclusion at the height of his mid-’70s fame, becoming a student of African awareness. It was left to such reggae-rasta performers as Bob Marley & the Wailers and Toots & the Maytals to make reggae-rasta popular with a broad American audience. Reggae gave a new rhythmic concept to rock music, as performers such as the Police, the Clash, Eric Clapton, the Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffett proved. Blondie (“The Tide Is High”) and Stevie Wonder (“Master Blaster”) recorded hit singles with a heavy reggae influence.

But reggae’s impact on pop music had been disproportionate to its own commercial success, according to Cliff. The Harder They Come was more than a dozen years old when he performed at the University of Colorado Events Center in 1985, and he was anxious to focus attention on his other musical achievements. “People still seem to expect me to be Ivan, the good-guy-turned-bad,” the effusive Cliff admitted. “But I truly feel like I’m just starting my career.”

Cliff enjoyed an explosion in popularity when the Cliff Hanger album, which featured a partnership with members of Kool & the Gang, won a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. Two other factors aided his visibility in the American market. He returned to the screen in Club Paradise, a film also starring Robin Williams, Peter O’Toole and Twiggy, and written and directed by Harold Ramis (Animal House, Ghostbusters, Meatballs, Caddyshack). He was approached for the project, he explained matter-of-factly, “because naturally I am the most known film actor in Jamaica. I play the initial owner of Club Paradise, a hotel club. The government of the day is corrupt and wants to take the club away from me. The finality of it is that the government troops and my troops clash, and it’s like a good-over-evil situation. I become the new prime minister!”

Cliff also received attention when his composition “Trapped” was recorded by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band for the We Are the World benefit album—the track became the most-programmed song on radio and a staple of Springsteen’s live shows during his world tour. “I had met Bruce before—he used to do ‘Trapped’ in his sets a long time before that Ethiopian situation. He’s for real. There’s one area in my career that I haven’t been able to overcome up to now. I have helped to create the music that is now known as reggae music, but at the same time, I’ve created other music forms that aren’t as popular.”

Over the years, such fusion efforts had gotten Cliff rapped as a musical and cultural sellout. He might have deflected some of the criticism if it became known that he was Muslim and his roots were in R&B as much as reggae. But ever since he put strings on his 1970 hit “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” he’d been castigated by certain camps. “They claimed I was watering down reggae, commercializing it. I couldn’t figure it out—they should be crediting me, rather than discrediting,” he lamented. “I am a ballad writer and singer, and I love that side of me as well. In Jamaica, they’re saying that I’m ‘the ambassador of reggae’ and those kind of things. I accept those titles that they give me, but I hope the day will come when they recognize the other side of my musical creativity.”

Cliff was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, one of two Jamaicans in the hall, the other being Bob Marley.

In the early ’90s, Todd Snider was a talent to watch. A droll storyteller and a moralist with an appealing sense of humor, he wrote and performed songs that offered insight one minute and inspiration the next—all topped with his irreverent attitude.

When Snider’s Songs for the Daily Planet was released in 1994, some radio stations discovered a hidden track at the end of the CD—the Dylanesque “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues.” The playful satire, about a Pacific Northwest band that makes it big by refusing to “play a note/Under any circumstances/Silence/Music’s original alternative/Roots grunge”—turned up an unexpected hit on the album-rock charts.

The Portland, Oregon native hit the roadhouses of America—he debuted in Colorado performing at the Bluebird Theater in Denver and at the Fox Theatre in Boulder—but he wouldn’t play the song. “I’m a cowboy singer,” Snider, then 27, mused. “I’m the last person that anybody should ask about Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain, but people ask me about them all the time. It’s that damn song.”

Snider had begun his musical experience by hoboing in the mid-Eighties. “For me, singing has always been a small, simple thing, the only way I knew how to take care of myself. I never made a decision to be a star or even make records. I knew I could put together words and play guitar. And I guess I was always kinda opinionated. I only went to college the first day. After that, I found the music that freaked me out—when disco was happening, Nashville rocked! Listening to Jerry Jeff Walker opened the door to John Prine and Billy Joe Shaver and Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson and Guy Clark and Bobby Bare.”

Snider landed in Memphis, patterning his ersatz country-rock band, the Nervous Wrecks, after that music, and Jimmy Buffett signed him to his Margaritaville Records. “Those early records of his, A1A and Living and Dying in 3/4 Time—Jimmy Buffett taught me a lot before I met him,” Snider chuckled. “He’s letting me come up with my own ideas. So far, the record company hasn’t asked me to change my clothes.”

Snider might have been barefoot and a little scruffy, but his songwriting at times bordered on the exceptional. The brightest moments on Songs for the Daily Planet were crazy but honest slacker odes and pensive recollections like “Alright Guy” and “You Think You Know Somebody.”

And, of course, there was “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues.” The tune wasn’t anti-flannel as much as it was a wise-ass commentary on the current music business. “That’s a real personal song,” Snider said. “Three years ago, a guy from Capitol Records said, ‘You wanna make a record?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ I went in and tried to expound on that too-country-for-rock/too-rock-for-country sound and it got weird. They said, ‘You’ve either gotta rock or be country.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have to do any of them.’ And I left. We got dropped by Capitol, and not long after, I was playing one of them things where the record people come, a ‘showcase.’ And that day I made up that song for that show. I never intended to use it on my debut album.”

Snider reconsidered when a Canadian rock critic heard a tape and named it his No. 1 song of the year. But the Songs for the Daily Planet packaging was complete, so “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” was tacked on, unlisted.

“This has definitely been a different year,” Snider reflected on 1994. “You can feel the pressure in your body, it works your back. But I don’t really think about things like money anymore. In 10 years, when this is all over, I may look back and go, ‘Wow, I’m really broke and I had some song about Seattle…’ I’m not gonna worry about that. I’m hoping that I get into heaven, and other than that, this is all nice and fun. I hope that doesn’t sound like a ‘heavy rock dude’ talking, but it just seems like when money creeps around in bulk, people tend to freak out. I guess that’s why it’s hard to be a rock star from Seattle.”

By 2002, the hysterically funny and engaging entertainer had signed with his mentor Prine’s independent Oh Boy imprint. Like Prine, his stylistic forefather, Snider assembled songs from pieces of country, blues and folk, and they were often poignant, sometimes off-kilter and always sincere. Stoked on translating every aspect of the human condition into straightforward, startling truths, New Condition confirmed his talent. In “Broke,” a minor-league criminal robs a grocery store that keeps his overextended credit card. There were intimations of mortality at a class reunion (“Class of ‘85”) and such sardonic nuggets as “Statistician’s Blues.” He covered Prine’s “Crooked Piece of Time,” with Prine joining him on background vocals.

“When people go, ‘You’re the young John Prine,’ I go, ‘Yeah, I hope so!’ We all want to be who we are, but he’s my idol—I stalked him in my teens, all I ever did was go see him in concert. Being hooked in with him, I love it.”

Snider supported New Condition with a tour, including a show at the Boulder Theater. “I’m working hard at making better records—I’m learning all the time. But you don’t ever have enough time, and all that gear is different. Besides, I just like to play live. I’ve always felt real comfortable about performing. If I come up with a new song, my first instinct isn’t, ‘Oh, cool, I’m going to record this.’ My head goes, ‘I like this, I’m going to play it.’

Snider was a cult hero in Americana circles, known for entertaining crowds with little more than an acoustic guitar, harmonica and his story-telling genius, delivering wry, politically charged sentiments about battered but unbroken outcasts and hippies. Reviews called 2003’s Near Truths and Hotel Rooms, his first live album, closer to a comedy act than a concert; the “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” track was recorded at a Boulder Theater show.

In 2013, Snider fronted Hard Working Americans, a collaboration of all-star musical lifers from the jam-band scene. The first concert was a performance at the Boulder Theater, a sold-out benefit for Colorado flood relief. “I wanted to poke fun at the flag-waving people who think that the name ‘hard-working Americans’ only applies to them,” Snider stated. “It’s like Woody Guthrie said—‘Music should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’”

Todd Snider passed away on November 15, 2025 at the age of 59.

GALLERY: KBCO Studio C

Photography by Jeff Uhrlaub

In the ’90s, many musical acts in Colorado for a concert or promotional tour dropped in to play live on Boulder-based radio station KBCO, one of the trailblazing broadcasters of “adult album alternative” programming. Jeff Uhrlaub curated a compelling visual showcase of artists who performed in Studio C, which he shares with the Colorado Music Experience.

Ace Frehley, the Kiss guitarist and vocalist, died October 16, 2025, following a recent fall at his home. He was 74.

For 10 years, Kiss’ original lineup released a string of multi-platinum albums and dazzled audiences the world over with a unique sense of showmanship—explosions, fire-breathing, smoke-spewing guitars and fireworks. The impact and influence on a generation of fans and musicians was immense and enduring. Offstage, “Space” Ace Frehley, the lead guitarist, thrived on eccentric humor (he’d hand out large plastic bugs and house flies to strangers) and a singular laugh.

“My brother had a folk guitar, which I didn’t like because it wasn’t electric. So at Christmas, I asked my parents for an electric guitar, and I started practicing hours on end,” he recollected in 1987. He soon formed a band with his brother and performed at high schools and church dances. “And then I graduated to bars,” he laughed. In 1973, he answered an ad in the Village Voice placed by a New York City band called Wicked Lester. When the former art student passed the guitar audition, the group soon changed its name to Kiss and gained Frehley’s graphic design skills as well—he designed the hallmark Kiss logo, making the last two letters into lightning bolts. The members—Frehley joined Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss—began painting their faces and donning outrageous costumes for their concerts. Frehley cultivated an otherworldly image, with a winged outfit and silver galactic makeup.

The rock intelligentsia gave little respect, but Kiss took the world by storm with a lot of hype and a lot more hustle. Increasingly elaborate concert productions with pyrotechnics, theatrics and bitchin’ guitar riffs quickly made the act a cultural phenomenon, and the ample and well-marketed merchandise, portraying the unholy foursome as a collection of cartoon superheroes, grew to include everything from comic books to pinball machines to lunch boxes.

There was even a made-for-television movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.  During filming in 1978, Frehley stood sans makeup behind an outdoor stage at Magic Mountain, the Valencia, California amusement park serving as a location. “There’s a lot of parents across the United States with youngsters who have our pictures plastered all over their walls,” Frehley said. “And they’re wondering, ‘Who are these crazy guys with the makeup and spooky costumes?’ When they see the movie and hear our new albums, they may get some insight into what we’re all about.”

All four members had burned out after years of touring, so in a typically excessive Kiss stunt, they took a break and simultaneously released their much-publicized solo efforts. Surprisingly—given Stanley’s role as Kiss’ lead singer and the all-star cast Simmons gathered for his creation—Frehley scored the highest-charting single from any of the albums, a cover of “New York Groove,” written by Russ Ballard and shaped by Eddie Kramer’s production.

The following year, Kiss made a perfectly timed appearance, parading into Denver’s McNichols Arena on Halloween week. Frehley’s guitar did everything but talk—lighting up in patterns and then flying out of his hands. Another one appeared in his grip and then exploded with rockets coming out of it.

Frehley left Kiss in 1983 and returned with Frehley’s Comet, a new group. “As early as 1978, I knew I was going to leave the band,” he said. “My solo album was such an awakening for me. I didn’t realize what I had inside of me—I was being held back. Since the beginning, Paul and Gene did most of the singing and writing, and it was hard for me to do more than just play lead. After the success of my solo album, I felt that if I stayed with Kiss, I could never fulfill what I wanted to do, which was to front my own band. I was fed up with the whole thing. I have my own studio at home in Connecticut, and I decided I wanted to stay home, work on my own material and play with the musicians of my choice.”

He paused. “But those ten years with Kiss were some of the best years of my life.”

John Lodge, the bassist and singer with the Moody Blues, died on October 10, 2025, at the age of 82.

The Moody Blues took a soulful approach as part of the British invasion of 1965—wearing matching, pinstriped navy stage suits, the band scored a major hit with “Go Now,” a cover of a Bessie Banks R&B song sung by Denny Laine. It sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, reaching No. 1 in England and the Top 10 in America. The group toured with the Beatles and seemed poised for pop stardom, but subsequent singles made no impact. Laine and another player left and were replaced by Lodge and singer/guitarist Justin Hayward (Laine later joined Paul McCartney’s Wings).

Everything changed when Lodge and Hayward helped steer the band. On 1967’s Days of Future Passed, considered one of rock’s original concept albums, the Moody Blues were the first band to record in stereo and to use the mellotron, a forerunner of the synthesizer. The lush, symphonic sound ushered in a groundbreaking era for progressive rock.

“‘Go Now’ was one of the seeds, but we see Days of Future Passed as the beginning of our recording career,” Lodge said in 1997. “The songs we did onstage were never recorded with an orchestra. When you first start writing and recording, you’re prepared to take more risks because you’re gigging—you have a hands-on experience with your audience. After that, you get into a cycle where you have to finish the album and go on tour, and the record company seems to take over. The tour is to promote the album. That’s never how we envisioned it. The two things really go hand in hand. Starting off with Days of Future Passed, we had to be truthful with our songs so that they would stand the test of time, and hopefully that’s what has happened.”

Lodge wrote some of the band’s signature songs, including “Ride My See-Saw,” “Isn’t Life Strange” and “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band).” The musician released his 1977 solo project, Natural Avenue, recorded after the band embarked on a five-year “break-up.” It sounded a lot like earlier Moody Blues albums, and there was nothing wrong with that. “It was a very satisfying album because it reflected on who I was at that particular time—someone who got cocooned into a massive lifestyle with the Moody Blues and finally managed to break all those pieces away and emerge again as an independent person.”

The Moody Blues had never performed live with an orchestra until a 1992 concert with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra at Red Rocks Amphitheatre to celebrate the 25^th anniversary Days of Future Passed. It became a popular PBS special, video and CD. For years, the band trotted out top-grossing tours, backed by members of local philharmonics, with orchestra players lending the lush sounds of violins, timpani and classical harp to such classics as “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Nights in White Satin.”

“That very first concert at Red Rocks was the very best experience of them all,” Lodge said. “It meant so much to so many people who had been wishing and hoping for that. There was so much satisfaction in everybody’s face before we even walked onstage. It wasn’t just our dream; it was their dream that had come true as well. When I look back at the video of that concert and feel the energy and the anticipation, it’s just mind-blowing for me.”

Rick Davies, the singer and founding member of Supertramp, died on September 6, 2025, after a long battle with cancer. He was 81.

In the ’70s, Supertramp filled a void in the progressive-rock genre. While the band presented the same type of atmospheric, thematically related material and refined instrumentation as groups like Pink Floyd and Yes, it took things a step further. Songwriting partners Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies could also write hooks and melodies, a rare commodity in the genre. The band was fueled by the creative tension between the two strong and highly distinct personalities, and the relationship worked in a big way, giving Supertramp best-selling albums with Crime of the Century, Crisis? What Crisis?, Even in the Quietest Moments… and Breakfast in America.

But Supertramp lost musical momentum in the first half of the ’80s. While previous records had marked their progression as players and exponents of their own hit formula, Supertramp released a lackluster album ominously titled Famous Last Words in 1982 and seemingly disappeared.

The normally reclusive Davies reflected on Supertramp’s three-year hiatus while lunching in a Mexican restaurant in Denver. “People think we broke up,” the enigmatic keyboardist and vocalist said. “Famous Last Words was a disappointment to us as well as our fans. It was a tough album to make—we were floundering, surrounded by indecision and confusion. We had different configurations of songs, but we couldn’t agree on a unifying theme for an album. It was like pulling teeth.”

Following a tour of Europe, Supertramp took a six-month “cooling-out period” before deciding to embark on a farewell tour of America. Hodgson announced up front that he was leaving the band and did so after the last performance (he then released a solo album titled In the Eye of the Storm).

Hodgson’s departure didn’t cripple the plans of the remaining members—Davies, Dougie Thomson on bass, Bob Siebenberg on drums and John Helliwell on saxophone. “He had threatened to leave for six years,” Davies said. “So we had already kicked some ideas around—what we would do if he left.” The group put its affairs in order—Davies’ wife handled the management responsibilities—and finally went about recording. The band resurfaced with Brother Where You Bound, an album that yielded the title track, a 16-minute epic that turned out to be the centerpiece. David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s major instrumentalist, showed up to contribute the song’s hypnotic guitar riff.

“It’s been around for four or five years and slowly grown like some big monster,” Davies said, laughing. “We tried to do it on Famous Last Words and couldn’t make it work with everything else we were doing at the time. It’s sort of an abstract odyssey or oddity of a piece about a paranoid character who is convinced that the country is going to be taken over by forces unknown.”

Some critics interpreted the song as an allegory about communism, and the other material on the album had a decidedly political slant. “I now find myself less scared of saying something that might have a bit of a political edge to it,” Davies said. “I tend to read more newspapers, listen more to what is going on in the world, and in turn, I’m prepared to risk my neck a little more with this album. I use quotes from politicians to date it. It helps establish when it was written, and I like that.”

Davies never fulfilled a long-standing deal to record a solo album. He went on to form new iterations of Supertramp to tour and record, but not with Hodgson. “I don’t have huge individual ambition,” he said. “Roger would like to be a name. I’m a little less heavy—it’s just an expression for me, not a big deal. Rock ’n’ roll is basically a commercial medium, and it’s something you have to face—we’re all subject to the public’s reaction. Our concern is to remain fresh and current, to try to find ways to reflect what’s happening today, not rehash 1975 and end up in Vegas. That would be the worst.”

The crazy train reached its final destination when Ozzy Osbourne, the pioneering heavy metal singer and Black Sabbath frontman, died on July 22, 2025, at 76.

Black Sabbath came from a working-class section of Birmingham, England. Lead singer Ozzy Osbourne shrieked in a flat, ruptured wail. Because of an accident that cut the tips of his fingers, guitarist Tony Iommi couldn’t play comfortably unless his strings were slightly slack—so he tuned down his instrument, creating an ominous, menacingly loud wall of sound. Bassist Geezer Butler’s lyrics reveled in the occult and mental illness. Drummer Bill Ward never strayed from the same lumbering beat. But they were masters of the monster riff, and the classics “Paranoid” and “War Pigs” became their most enduring recordings.

Black Sabbath’s 1978 tour celebrated the band’s ten-year anniversary. Osbourne stated that the legendary British quartet’s longevity was starting to awe him. “Ten years, man,” he gasped prior to a concert at Denver’s McNichols Arena. “We’ve seen a lot of different styles and factions of music, and we’ve seen big bands come up and go down in the same year—and we’re still plodding along. I don’t know anything else. It keeps me thinking young, mixing with young people. I’m 30 years old, and I think, ‘Thirty! I should be in front of the fireplace, watching TV and eating popcorn and drinking beer every night.’ Nobody plays the records on the radio, so we’ve got to get the music out there somehow. If I sit at home, I just get fat and bored.”

The album Never Say Die pleased the group’s old fans and captured some new ones. “The audiences are ranging from 16 to 35 now,” Osborne noted. “I feel like Elvis Presley sometimes when I’m up there. But as long as the kids are there and want to hear us, then we’ll carry on as long as we possibly can. A lot of critics have put us down, but the main thing is that the kids still enjoy it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with turning kids on to music. I’ll never forget the last time we played Denver because it was Halloween night, and it was one of the craziest gigs I’ve ever done in my life. There were so many freaks in the audience—the guy that won the competition was a headless man. I’d never done a Halloween gig in America before, but it should be like that every night.”

Osbourne gamely stuffed his Yogi Bear physique into a leotard to lead Black Sabbath’s concert ritual, but after a decade of drugs and alcohol leading to subpar performances and internal friction, he’d had his fill. He tried his own wings with Blizzard of Ozz. “When I first quit, to be honest, I thought, ‘What have I done now? I worked for 12 years to get this, and I just threw it out the window like a stupid fucker.’ But then I went out and got drunk for three of four weeks and got it together. The last few months with Sabbath, it was like dealing with a commitment, a corporation. We didn’t have to change. Now I’m doing it because I want to, not because it’s the only way to feed my family. I just figured that in the years I have left, I wanna have some fun.”

Osbourne’s first move was to recruit guitarist Randy Rhoads, an energetic youngster who provided the musical muscle for Blizzard of Ozz and the stomping “Crazy Train.” “I was frightened that people would forget me,” Osbourne admitted. “See, you could put four dummies up on a stage, call them Black Sabbath, and they’d fill a hall. Black Sabbath always had this weird cult following—we had black magic stuff thrown onstage perpetually. I’m definitely glad to be away from that—I’m a bit of a crazy fucker, but that’s all.”

Crazy wasn’t quite the word for Osbourne’s initial publicity stunt—supposedly he walked into his record company’s office and bit off the head of a dove. Messy but effective. “It makes me mad that people are blowing that out of proportion, because it isn’t true. It was totally staged—I walked in and threw a live dove in the air and then chomped on a fake one with blood capsules in my mouth. I had dealt with enough record companies to know you have to shake them up. And even if it was real, people eat chicken and steak—what’s the big deal about a dove?”

Osbourne became an icon through his best-selling solo albums, bizarre stage persona and rock star lifestyle. Multitudes of new headbangers revered him. He didn’t mind being famous. He just didn’t care for the way it had happened—as if biting the head off a live bat onstage was something to reconsider. During his 1982 “Diary of a Madman” tour, the expected backlash came to a head, as several conservative city officials successfully campaigned to have Osbourne’s concerts banned. He’d never expected the outrageous stunts to get out from under the shadow of Black Sabbath would take money out of his pocket.

“People want to hate me,” he groused before a concert at McNichols Arena. “I’m the guy your mother likes to hate. I’ve spent the last year trying to explain myself, and I’m not going to try anymore—people are going to prejudge me anyway, so what’s the use?” He made such nice-guy gestures as a donation to the ASPCA, another ploy to erode his I-snack-on-puppies image. Osbourne really wasn’t the ogre he appeared to be. He was extremely polite, although he had a distracted air about him, as if he was listening to voices no one else could hear. He had a domestic side—his wife Sharon gave birth to a daughter and the Osbournes were expecting again. Ozzy: “I’ve got to find out what’s causing it!”

Wanting to come off with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, he envisioned himself as sort of a Vincent Price of the heavy metal set, and he had a ball doing what he did. “I don’t hang midgets onstage or throw meat into the audience anymore,” he said. “I’m tired of that hassle. I don’t want people to think I need all that lunacy to be good. Now it’s more basic so that the music plays a role, too.” Still, at the 1983 US Festival, he appeared onstage wearing a five-foot high headdress featuring skulls, bones and other paraphernalia, looking for all the world like a Native American in a Fellini movie.

In 1988, John Michael Osbourne marked his 40^th birthday, while his musical alter ego, dubbed “the Prince of Darkness,” turned 21. “Ozzy Osbourne became a man this year—21 years in the music biz,” he crowed. “Now all I want is to be left alone to do my work.” Which was easier said than done. “I fail to understand why people still think I’m a devil worshiper after all this time. I try to ignore it and hope it goes away, but somebody always comes up with a weird interpretation of my songs. Now there’s a group accusing me of enticing my audience onstage to have baby sacrifices—it’s news to me. Stephen King writes horror books. John Carpenter makes horror movies. I sing some horror songs—and that’s all it is, a different angle on entertainment. If everybody wrote Pat Boone songs, it would be a pretty boring industry, wouldn’t it?”

His album No Rest for the Wicked kicked off with “Miracle Man,” which took a shot at the money-hungry, Bible-thumping capers of television evangelists. “I got a bit of a smile on my face when Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker got caught with their groupies and their fun on the side,” Osbourne admitted. “It’s true hypocrisy, the likes of those people condemning me! They ought to sweep up their own backdoor before they start cleaning up after me. I’ve watched their programs over the past ten years where they’ve shown my album covers and said I’m Satan, that I should be banned. But they’re not doing any better themselves, are they?”

Osbourne had recently spent a second stint in an alcohol treatment program. “If anybody is sick and tired of being sick and tired, there’s more help in this country than anywhere else in the world, if you’re prepared to stick it out. Since I stopped drinking six cases of beer a day, I’ve dropped 18 pounds, I eat well, I have more energy and my attitude is good most of the time.”

In 1992, Osbourne retired from the touring circuit, rounding out his farewell “No More Tours” dates with a performance at McNichols Arena. Osbourne said that his immediate plans might involve his working with other musicians in a different format. “But my future will not involve a reunion with Black Sabbath. That would be like going out again with my first girlfriend.”

But Osbourne invited a reincarnated Black Sabbath—a lineup of founding members Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler and vocalist Ronnie James Do—to open for him at his final date in Southern California. Osbourne’s ex-bandmates accepted his offer, to the dismay of Dio—he flatly refused to front Black Sabbath on the bill. Osbourne didn’t feel like he was getting respect. “I find it very sad at this point in my career—after I’ve shared the stage with many great artists from Rod Stewart to Led Zeppelin to Metallica—that Ronnie James Dio doesn’t have enough respect for me to accept my invitation. I’m a shame that his ego has gotten in the way of a great night.”

Dio then became an ex-member of Black Sabbath. Fans figured a Black Sabbath reunion featuring Osbourne loomed, and Osbourne approached a reshuffled Black Sabbath about a two-week stadium tour, then a month, then a year, then a live album, then a studio album. “I was involved in trying to get it together on occasion, but there was a lot of weirdness and I couldn’t deal with all that shit. I got fucked when it was on one minute and off the next. I ended up with egg on my face. There’s still a lot of bickering. It’s not the band, it’s everybody’s fucking managers. So demanding! I could spend five days talking about it, but it’s so boring and petty, it’s a waste of fucking air. It’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians.”

By 1995, Osbourne needed a head start on his New Year’s resolution. “If a man can quit smoking, he can fly to the moon,” the jonesing singer said. “I’m trying, but I tell you, it’s one hour at a time—it’s 15 (minutes) to two, and I’m going, “14…13…” Osbourne’s resolve was stronger when it came to his return to music. It came as a surprise to many when he announced that his “No More Tears” tour would be his last, but you had to be nuts to think that his retirement would last very long. His latest tour, “Retirement Sucks,” kicked off at McNichols Arena on New Year’s Eve.

Ozzmosis, his first release in four years, was issued during a time when many pundits were claiming that hard rock had been replaced by alternative music. “All I can do is go into a studio and make a record. None of us ever say, ‘Okay, I’ve had a good run, let’s make a pile of shit for a change,’” Osbourne said. “There are so many bloody pigeonholes, brand names they keep giving it—grunge, metal, rap, soul, blues. The bottom line is, it’s all music. You’ve got a choice—you either like it or you don’t. I don’t know what key I’m singing in. I don’t know a guitar from a trumpet. I look at my arms, and if my hairs stand on end, it’s a good song.” Ozzmosis entered the charts at #4, the highest debut of his career.

“I just wanted to step aside for a while and look at what I’ve got. For years, I felt like a mouse on a wheel going round and round—it became routine. I was traveling around aimlessly buying houses that I was never living in, buying animals that never knew me, having children who thought I was a voice on the phone—basically living out of a suitcase for 25 years.” He had claimed his body could no longer handle the physical demands of a rigorous touring schedule, and his mind couldn’t handle the burden of being Ozzy Osbourne, heavy metal’s most famous radical—that former drunken drug addict who peed on the Alamo and tried to strangle his wife. “In my heart of hearts, I knew I wouldn’t retire forever,” he said. “But by announcing it, it was a final decision—everybody thought, ‘There’s no use asking Ozzy to come out to Bulgaria.’ I can honestly say that for one year in my life, I had no pressure. But in hindsight, I don’t know whether it was a good move. I had too much time on my hands. I thought, ‘What a stupid thing to do!’ So I’m back. And I ain’t gonna retire again.”

Osbourne’s new show was a career retrospective that included a few Black Sabbath songs. “I’m very proud of my time in Sabbath, the early days,” he said. “It was a long, long time ago. I don’t know where it came from—it was absolutely a gift. We never consciously sat down and thought, ‘Well, write the music now, and in 1996 people will look back on it as being an icon of its time.’ I’m as surprised as anybody. The original Sabbath started out playing jazz-blues—our influences were Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. But if you listen to how it developed, there’s no kind of blues—we never recorded a twelve-bar blues song, ever. The guys would come up with the heavy riffs, and I’d try to put a melodic vocal line over the top. If I couldn’t. I’d sing along with the riff, like ‘Iron Man.’ It was just innocence.”

But Osbourne had been the influential and popular godfather of heavy metal ever since. “To me, this new music is old music played by younger kids,” he said. “The vocal quality of a lot of the Seattle bands sounds like the Byrds, bands that were around in the ’60s. Nirvana was very Lennon-ish.”

By 1997, it was Marilyn Manson’s turn to be America’s favorite scapegoat, as several conservative city officials campaigned to ban Manson’s Ozzfest ’97 performances. “Let Marilyn have all that,” Osbourne said when his day-long extravaganza visited Denver’s Mile High Stadium. “I’m quite content right now, well rested.” Osbourne was apparently in another recovery phase regarding his drinking and debauchery.

At shows on the Ozzfest tour, after Osbourne concluded his full-length set, he was joined by Butler and Iommi onstage for a near-reunion of Black Sabbath. “We took our name and developed that ‘evil’ image as a way out of the gutter—we didn’t believe any of it. Sabbath was a musical irritant in that we didn’t conform to any set patterns, and it was the best education we could have. For a lot of kids, it’s became a fashionable thing to say they were influenced by Sabbath, but I can’t see it. For all I know it’s ‘Paranoid’ and ‘War Pigs,’ and there’s a lot more to Sabbath than that.

“But there hasn’t been a day that went by without somebody saying, ‘When are we going to be able to see the original Sabbath?’ I’d love for it to turn out great for the fans.”

The original members of Black Sabbath reunited and embarked on a six-week American tour, including a visit to McNichols Arena. Osbourne, who had turned 50, credited the reunion to his wife and manager, Sharon. “I told her, ‘You’re my manager, I’m your artist. I want to say to you: “Yes.” Now make it happen.’” The Reunion album, a 2-CD release, featured 16 live versions of Black Sabbath’s best-known songs, a few tunes that were loved by hardcore fans, plus two newly recorded studio tracks. The album debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard album chart. Were the band members thinking of all the money they could make? “Even if the tour and the album stiff, I’ll still be fine,” Osbourne said. “I’m really not a business-minded person.”

In 1999, Black Sabbath was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but didn’t get in. None of which bothered Osbourne a bit—he publicly called for the hall to remove Black Sabbath from the list of potential nominees (the group entered the pantheon in 2006). “I don’t care if the band is inducted. It’s an honor the business votes on, and Sabbath has never appealed to those people. But I would welcome it if it was voted by the fans. It would be interesting for my great-great-grandkids to be walking through the Hall and see my plaque and say, ‘What a nut case!’”

His career began in the ’60s, but with his chart-topping hit “Feels So Good,” the title track of his 1977 album, Chuck Mangione finally was recognized as one of the premier instrumentalists and composers in the world of melodic jazz. Awards from the record industry piled up, and the sincere little man with the flugelhorn found himself in constant demand on the concert circuit.

“Obviously our music is now being heard and appreciated by many more people than in the early ’70s,” Mangione said prior to a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater in 1980. “But what’s gratifying is to see the people who were there in 1970 are still there, and the new audience has been established now.”

With that increased listenership, more was expected of the prolific Rochester, New York, native. “There are demands not only from the US and Canada, but Europe, Japan, Australia and South America. It’s like trying to find enough time to touch all the bases, and yet as someone who grew up playing music and enjoying performing live for people, it’s kinda high-class trouble. I still believe it’s important for people to hear the music live, especially today when people need to be taken away from their living room TV sets once in a while.”

By 1980, however, television had only enhanced Mangione’s appeal. After ABC Sports had successfully used Mangione’s unsolicited music in background and replays during the 1976 Olympics, the network’s Roone Arledge commissioned him to write the theme for the 1980 Winter Olympics and broadcasted him performing the “Give It All You Got” theme at the Olympic Village to a global television audience of 500 million people.

Mangione’s music acted as a jazz primer for many of his newer listeners. As a composer, he turned out an admirable amount of music that was as varied as it was significant—soundtracks, orchestral pieces and more. At the time of his 1980 Red Rocks performance—the fourth of his career—his work with the Chuck Mangione Quartet was stoking his enthusiasm. As always, the musicians with whom he surrounded himself worked sans contract. “I don’t believe in holding anybody prisoner,” he allowed. “I think people should be given space to grow and contribute. Everyone is professional—the group’s track record is quite unusual, with people staying together three and four years with the amount that we travel and work. The alumni of the band over the last ten years is pretty incredible—Steve Gadd, Tony Levin, Gerry Niewood, Alphonso Johnson—and I’m very proud. I always fall in love with the people I make music with, so I don’t sit around thinking about what happens when they move on.”

In 1981, fans managed to stagger out of bed at dawn to make another trek up to Red Rocks. Mangione and some special guests performed two shows at the famous outdoor venue—a 7:30 a.m. sunrise appearance and an 8:00 p.m. sunset concert. The early performance as the sun came up was a change of pace for audience and performer alike.

“Yeah, it involves some unusual things—like getting up for a sound check while it’s still dark outside,” Mangione laughed. “But Red Rocks has always been a unique situation for me. The first time we played there, we had a full eclipse of the moon. And it had been raining for days when we came to town for the ‘Chase the Clouds Away’ tour, and we had perfect weather. Since it’s always been special playing at sunset, I just wondered what it would be like playing at sunrise.” Mangione thought the experience of making music at an early hour was a spiritual event—he believed that people listen to music at all times of day.  “I don’t look at it as two different musical programs, just two different musical feelings.”

Mangione wanted the shows to be special. Featuring three trumpets, two French horns, four trombones, reed and rhythm sections, guest drummer Gadd and singer Don Potter, the shows were part of his tour to promote Tarantella, an album recorded during an eight-hour musical marathon that he had organized in Rochester to benefit victims of the November 20, 1980, earthquake in Italy.

He had read about the situation and heard that money wasn’t getting to the right people. “I got to thinking about all the people I’d made music with in the last twenty years, and a lot of their last names ended in a vowel,” he grinned. “I didn’t have any relatives involved in the earthquakes, but I’m proud of my heritage, so I got on the phone. It was a hard time to get people together—two days after Christmas—but everyone was interested.”

More than $100,000 was raised through the concert and a telethon held the night before. The event was billed as an evening of music and dance, but it ended up going until five in the morning, with contributions from friends Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea, Gadd and Mangione’s brother Gap. Mangione had only planned on videotaping the performance, recording audio as an afterthought, but afterwards, he pushed for Tarantella’s release, going through the hassles of getting clearance for all the guest artists and finally getting 80 minutes on record out of the eight hours onstage.

Guitarist Mick Ralphs, who died June 23, 2025, epitomized the no-nonsense sound of Bad Company. During their mid-’70s heyday, the members of the band defined the notion of an English hard-rock supergroup. Paul Rodgers, an aggressive powerhouse frontman, inflected his smooth vocals with soul, and drummer Simon Kirke and bassist Boz Burrell comprised a thumping rhythm section. But Ralphs provided the transcendence, turning in rock-steady power chording and sparse, tight riffs.

All four players were experienced by the time Bad Company took form in 1973. Ralphs had been with Mott the Hoople—that band had secured David Bowie as producer and scored big with “All the Young Dudes”—but the glam direction wasn’t to Ralphs’ liking. With the band Free, Rodgers and Kirke had racked up a hit with the enduring “All Right Now,” only to dismantle the group when guitarist Paul Kossoff got swept up into the drug scene. Burrell had been a member of King Crimson. Bad Company allied with Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant and signed with Swan Song, the Zep’s then-new label, achieving instant recognition as a top attraction in America with some of the finest hard-rock hits ever— the straight-ahead, swaggering macho-rock standards “Bad Company,” “Can’t Get Enough,” “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” “Ready for Love” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy.”

“The original Bad Company was big, and everything that goes with success was there,” Ralphs later said. But despite its pedigree, the popular British band eventually fell prey to recording and heavy touring burnout after six albums. Rodgers went his own way in 1982 and, though the move was never formally announced, the band fell apart. Ralphs kept a relatively low profile—forming and disbanding his own group, producing an album for an obscure young act, surfacing to play with David Gilmour on the Pink Floyd guitarist’s solo tour in 1984. Then Ralphs and Kirke found their second wind and soldiered on as Bad Company.

“Bad Company was a very tight, insulated unit, and I really didn’t know anybody else after the band finished,” the affable Ralphs explained prior to a concert at Denver’s McNichols Arena in 1986. “So, when I finally got back into writing, I found myself gravitating toward Simon and Boz. But we had no name at that point. Someone said, ‘Why don’t you just call it Bad Company and be done with it?’ I was still hearing us on American radio a lot, and Simon and I had worked for that name as much as anybody, so it was okay by us. We didn’t want it to seem like a cheap scam, so we approached Boz to tour with us.”

Brian Howe served as lead singer from 1986-1994, but the public’s insatiable demand for the reuniting of classic rock supergroups prompted the original Bad Company members to reunite in 1999, 16 years after their demise, to relive their rock ’n’ roll fantasy. Propelled by Ralphs’ full-sounding block-chord structures, the act included a tour stop at Denver’s Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre. “We’re a bit more grown-up now, and it’s a more realistic scene,” Ralphs said. “We’re just doing what we do, hoping people will tell us what they think.”

Configurations of Bad Company continued to perform intermittently during the 21^st century, although Burrell suffered a fatal heart attack in 2006. Ralphs suffered a stroke days after his final performance with the group in October 2015 and remained bedridden until his death nearly a decade later.

Brian Wilson, the visionary heart and soul of the Beach Boys who struggled with mental illness and drug dependency for much of his life, died on June 11, 2025, at 82.

In November 1991, one of pop music’s most famously troubled recluses sat at a piano in an empty ballroom at Denver’s Brown Palace and fidgeted. “If I could have a wife and kids that loved me, an accounting job that I liked…I would still choose the life I’ve had, the emotional pain. My art wouldn’t have been brought out if I’d had a happy childhood.”

Wilson’s life had seldom been simple. He was the writer, producer and singer behind the Beach Boys, and his ambitious Pet Sounds album was a landmark in the history of pop music production. Yet he’d had a long struggle between the heavy burden of genius and mental problems. In his autobiography Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Wilson, then 49, told the truth about his schizophrenia, his drug addiction, his alcoholism and bizarre eating habits. On a book tour, Wilson was trim and drug-free, an eager-to-please gentle soul, but it was taking a monumental effort—he’d paid a terrible toll on the road back. Coherent but fragile, he often asked people to repeat simple conversation that he didn’t understand. He politely asked bystanders to fetch two diet Cokes with no ice, chugging them with trembling hands upon delivery.

Wilson’s book described his father Murry, a failed songwriter and the Beach Boys’ manager in the early days, as a viciously abusive parent. Murry’s violent mistreatment left his eldest son with permanent psychological scars and a predilection for substance abuse. “He made me crap on a newspaper. He pulled out his glass eye and made me look in the empty socket,” Wilson reflected. “He once flogged me with a two-by-four—it caused deafness in my right ear. He also purposely dropped a motorboat on my hand. He was crazy.”

The Beach Boys were thrust into the spotlight before Wilson was 20, and his musical talent outgrew his social abilities. He was credited with pioneering the California sound—that is, surf music—that helped define American rock in the early ’60s. He stopped performing with the Beach Boys while continuing to write and produce their songs.

Then out of nowhere, he challenged the Beatles for creative supremacy. He heard their groundbreaking album Rubber Soul and was moved to compose something more startlingly imaginative than songs about surfing, cars and girls. Containing such classics as “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows” and “Caroline, No,” Pet Sounds—an exposition of his own arduous transition from teenager to adult—earned Wilson modern-day studio wizard status in the rock world. The Beatles, in turn, wrote Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

But when it hit shelves in 1966, the record was initially ignored, selling poorly compared with previous Beach Boys releases. Record company executives, his father and the other Beach Boys wanted Wilson to get back to the surfing-cars-and-girls formula. After the sessions for Smile, the storied follow-up to Pet Sounds, were aborted, Wilson faded away in a series of withdrawals and breakdowns. He began to draw inward, physically intimidated and incapable of asserting himself. He drank heavily and, with the advent of the drug culture, began using “pot, LSD, uppers, downers, coke.” It precipitated his descent into a living nightmare that almost cost him his life. Widespread accounts of his iconoclastic behavior persisted for decades. He became infamous for having a sandbox in his home, and he stopped washing himself, staying in bed for months at a time.

“I was stoned on such a broad scale, my head was so messed up,” he recalled with a nervous laugh. “I hardly had a chance to get music out.”

After he nearly overdosed on alcohol, cocaine and pills in the early ’80s, Wilson spent more than a decade in the “care” of maverick therapist Eugene Landy. It had been rumored that Wilson was brainwashed by Landy, and the relationship had been unusual. Landy monitored Wilson 24 hours a day, then went on to become a business partner and executive producer of Wilson’s 1988 solo album.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice described Wilson as his own man, cured of physical and mental dependencies and free of undue influence. But against his wishes, members of his family—including his mother, his daughter and his brother Carl—had asked Santa Monica Superior Court to declare Wilson incompetent and appoint a conservator to handle his affairs. They alleged that Landy had exercised unethical and avaricious control over Wilson. All Wilson understood is that people were trying to keep away the person who had done him the most good. “My family has misread the situation. Gene’s my friend, and they’ve really managed to cut him down. Over a million dollars in attorney fees in the last year! I talked to Carl two weeks ago, and he doesn’t want to put me through a trial. We’re trying to settle before it goes to court this month.”

Wilson offered a peek into his musical mind playing a stock shuffle rhythm on the piano and a verse of Bobby Vee’s 1960 hit “Devil or Angel” when asked about his demons. He thought re-releasing his classic “Caroline, No” would be “like a 10-milligram Valium for the whole music industry.”

And he was convinced someone should cover Elton John’s “Daniel.” When informed that a “Daniel” remake had just been released—by his daughters Carnie and Wendy of Wilson Phillips (on the Elton John tribute album Two Rooms)—he asked to hear it. He rubbed his eyes and face as he listened, nervously tapping his foot. “That’s enough,” he said two-thirds of the way through. “They’re good kids—they work hard and fast. I was a bad dad. I feel very guilty about it. It doesn’t add up to a spectacular reunion. That would take a lot of courage.” Ironically, the preceding track on the album was “Crocodile Rock”—as interpreted by the Beach Boys. Wilson was asked if he wanted to hear that track as well. His expression was vacant. “No.”

Landy’s questionable treatment eventually led to the loss of his license. Wilson slowly pulled himself out of his tailspin. In 1998, while something called Mike Love of the Beach Boys and His California Beach Band was on a bogus-oldies tour, Wilson recorded his first all-new album in a decade. Imagination wasn’t a classic, but it was above-average pop music. There were hints of the gorgeous production, vital hooks and subtle arrangements of Pet Sounds, and Wilson’s voice was strong on the stunning multitracked harmonies.

“It’s an adventure to go into the studio in the first place, and to be able to sing what you feel is a great honor, too,” Wilson said. The best song was the perky “Your Imagination.” “It’s trying to express the fact that your imagination can get away from you,” Wilson explained, “that you don’t have to really let it.” Sadly, no amount of imagination would help his summer-means-fun tune fit into any current radio format. Still, a self-confident Wilson said, “I’m ready for success—I’m ready to get somewhere with it.”

By 2000, Wilson had emerged triumphant, recently inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and bringing his much-anticipated Pet Sounds Symphony tour to the country. He came off as a fragile survivor, responding in short, clipped sentences. But his uneasiness somehow took on a warmth, and he seemed genuinely earnest when he talked about his return to the stage, which began with a handful of shows the previous year.

“I make little decisions in my life. I decided, ‘Well, I’ve sat on my ass long enough.’ I wanted to go out on the road and try something new,” Wilson said. “And so far, I’ve been getting standing ovations wherever we go. I can’t believe it. I feel much more comfortable onstage now. At first, it’s a little scary, and then the nervousness goes away. I have a much better band behind me than the Beach Boys were. And I wanted people to know that I could still hold a note, still sing.”

The summer tour was named for the Beach Boys’ influential aural masterpiece. Pet Sounds hadn’t been certified platinum until spring 2000, but the complex magnum opus had been quoted by the likes of Paul McCartney as perhaps the 20^th century’s greatest expression of pop artistry, and dozens of bands had pledged allegiance to the deceptively dense work. It made “best albums of all time” lists as a matter of course. “I miss how inspired everybody was then, how great music was,” Wilson said. “These days it’s all gone away.”

Wilson’s life was less eccentric. He credited his second wife, Melinda, for getting him further out of his shell. “It’s given me a new lease on life. I can go on tour and have fun. I take it one concert at a time.” But no one held out hopes for a Beach Boys reunion. The group was originally made up of Wilson and his two brothers—Dennis (who drowned in 1983) and Carl (who died of lung cancer in 1998)—and cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine. With lots of auxiliary members, Love had continued to milk the band’s legacy as an exercise in nostalgia at baseball games and fireworks displays across America every summer.

“After Carl died, it kind of messed us all up,” Wilson said. “He was our peacemaker.”

Mike Peters, the frontman and songwriter of the Alarm, died on April 28, 2025, at age 66 after a long battle with blood cancer.

The Alarm debuted on the international recording scene circa 1982, and the quartet had to live with a convenient tag—many people considered the group a U2 knockoff. That comparison was based in some fact—certainly the two acts shared a penchant for writing anthemic calls-to-arms and taking declarative lyrical stances. The Alarm’s affiliation with U2 went back to the Welsh band’s first British tour, when the two groups played several showcase dates together. “We had to break it off,” Peters explained over the phone from his home in Rhyl, Wales. “They’ve been very supportive and we’re fast friends, but we didn’t want to get tagged as ‘U2’s opening act.’”

The Alarm managed to attract attention on their own. The members—singer Peters, guitarist Dave Sharp, bassist Eddie MacDonald and drummer Nigel Twist—grew up together in northern Wales, and by the time they reached their teens they were ready to command the regional music scene. They took their name from the first song they wrote, “Alarm Alarm,” and began playing to scrape up money for some time in a recording studio.

“We bought acoustic guitars, and it’s turned into our trademark sound,” Peters noted. “We tried electric and it didn’t work, anyway. With acoustic guitars, we’ve been able to rehearse in a flat, carry our own equipment and generally keep things within our own circle.”

The sound of “Sixty Eight Guns” was also reminiscent of the Clash. The band’s acoustic style was unveiled to audiences on the first American tour. “We picked up a loyal following of Americans that were staying in London,” Peters enthused. “They’ve gone back happy and spread the word. So I think we’ll do well—we like a lot of American music, like Springsteen and Dylan. We’re a live group, not like Culture Club or Human League, groups that don’t tour a lot. We want to play every night of the week, every week of the year.”

The Alarm gained a reputation as a searing, passionate live band that communicated better in concert than on record. With the 1985 album Strength, the members phased out several career-launching traits as they took on a new direction. Instead of the rebel-rousing anthems that had comprised the group’s repertoire, Peters contributed some very personal material based on his own experiences. The quartet had nothing to do when a studio session was postponed the previous year, and Peters called it “some of the most valuable time we’ve spent since the group started. It was the first time we were able to step out of the spotlight and have a good long look at the band, to see what we’ve achieved. We decided to see how good the ten new songs were—we went out and did our biggest tour in Britain. I did a lot of talking to the audience, telling them to write us what they thought. We got tremendous response, but some people said, ‘Mike, we don’t want you to write “we” all the time. We all know what “we” think. We come to the concerts to know what you think.’”

Some self-interrogation followed and gave Peters the inspiration for the song “Spirit of 76,” a lengthy street symphony. “It’s about me getting into music for the first time,” he explained before a performance at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver. “Ten miles across the water from Rhyl is Liverpool, and me and my friends were attracted there to find entertainment. We would go down in the basement of this club where the Beatles had started off, and it was there that we heard the Buzzcocks and the Jam, all that sort of thing in ’76. It made us feel like the world was our oyster. I just wanted to step off for a few years and see what I could do, go see the world, experiment—’I’ll give it a few years, and if nothing happens, I’ll go back to being a computer operator and the straight line.’

“I wrote that song about what happened not just to me, but my friends who were part of that audience—how people coped with that inspiration in the last ten years. John and Suzie (mentioned in the first part of the song) were my best friends from school—they felt the same way as me, but we went our separate ways to achieve things. I met them a year ago and saw two very disillusioned people—their lives had been battered and kicked into the ground. I felt really sad, because I think when people become downhearted, that’s when the crime and drugs get ahold of them. Our music is about fighting those things, fighting the blackness in your heart. ‘Spirit of ’76’ is a similar thing to the American way of life, establishing your independence as a nation. That’s what we were trying to do in 1976, establish our own independence.”

Another modification concerned the Alarm’s appearance—the group abandoned the oversized hairdos and Peters’ shock of long blond hair that had become trademarks. “Looking the way the band did established our identity when we started,” Peters insisted. “But I had to cut it in Detroit—it was just getting so long, I couldn’t handle it. It was time, though. Now I think we’re known for the content of our music, not the style of our hair or the shape of our guitars.”

Developing an exuberant, stirring approach to live performances, the Alarm nurtured an impressive communion with fans.

“That community atmosphere in the concerts doesn’t come easy to a lot of bands,” Peters mused prior to another Rainbow gig. “It’s not something that you get overnight—we’ve always made the effort to communicate with our audience verbally as well as lyrically, by meeting them after the shows. And one thing the audience knows about the Alarm, we do personalize the show wherever we are—our set is different every night. A lot of people don’t realize that the Alarm has been playing live for a decade now. It’s only been in the last four years that we’ve made records. Live, we’ve played thousands of gigs whereas we’ve only made three albums. It’s always been our goal as a band to achieve on record what we can do in a live situation.”

Peters cited “Rain in the Summertime,” built on a cascading guitar arrangement, as an allegorical tune symbolizing a “dry stage” the group went through. “We had been uprooted with our last album, thrown around the world for the first time,” he noted. “When we got back, we realized we’d all changed quite a lot since we’d known each other, since we were 15. So we grew close again and solidified our relationship, and made a record for ourselves without the constraint of a domineering producer. That song was very free-form, only loose ideas when we went in the studio to put it down. People are actually hearing the moment of creation, which we’ve never had on record before.”

Grateful Dead/Spontanuity

YouTube

In April 2024, Colorado Music Experience and Fiske Planetarium convened “Light • Sound • Dialog — Grateful Dead • Boulder 1969-1981,” a select symposium celebrating the Grateful Dead’s historic concerts on the CU-Boulder campus.

Representatives from Spontanuity, a group of visionary artists who eventually became an integral part of the concert business well into the ’70s, reunited to recreate their psychedelic light show using archival assets from the band’s 1969 performance. The Dead’s musical improvisations were artfully deconstructed by Grateful Dead scholars and musicians David Gans and Micheal Sebulsky, and Colorado native and bassist Kenny Passarelli, whose band Conal Implosion opened for the Dead at the 1969 event.

An American country-blues singer, fingerstyle guitarist, harmonica player and songwriter, John Long performs in a prewar acoustic blues style, although his material is contemporary, mainly composed by Long and his elder brother, Claude. Living in Chicago in the early ’70s, Long met Homesick James, who became an adoptive father, mentor and inspiration. A few years later, Long moved to Colorado, where he has played regularly ever since, both solo and with the Johnny Long Blues Band, and recorded a couple of albums, Stand Your Ground and Long on Blues.

Punk pioneer David Johansen, the famed New York Dolls frontman, died on February 28, 2025. He was 75.

Hitching a ride to a 1978 performance at the Blue Note in Boulder, Johansen sat upright in his seat and grabbed for the car-radio volume dial. “Lookin’ for a Kiss,” one of the New York Dolls’ signature tunes, was being played by an astute disc jockey to celebrate the band’s ex-singer’s arrival. As the song’s power chords faded away three minutes later, Johansen’s expression was one of revelation. “That’s incredible,” he mused. “After five years, that song almost sounds normal!”

After five years, Johansen almost seemed normal, too. After the dissolution of the Dolls, he held back from recording, only to return with a solid album, David Johansen, and a new status among punk and new wave fans.

Nobody was ready for the New York Dolls in the early 1970s. The group exposed a whole new realm of pretentions with their glitter, makeup and androgynous appeal. When the Dolls appeared at Ebbets Field in 1974, Coloradans got a taste of how off-the-wall a bunch of frail New Yorkers could get playing loud, sloppy rock ’n’ roll. Johansen was the band’s bratty leader.

“Back then it was all so innocent—there’d be a place to play, there’d be a crowd, so we’d do a concert,” Johansen recounted. “Our records are considered classic, but the looseness of the recording sessions was responsible for that.”

Eventually, the Dolls failed in their bid for rock stardom and split up after garnering a lot of attention from the rock press as the latest love-’em-or-hate-’em sensations. “It was kind of exhilarating,” Johansen recalled. “It just got to a point where it was limiting each one of us into a role that we were finished with. It came down to whether we were gonna make a third album or not. We decided not to. You get weary after touring for three years. You want to go home and see your mother.”

Although the band never met with any degree of commercial success, it planted the seeds of what became the American punk scene. The Ramones came along afterward and showed kids the form, but it was the Dolls who gave everyone the idea of being different. “We weren’t ahead of our time,” Johansen insisted. “Someone had to break down the barriers and show kids that you didn’t have to be commercial, that you could just go out and do what you felt. We gave a lot of New York bands the chance to get out and play.”

Johansen had survived a bout with demon alcohol and kept in shape with a band featuring old Dolls cohort Sylvain Sylvain on guitar. When the singer decided the time was right to launch his solo career, David Johansen put him back in the limelight. The album, which contained the powerful “Funky but Chic,” showed Johansen hadn’t lost his swagger or street smarts, and it gave him immediate status as an elder statesman of punk.

“It don’t grate on me—I’m kinda proud of it,” he said. “I’m really flattered when kids include me in those categories. Every town has pockets of real aware music fans, like the kids who go to Waxtrax in Denver. I’m glad they’re still with me, because the music has come a long way.”

GALLERY: First Quarter, 21st Century

Photography by Garrett Hacking

For more than 25 years, photographer Garrett Hacking has captured the personalities and emotions of musicians at concerts across Colorado. He selected some of his favorite images exclusively for Colorado Music Experience.

Marianne Faithfull, British singer and Rolling Stones muse, died on January 30, 2025. She was 78.

Faithfull’s name conjured up memories of the Rolling Stones during the heights of the ’60s British Invasion. She appeared on the pop scene at 17 with her first recording, “As Tears Go By,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, her girlish voice far from actual tears. But she became better known for her turbulent romance with Jagger, his party companion in the days before Brian Jones’ death. As Mick’s beautiful, blond, teenage girlfriend, Faithfull ensured her place in the headlines that followed the Stones wherever they went. She was infamous as the semi-clad “girl in the fur rug” after getting busted for drug possession with Jagger and Richards at the latter’s country home in Sussex. She rocked the “establishment” by preaching free love in interviews.

But in late 1969, the relationship with Jagger began to fall apart. By her own admission, Faithfull lived on pills and made several suicide bids, and one of the most ravishing icons of the ’60s became one of rock’s most celebrated casualties. She spent most of the ’70s battling personal trauma, alcoholism and heroin addiction.

Fortunately, her story of bizarre situations, periodic homelessness and drug dependency had a happy ending. She staged a comeback in 1979 with the brilliant Broken English album. Her raspy, cracked voice was full of experience—harsh, nicotine-encrusted and capable of frightening aggression—and the venomous and sometimes pornographic lyrics about guilt and personal violence spoke volumes about her state of mind (critics wrote that such songs as “Why D’Ya Do It” and “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” were “a cry from the gutter” and “telegrams from hell”).

But drug problems persisted, and Faithful stayed out of circulation for most of the ’80s until 1987’s Strange Weather, another excellent album, comprised largely of old standards (and a haunting remake of “As Tears Go By”) rendered in her ragged voice.

In 1989, Faithfull arrived in Colorado to perform at the Boulder Theater. Her stormy personal life had always had an air of fatalism, but she had survived to become a creative, vital artist. Clean for more than three years, she refused to gloss over her past. While she had called upon her checkered life for inspiration, she was searching for new ways of expressing herself.

“Broken English was a breakthrough, and whatever happened with my voice hasn’t gone away,” Faithfull explained. “I learned how to put emotional intensity into my work where I hadn’t before. I sing about my feelings and my truth, and right now it’s difficult. There have been so many changes in my life and myself, it’s taking time to find my voice again. Obviously, I used to get a lot of my energy from neurotic activity. It’s hard to find that edge now. But I know there’s a way through this, and I’m finding it.”

She occasionally spoke to Keith Richards on the phone. In the early ’80s, he had insisted that the uncredited Faithfull received the royalties she deserved as the lyricist for the Stones’ “Sister Morphine.” “But I’m glad my path hasn’t crossed with the Stones otherwise,” she said. “I needed to sever myself from them, and I did it a long time ago. I don’t want that back.”

By 1994, Faithfull was able to get her chaotic life on track, acting onstage and in films and doing recordings. In Denver to promote Faithfull: An Autobiography, written with David Dalton, she sat drinking tea and smoking in the Brown Palace Hotel lobby prior to a book-signing at the Tattered Cover. Wearing a black blazer and jeans, she looked younger and prettier than photos suggested and was friendly and erudite, with a big smile and an easy, spirited laugh.

“All of the wonderful world-class loons are coming out,” she said. “Some people don’t say much, or they occasionally mutter something about heroin. I can see what they’ve been through. It’s something to do with being human, with shared experience. We recognize each other.

“I’ve tried very hard not to glamorize that part. I hope young people will be okay, but I don’t think they’re going to read my book, go off and shoot up.”

Dish on the Stones in the spirited memoir? “I tried to do a fair, loving portrait of Mick,” she said. “Keith would never be upset with the book—he’s the lost love of my life, the dear ol’ boot. I haven’t seen their tour this time, but I imagine they like having a real bass player.”

Faithfull was channeling her energy into music via a new recording for a friend who died of AIDS, a cover of Patti Smith’s “Ghost Dance” produced by Richards and Don Was. “It was Keith’s day off (from the Stones’ Voodoo Lounge sessions). Everybody trundled into the fucking studio—except Mick. I shouldn’t be nasty about it, poor old thing—he wasn’t invited!”

A protean artist, performer and set designer, Tim Duffy grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, in the intoxicating orbit of the Newport Jazz Festival. He studied sculpture and film at the Rhode Island School of Design, which led to a series of improvisational, artistic explorations. In the early ’70s, Tim migrated to Colorado, where he pioneered experimental workshops around the state, evolving into his funk-gospel-jazz “cosmic pageant,” Orchestra of Clouds. His design and art direction for film, television, commercials and concerts (including U2’s immortal 1983 show at Red Rocks) took him around the world before he returned to Colorado in the early ’90s, composing, recording and performing countless works of original music. His active, adventurous blend of jazz, funk and humor was executed by various ensembles including the Rocky Mountain All Stars, the All Stars Soul Revue and Jazz Explorers. In 2002, he suffered a debilitating stroke, followed by another. He now resides in Washington State, where he continues his sculpting career with the use of one hand and makes occasional recording pilgrimages to Colorado.

Tim Duffy has recruited Colorado’s finest musicians to share the studio and stage, including:
Larry Thompson, Randy Chavez, Eric Gunnison, Larry Wilkins, Kim Stone, Fred Gowdy, Chris Engleman, Marguerite Juenemann, Mark Oblinger, Bob Rebholz, Coco Brown, Gary Wilson, Fly McClard, Robben Ford, Sam Broussard, Jason McDaniel, Kent McLagan, Dawn Kramer, Winston Ford, Esmé Patterson, Genevieve Patterson, Carl Carlwell, Christian Teele, Pete Sommers, Charles Lee, Bijou Barbosa, Rashid Collins, Reed McRoberts, Lee Trees, Darren Kramer, John Armstrong, Eric Deutsch, Orvin Thompson, Fatima, Jane Simms, George Cables, Carmen Lundy, Linda Lawson, Jeff Jenkins, Mike Marlier, Brad Goode, John Gunther, Nelson Hinds, Mitch Chmara, Paul Romaine, Zach Littlefield, Tony Selvage, Aaron Stone, Christopher Thomas, Patty Greer, Buddy Red Bow, Frank Serafine, Jac Murphy, Terry James, Mike Miller, Paul Vastola, Bernard Grant, Suzi Nelson, Sue Garmany, Mende Stirling, Tom Howard, Alan Westrop, Gene Rush, Julie Churchill, Gabrielle Silva, Don Gorder, Chuck Schneider, Dick McGee, Gene Rueff, Joe Farrell, Robbie Chamberlin, Al Campbell, Blake Teach, Steve Strzepek, Jim Oates, Bob Funk, Bob Burnham, Walt Fowler, Steve Fowler, Al Wing and Ernie Carlson.

Time Code

Bassist Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead, died on October 25, 2024. He was 84 years old.

Lesh spent three decades touring virtually nonstop as part of the psychedelic journey of the Grateful Dead. Following the dissolution of the legendary San Francisco band after the death of iconic guitarist Jerry Garcia in August 1995, he hosted Phil Lesh & Friends tours. At most every show, Lesh kicked off each encore with a brief monologue urging everyone in the audience to declare themselves organ donors—he had suffered from hepatitis-C and received a liver transplant in 1998. Lesh had friends, indeed.

Before Garcia’s demise, there were portentous signs that the once tractable Deadhead scene, dedicated to rock’s biggest circus, was grinding to a halt, shaken into profligate, wanton behavior. But the good-natured Lesh never ended his relationship with the true fans. Circa 1997, Dead alumni—guitarist Bob Weir, drummer Mickey Hart and Lesh with pianist Bruce Hornsby (who toured with the band in later years)—convened to hit the road as the Other Ones, named after an early Dead tune.

“Then I got sick,” Lesh said. By the following fall, his battle with hepatitis-C was made public. He was at death’s door, but he made a marvelous recovery from transplant surgery, which he ascribed to the outpouring of spiritual support and well-wishes from the millions of Grateful Dead fanatics around the world.

“I had to decide what was important to me. One of the main things was the amount of love and healing energy and prayer that was sent to me by the Deadheads—it was palpable, especially during the time of my operation and just afterwards. I could feel it, and it brought me back really quickly. To me, they’re the salt of the earth. I owe them everything, including my life. Right now, I’m as good as new, if not better,” he said. “My illness and the way Deadheads responded to it brought them closer together as a community. That, to me, is the real payoff. I’m in great shape, but they’re in great shape, too—they know it’s important that they communicate and do for each other.”

By December, Lesh was on the road after his surgery, performing eight dates on the “Summer Session ’99” festival tour that featured hot talent on the grassroots jam scene. Performances included dates at Denver’s Fillmore Auditorium and Red Rocks Amphitheatre. He’d gotten reacquainted with the music as an audience member, becoming aware of the next generation of bands inspired by the Grateful Dead.

“Since ’95, that whole ‘jam band’ scene has flourished and come to the surface of the culture,” Lesh said. “That’s a great thing, because that’s the most interesting musical direction that I can imagine. Three-minute songs don’t do it for me. “I discovered the massive pool of musicians out there who love the Dead’s material and get off playing it whenever they can. I’m trying to tap into that concept of treating it as repertoire material, and finding new doors, as it were, from these guys and myself.”

After a two-year absence, the Other Ones revived with a new lineup, but Lesh, then 60, opted out of the tour. He had problems with the group’s philosophies, including management of the Dead’s vast archive of live tapes. As Phil Lesh & Friends, he forged ahead on the road with a wide range of guests, from various Dead collaborators to members of jam bands such as the Allman Brothers Band, String Cheese Incident and Phish, mining the huge repertoire of Grateful Dead music in his continuing pursuit of improvisation.

“I have issues with the Grateful Dead on every level, but that’s not why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m doing what I’m doing because the music demands it. It wants to happen this way,” he said when Phil Lesh & Friends returned to the Fillmore Auditorium in 2000. “The concept is to allow the music to be interpreted by various groups of musicians. And each lineup has its own personality. I hate to be too graphic, but I would say that these guys eviscerate these tunes and read the entrails, to find their new meaning. I’m the chief soothsayer, the rune reader, the tea-leaf shaman or whatever. These guys have prompted me to approach this in a way I’ve always wanted to, to take each song as something that can connect to anything else within the constraints of key, lyric and rhythmic character.

“I’m working on compositional projects using various Dead songs as elements, as well as projects that don’t have anything to do with Grateful Dead music. I’ve got enough to keep me busy for two more lifetimes.”

Jack Russell—the frontman of Great White, the hard-rock band that peaked in the late ’80s with a cover of “Once Bitten Twice Shy” and was involved in one of the most tragic concerts in American history—died on August 15, 2024, of Lewy body dementia and muscle atrophy. He was 63 years old.

While Great White hailed from the Los Angeles area, the band members wanted no part of the Spandex-and-makeup trappings that marked the majority of the city’s pedestrian glam-rock acts. “I was born and raised in L.A., but most of the so-called L.A. bands aren’t even from here,” Russell said. “It’s a drag that those guys come here worrying about what they’re wearing instead of worrying about music.”

A bluesy sound set Great White apart, in Russell’s estimation. Much like Whitesnake, the band they opened for at Denver’s McNichols Arena in 1988, the members found success as “exiles from the ’70s” and worked in the blues-rock tradition of classic British bands.

Great White’s “overnight” popularity belied the group’s origins. The groundwork for success was laid in 1986, when the band covered “Face the Day” by Angel City (known as the Angels in native Australia), and the song went to No. 1 on several Los Angeles radio stations. “It was my idea (to record it),” Russell said. “I was over in London, really hung over, and a friend woke me at six in the morning to hear this song. It made so much sense to me, I knew we had to do it. The lyrics are right there for a Monday morning—‘I don’t wanna face the day.’”

Once Bitten, Great White’s 1987 album, sold more than a million copies. “Rock Me,” a seven-minute extravaganza, emerged as a rock radio hit despite its length, and “Save Your Love,” a power ballad, propelled the band to the top of the charts.

Great White rode highest with the 1989 album …Twice Shy. The hits were “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” a breakthrough cover of a song penned by former Mott the Hoople leader Ian Hunter, and the ballad “House of Broken Love.” The multiplatinum album sported several blues-oriented tunes, and the band maintained a mid-tempo hard-rock bluesiness on 1991’s Hooked.

“The single ‘Call It Rock & Roll’ was written at a sound check—we were smarting around. I went back in a trailer and wrote the lyrics. Other songs took a little while. The trick is to write for yourself, not for anybody else,” Russell (aka Mista Bone) said when Great White opened for Scorpions at Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

Great White’s commercial fortunes declined through the ’90s as grunge and alternative rock displaced the band’s sound on the radio and MTV. The band battled being labeled as “another hair band” and struggled with the “wimp” factor. From the 1993 album Psycho City, the ambitious “Old Rose Motel” put dark edges around the band’s hard-hitting bluesy-metal style, as Russell, the rambunctious leader of the gang, sang about the ache that consumes self-destructive people.

“It’s stressful being ‘on’ all the time,” he said prior to a performance at Denver’s Bangles in 1993. “I remember one of the last times in Denver, I was drunk for four days—and they let me drive a car, it was the MTV Grand Prix! Now I’ve been sober for seven months. I can focus my energy in the best way possible.

“I’ve been doing this for 15 years. About eight of those years, I can actually say I made some money, so I’m batting a little above 50 percent—not bad for rock ’n’ roll. But let’s not forget the years prior to that—we did it for nothing. Music is still the thing that gives you all the pleasure in the world.”

Some of the songs from 1994’s Sail Away were acoustic-based, a reminder that Great White was one of the first hard-rock bands to make an MTV Unplugged appearance. “Every album is different—I had no idea what this one was gonna be like,” Russell said before a performance at Denver’s Ogden Theater. “We’re not gonna quit sounding heavy, being Great White.”

Yet the raga-flavored title track from Sail Away was a step away from fans’ expectations. “We never let anybody tell us what to do—for better or for worse,” Russell said. “To me, the song is about alienation, being adrift emotionally and spiritually. We’ve had our share of that over the years, working on songs and wondering if they’d ever be heard. Musicians are just romantics in search of hope.”

His spinoff band, Jack Russell’s Great White, was headlining at the Station Nightclub in Rhode Island in 2003 when pyrotechnics ignited soundproofing foam in the walls of the building. The fire killed 100 people—including guitarist Ty Longley, who had made his home in Colorado before getting to play with Great White—and injured more than 200 others.

Greg Kihn, who scored hits with “Jeopardy” and “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ’Em)” in the ’80s, died on August 13, 2024 after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 75.

Kihn’s passion for rock shined through over the decades. Based in Berkeley, California, he released his first song as a solo artist in 1976 on the famous compilation Beserkely Chartbusters Vol. 1, rising to popularity alongside other Beserkley Records acts, including Jonathan Richman, the Rubinoos and Earth Quake. The Greg Kihn Band built a reputation as a killer live act and, in Europe, as being America’s best “West Coast band,” even though Kihn was reared in Baltimore.

“It’s heavy industrial back there,” Kihn said, referring to his hometown after a concert at Denver’s Rainbow Music Hall in 1979. “You want to get out so bad that you’ll even sing to get away.” Citing the other musicians who had come from the same area (Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, George Thorogood, Nils Lofgren), Kihn said his ambition was for his group to be accepted in the tradition of great American bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Kids are getting tired of foreign bands. They’re ready for some homegrown heroes,” he said as he scoured his hotel room for a saltshaker (“Springsteen taught me about it—gargling with salt water is the best thing for your throat”).

There was no doubt that the Greg Kihn Band had a strong grasp of the slashing interplay and inspired material involved in playing hard-edged power-pop. The group cranked out an album every eight months like clockwork, and the culminating effect was to slowly ingrain Kihn into the public consciousness with singles like “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ’Em)” and “Happy Man.” Equally worthy were “Remember,” Springsteen’s “Rendezvous” (a fan, he wrote it especially for Kihn) and a cover of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (“the only Burt Bacharach song we know”).

Many observers thought Kihn would be a star if he recorded for a major label. But he remained with Berserkley, a small independent company that seemed to take pride in its unorthodox methods. “We’re like the Ma & Pa drug store that’s competing with Safeway,” he said. “But we don’t care. Matthew Kaufman isn’t even called the president of the label; he’s the ‘reigning looney.’ All of our success has come from going against the grain and being blatantly maverick. All of our fans are totally honest, because we’ve never had an ad campaign or a lot of hype.

“All of our albums sound like demos, but people can listen to them and get a sense of our history, hear what we’ve done and what we’re doing now. We’re going to be recording for a decade, so it’s good for people to know that we’ve got plenty of room to grow. With bands like the Knack and Tom Petty coming up, there’s a real scene starting to happen. And I want to be on top of it. I don’t want to be the Blues Magoos of the ’70s.”

Which was why the success of “Jeopardy” was so refreshing. The song hit #2 on the national chart in 1983 and became an early staple of the nascent MTV. “Weird Al” Yankovic honored the song with the parody “I Lost on Jeopardy”—the popular music video for which Kihn appeared at the end.

Kihn had sensed a recent breakthrough in his songwriting. “I’m just trying to get better and perfect my craft,” he allowed upon his return to the Rainbow that year. “I enjoy writing songs; I’m writing all the time. I’ve been trying to be economical—I call it ‘economy of expression,’ saying things in fewer words. That’s why I like Buddy Holly. This band really does take care of itself at home, on the road, in the studio and at gigs. Our records are basically self-produced—we just set up and play.”

From 1996 through 2012, Kihn emerged as the popular morning host at the San Jose classic rock station KUFX. He also released six horror novels and edited a collection of short stories written by rockers including Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Joan Jett and Kinky Friedman.

John Mayall, a legendary British blues pioneer, died on July 22, 2024. He was 90.

He earned the title in the Sixties, but Mayall remained “the godfather of the British blues scene” over the course of a career that spanned 60 years and more than 70 studio and live albums—“So far back, I’m surprised anyone bothers to count,” he laughed.

The tireless Mayall seemed destined to be remembered more for the people he groomed for stardom than for his own contributions to the development of rock music. In the mid-’60s, his successive bands of Bluesbreakers effectively acted as a finishing school for many of Britain’s leading instrumentalists. The original lineup, considered the first important British blues band, featured Eric Clapton on guitar. At various points, his disciples who graduated from the Bluesbreakers included Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood (later of Fleetwood Mac); Jack Bruce (of Cream); Mick Taylor (who replaced Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones); Andy Fraser (Free); and drummer Aynsley Dunbar.

“I was a little older,” Mayall explained prior to a performance at the Boulder Theater in 1988. “This lucky generation has access to rare things, things that were unattainable to us back then. Everybody had to find their own path. My father’s record collection was jazz, and I knew the history of American music from reading books. I knew what to look for. I started off by collecting 78s. Bit by bit things became available.”

When blues music was just gaining a foothold in ’60s Britain, young bands such as the Rolling Stones covered material by American blues greats Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. “Pop wasn’t played in the clubs—traditional jazz had ruled there for almost 10 years,” Mayall said. “But there were a few elements of blues, small quartets, within some of the bands. And the blues grew out of that and replaced the trad jazz scene.”

Mayall’s name soon became synonymous with classy British blues, even though the singer/keyboardist/harmonica player was 30 years old before he put together his first band. “It’s not where you come from that’s important,” he said. “It’s what you hear in your head and what you put out through your instrument.”

Indeed, for a time Mayall battled a reputation as a frugal eccentric, as he had once lived in a tree house. “But the motivation was the opposite of being a recluse,” he explained. “I lived in a crowded house with a large family, and I wanted my own room, so I built it up a tree. Of course, I used the house for the main facilities. I’ve never been like Jesus in the wilderness, but if anyone wants to think that’s eccentric, fine.”

Mayall moved to America in 1969, and during the ’70s worked increasingly in a jazz-blues style. He assembled a new Bluesbreakers lineup that ranked as the longest-lived configuration of any Mayall band. Two hot and hungry soloists, guitarists Coco Montoya and Walter Trout, provided the creative energy. The band averaged more than 120 shows a year in 15 countries. “It’s pretty hard to imagine blues fans out there in Romania and Turkey, but it shows you how the blues is spreading throughout the world.”

Purists felt an aversion to Mayall—as a singer and player, they considered him pedestrian, and he was white and British, not an African-American. But over the years, few artists remained as steadfast to their love and study of the blues. By the early ’90s, the 60-year-old qualified as a luminary, giving a state of the blues address following a concert at the Denver Zoo. “It’s very healthy,” he said. “In the early years, you’d get interested in a player and he dropped dead from self-abuse—that was the destructive factor in the ’60s. Nowadays, with all this new interest in the blues, the players aren’t about to let it slip through their fingers. The practitioners who are in the forefront are playing with great conviction at the peak of their careers. People write about where you come from out of convenience, but it transcends that. As long as you stand apart as a recognizable performer, that’s the key to the blues. Nobody can come close to sounding like John Lee Hooker or B.B. King, even if they play the same notes.”

Mayall harbored no regrets that many of his alumni became better known than he did. “I’ve never looked at my band in the same way other people have,” he said. “I’m not training musicians out there like a coach who trains athletes to go out for the Olympics. I put bands together for the enjoyment of all of us. I have no way of getting in touch with Eric Clapton other than the general public would—he’s never seen a show of mine. But there are people you bump into—Mick Taylor and Mick Fleetwood are in the picture. Hopefully we’re outgrowing those critics, those old dinosaurs who can’t see past the sidemen who went on to bigger things. Today’s audience of 18-year-olds hasn’t heard John Mayall’s music until they’ve heard a new album.”

Musician, novelist, raconteur and occasional politician Kinky Friedman died at 79 on June 27, 2024.

Friedman was country when country wasn’t cool. In the ’70s, when virtually all his peers were into rock, the Texas-born Friedman took an extreme approach to his work. As an ethnic rarity—a Jewish country singer—he formed a backing band called the Texas Jewboys. The group’s name alone, a spoof on the almost sacred institution of Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys, was enough to raise eyebrows among many country music fans.

But Friedman’s forte often seemed to lie in his sheer offensiveness. His outrageous persona was a unique cross between Don Rickles and Woody Guthrie. He came across onstage as an old-style Texas country bandleader, except he wore a mezuzah and Star of David around his neck and used obscenities.

“We irritated a lot of people. We got up the sleeves of just about everybody,” Friedman said prior to a concert at Denver’s Mercury Café in 1992. “We were chased out of town by rednecks, blacks, Jews, homosexuals. Women were the worst—feminists went crazy on us.”

Most of Friedman’s best material appeared on 1973’s Sold American, a remarkable debut album. The raucous “We reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You” was about the hostility a Jewish longhair encounters in a redneck café—and in a synagogue. “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” was perceived as tasteless.

Yet Friedman could get self-deprecating and a little serious, writing capable and exceptionally witty songs. The classic title track was a piercing look at a faded cowboy star looking for a cheap high and wondering where the kudos went. “High on Jesus,” “Top Ten Commandments” and his signature “Ride ’Em Jewboy” made a big splash.

Friedman’s self-titled second album featured songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” (produced by Willie Nelson), and his charisma won friends and influenced people among the rock establishment. Many contributed to 1976’s happily indulgent Lasso from El Paso—for example, Ringo Starr put in a cameo appearance on the riotous bad-taste parable “Men’s Room, L.A.”

Friedman was also given prominence on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, in which several different artists performed with Dylan in loose-format concerts across America (Lasso from El Paso included a live version of “Sold American” recorded in Fort Collins).

The National Organization of Women awarded Friedman the 1974 Chauvinist Pig of the Year award for “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.” And there was a lawsuit from advice columnist Abigail Van Buren over his song “Dear Abbie.” “I was fuckin’ blown away,” Friedman said. “The subtitle was ‘Steal This Song’—it’s obvious to anyone with a brain the size of a Le Sueur pea that it’s about Abbie Hoffman.”

But despite his rising profile, public response continued to be disappointing, and Friedman didn’t make any records during the ’80s. Country artist David Allen Coe explained it: “You gotta understand, the music business is basically run by Jewish people, and the image thrown up by Kinky Friedman & the Texas Jewboys was not something they wanted to promote.”

So Friedman searched for “a lifestyle that didn’t require my presence.” One night he rescued a woman from a mugger at an automated bank. Right away he wrote his first mystery novel, Greenwich Killing Time, on his ranch in Texas. “Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time I knew I had something pretty hot,” Friedman said.

He did. He would become a successful writer of crime novels—A Case of Lone Star, When the Cat’s Away and Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola among them. The Mile High Club, the last book in his popular detective series, “is about a woman who goes back to the lavatory as an airplane is coming into LaGuardia. She asks me to keep an eye on her carry-on bag, and she disappears. It’s a departure from my other work in that it has a plot and a surprise ending. It’s the first mystery that involves a cat dumping in a loft as a major clue. Mojo Nixon asked me if I belonged to the Mile High Club. I said no, I didn’t. He said he was a solo member.”

“The Kinkster” was playing music again in the ’90s. “Instead of an old country singer, I’m a new comic, and real Americans seem to get it this time around,” he mused. “I try to preach to the choir. Stupid people think I’m a bigot or a racist, others think I’m holding a mirror up to them. I dunno, bigots and racists need to be entertained like anyone else.”

Friedman performed at Herman’s Hideaway in 2000, his first Denver club date in seven years. He brought along Little Jewford (born Jeff Shelby), a founding member of the Texas Jewboys. “He’s the last surviving member who’s still ambulatory,” Friedman said. “He killed them in Australia—he’d say things like, ‘I am the Lindbergh baby.’ He’s the president and CEO of Sphincter Records—our motto is ‘Leaving our competitors’ behind.’”

A record was made of their European tour, Classic Snatches from Europe. “It’s mostly comedy bits and reprisals of our old songs. We did a few shows in Germany. As you know, the Germans are my second favorite people—and my first is everybody else! In Cologne, a blind woman from Paris came to the show with her seeing-eye dog. We brought ’em both up onstage and sang ‘Old Shep,’ a very poignant moment. Afterward, she invited us to Paris on a day off. So I asked the German promoter, ‘How far from Cologne to Paris?’ He said, ‘Oh, about four days’ march.’”

Bill Walton, the NBA Hall of Famer who was famously “the biggest Deadhead in the world,” died on May 27, 2024, from cancer at 71.

In the ’70s, the 6-foot 11-inch athlete embraced the counterculture. His image with the public was anti-establishment—“Gee, he has long hair, he wears a bandana and isn’t he somehow tied into the Grateful Dead?” The years mellowed the gregarious Walton. In the mid-’90s, the basketball legend left the beard behind for a suit and tie, becoming a sportscaster. But he still loved music.

“More than ever—I’ve taken up piano,” he said as he carried his Roland keyboard to the bus after analyzing a Denver Nuggets game at McNichols Arena. “And I’m so proud to be a Deadhead. I’m one of those guys who jumps up and down and pumps his fist in the air and says, ‘Yeah, I’m with them!’ My favorite Dead show is the next one. I’ve been to about 600 of them, which is not that many, considering that I’ve been going for 25 years, only 25 a year. I’ve been to all the shows in Colorado.

“It’s always such fun. It’s like being around (Larry) Bird and (coach John) Wooden—you know it’s going to be remarkable because of their professionalism and energy and commitment to be great every time. They can turn the worst situation into a magic moment.”

Walton’s Men Are Made in the Paint, on New Alliance Records, was a spoken-word double-CD. He’d recorded his impressions of basketball and how the game serves as a metaphor for winning in life, too. His 2½ hours of expertise were sprinkled with musical interludes performed by ex-Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart of the Dead threw in the liner notes.

Walton’s connections with the Dead first gained notoriety in 1978, when he played drums on stage with the band in Egypt. “My teammates in Portland were in training camp then,” he recalled. “They saw a photo on the front page of the newspaper and didn’t like it. But I was in a cast. What could I have done, passed out the aspirins?” Walton used rock music for inspiration before games. “A Grateful Dead song was always running through my head when I was triggering fast breaks,” he said.

“It’s a mistake to think that pro basketball players and professional musicians just walk out onstage and perform. There are thousands of hours of preparation required, not only to get your skill level up built to get your psyche to the point where you’re able to create. It’s not something that you just turn on and off. I love it when the guys in the Dead are going in different directions so fast, yet they’re always able to come back.

“It’s like a basketball team. One guy doesn’t do everything. If you’re a terrible team, then everybody is doing everything by himself. But when you’re on a true team and you’re working together, everybody doing his little part, that’s when it’s really happening. And it’s not easy to do that. That’s why there are so many bad basketball teams—and so many bad musical groups.”

The renowned saxophonist David Sanborn died on May 12, 2024, after an extended battle with prostate cancer. He was 78.

At the peak of his career in the late ’80s, Sanborn had topped the jazz charts consistently with his sophisticated blend of contemporary jazz and pop elements, winning his fifth Grammy (Best Pop Instrumental Performance) for 1988’s Close-up. On television, he was co-host of Sunday Night, NBC-TV’s critically acclaimed late-night alternative music series. On radio, he hosted his own weekly national broadcast, The Jazz Show with David Sanborn.

And he was on tour, including performances at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 1987 and Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater in 1989. “My business is playing,” he said. “I just like being on the road in this country. It’s energizing.”

Sanborn’s passion with the alto saxophone went back to his childhood, but many people forgot that he started out as a rocker. He played with Paul Butterfield in the late ’60s before earning recognition from the musical establishment by recording and touring with Stevie Wonder (the Talking Book album), David Bowie (“Young Americans”) James Taylor (the solo on the hit “How Sweet It Is [To Be Loved by You]”), Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles and Dan Fogelberg, among other iconic stars.

“Now I don’t do those sessions very much anymore—I got tired,” he said. “As a soloist, you’re fulfilling someone else’s idea of what you’re supposed to sound like. Very rarely will they let you just blow. Afterwards in the studio, they can drastically alter what you’ve done and change the impact of what you played. It gets to be a drag. I don’t know how much of my past my audience is aware of. Actually, a lot of people only know me from the David Letterman show.”

Sanborn brought his virtuosity into millions of living rooms via a regular guest slot with the studio band on NBC-TV’s Late Night with David Letterman. “It’s not an easy gig,” he said. “Paul (Schafer, the bandleader) calls out those tunes off the top of his head—‘Rumble’ in the key of C—and boom, you have to know it. You develop the ability to play a tune you’ve only heard once in your life.”

The prolific Sanborn had to deal with his dismissal by jazz purists. “They have an ax to grind and I’m an easy target—‘This guy is masquerading as a jazz artist,’” he fumed. “I never called myself a jazz musician. I don’t happen to think I’m a real innovator. What I play is a synthesis of different styles I’ve heard over the years. Some of it comes from jazz, but most of it comes from R&B. I’ve played in enough idioms to have the respect of the people I work with.”

Dickey Betts, a founding member of the Allman Brothers Band and the fiery guitarist who wrote and sang “Ramblin’ Man,” the group’s biggest hit, died on April 18, 2024. He was 80.

The history of the Allman Brothers Band reads like a sorrowful opera. During the late ’60s and early ’70s, the group established a reputation for awesome playing skills, conjuring a mix of virtually every American musical form—blues, country, R&B, jazz and rock—bound by an ethos of soaring improvisation. The Allmans’ benchmark early albums remain noted for a graceful, unique interplay between Duane Allman and Betts, a gifted guitar duo. Live at Fillmore East ranks as one of the finest concert albums ever recorded.  

But in October 1971, when the Allmans might have been America’s best answer to the British supergroups, Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident at age 24. The band regrouped and continued to tour and enjoy success. Betts’ role became more prominent with his breezy “Ramblin’ Man,” the classic instrumental “Jessica” and the favorite “Blue Sky”—yet things were never quite the same. Brilliant instrumentation had taken the Allmans to the top, but the air of tragedy cemented the legend.

“Now it’s hard to talk about Duane without sounding like you’re being disrespectful,” the mannerly Betts mused prior to a stop at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 1991. “Duane was one of the greatest I’ve ever seen, and he deserves all the things ever written about him, for sure. But it’s hard as long as you’re still alive and out here chopping away at it—you don’t seem to be immortal. You can never measure up to that Duane Allman thing because he was killed at that early age. That was pretty tragic, and it’s mysterious and romantic. I’m glad to be here, and of course I’m glad to have played with Duane—I’m not complaining at all. But it’s a touchy question.”

The band had survived the deaths of Allman and original bassist Berry Oakley, the vagaries of substance abuse, legal wrangling and what appeared to be an irrevocable split suffered in the mid-’70s, when the band severed all ties with singer Gregg Alllman after he testified against his personal road manager, who received a 75-year sentence on narcotics charges. “There is no way we can every work with Gregg again,” an aggrieved Betts said at the time.

The beloved group endured rifts, breakups and reformations throughout the ’80s before coming together again in 1989, re-earning a place in the rock pantheon and reaffirming the old spirit with a signature blend of blues roots and virtuoso jamming. The band returned to its original instrumentation—two-guitar magic from Betts and new member Warren Haynes, and Gregg Allman on keyboards. ABB was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

“We’ve always been musicians—we’re not involved in show biz too much,” Betts allowed. “When we weren’t recording, we were still working and listening and experimenting, because that’s what we do. We didn’t quit playing during the ’80s and then come back from retirement. That’s made a lot of difference.”

Yet in 2000, on the eve of the band’s summer tour, Betts was forced out of the band by his longtime partners. In interviews, Gregg Allman claimed that Betts’ drinking and drug use interfered with the band’s performance. Meanwhile, cynics wondered whether Allman, who’d fought an alcohol problem for years, was pot or kettle.

After being relieved of his duties, Betts formed a new group under his own name and toured, performing at the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival and the Ogden Theatre in 2001. Meanwhile, the Allman Brothers Band played to half-filled houses. For many devotees, paying to see the Southern rock stalwarts without Betts—the backbone of the band along with Allman—was akin to seeing the Rolling Stones minus Keith Richards.

“I tried my best to talk them into having a farewell tour if we were going to fly apart at the seams, (so) we can leave the Allman Brothers Band intact for history,” Betts said, sounding sober and assured. “Let’s not call it the Allman Brothers Band with only two members, like the Drifters have done for 20 years. And they would not listen. That’s the disappointing part. Everything that band stood for—taking up for one another, brotherhood—got hit with a pie in the face toward the end of our career. I would have loved to see us go out with a little more dignity than that. It’s really heartbreaking.

“Maybe one of the reasons the guys felt the need for a change was that (the spark) was disappearing from the band. Somehow I became the person…if I wasn’t in the picture, everything would change for the better. I had no choice but to change. I’m making a tenth of the money working four times as hard to be able to pay the guys in my band. But on the other hand, they are making twice what they ever made—it’s the best gig they ever had! I guess it all works out.”

GALLERY: Red Rocks Amphitheatre 2007-2022

Photography by Lisa Siciliano

Self-taught Boulder-based photographer Lisa Siciliano shoots entirely on black-and-white film, with a distinct style of tone and texture that has gained national attention for her company, Dog Daze Photo. Having shot hundreds of concerts as a house photographer at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Siciliano has generously culled images from her voluminous collection in this gallery for Colorado Music Experience.

Rock eccentric Mojo Nixon—a motor-mouthed guitarist and singer-songwriter and nutcase radio personality—died on February 8, 2024, aboard a country-music cruise. He was 66.

Nixon had always been gonzo. Using his real name, Kirby McMillan, he lived in Denver circa 1980-81. “I was a young man with no plan,” he recalled when his 1988 tour brought him to Denver’s Casino Cabaret. “I was in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America, a domestic service agency akin to the Peace Corps), and they said I could go to Colorado. I thought, ‘Hunter Thompson lives in Colorado, and Gary Hart the sex machine lives in Colorado—I guess I can go there.’

As a member of Zebra 123, he was questioned by the U.S. Secret Service for the punk band’s part in the Assassination Ball at the notorious Capitol Hill club, Malfunction Junction. “It took place November 22, 1980, which happened to be the anniversary of Kennedy being caught in the triangulation there at the grassy knoll,” he recalled. “Zebra 123 had been banned from everywhere. We weren’t skinny-tie new-wave cute, we were pissed off—three chords and a cloud of dust. We got together with two other bands and decided to put on our own show. This girlfriend of mine took a picture of Carter and Reagan—the election was going on then—and made it look as if they’d been shot from below and their heads were exploding, not unlike JFK’s. That got the Secret Service all over us. They came and gave us a big lecture, and they didn’t like our show. So there’s a file on me somewhere.

“(Then) I went to New Orleans and had the Mojo Nixon revelation. I was told to change my name and bring pop culturecide to the world.”

In 1983, the iconoclastic musician teamed with washboard player Skid Roper in San Diego to begin his assault on the American public’s sensibilities, delivering his obnoxious diatribes in a stomping roots-rock format. “It’s what I do best, a kind of spontaneous, profane thing,” he admitted.

Nixon got away with such subversive lyrics as “I saw Allah at an Arby’s” and “the Dow Jones can suck my bone.” He wrote a delicate love-letter ditty to MTV veejay Martha Quinn (“Stuffing Martha’s Muffin”) and a topical ode to the just-say-no crowd, “I Ain’t Gonna Piss in No Jar.”

Nixon’s declamations usually didn’t qualify as commercial fare, but he scored a novelty hit in 1987 with the epic “Elvis Is Everywhere,” a disrespectfully exaggerated tribute that caught on during the 10^th anniversary of the King’s death. “He’s in your cheeseburgers, he’s in your mom,” he ranted to a rockabilly beat. The lyrics cited Elvis as being responsible for the Bermuda Triangle (“Elvis needs boats!”) and as being in everyone from bag ladies to Joan Rivers—although in Rivers’ case, he was trying to get out.

In 1989, Nixon performed at Denver’s Aztlan Theater and at Boulder’s Tulagi, and his Elvis watch continued. “629-239-KING” was an honest-to-goodness phone number tied to an answering machine with a plea for Elvis to phone home and for callers to leave messages about Elvis sightings.

“It was in my house, but now it’s set up where paid professionals are monitoring it,” he crowed. “It’s always busy, but a lot of people aren’t leaving messages—the weak, the puny, the pusillanimous just giggle and hang up. But one in 10 calls is a certified raving nut/lunatic/psychopath who should probably be locked up. That makes me feel good.”

Nixon’s raucous social commentary was also featured on “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child.” “We made love 14 hours straight,” he insisted. “She’s denying that she’s incubating the incubus, but there’s even a slight chance that Debbie will be in the video.” Nixon had become a fixture on MTV, but the network decided not to air the clip.

Nixon appeared onscreen with Dennis Quaid in Great Balls of Fire, playing the drummer James Van Eaton in Jerry Lee Lewis’ band. “Jerry Lee can’t separate when he’s a nut and not a nut—shooting his wife or talking to God, it’s the same thing,” he allowed. “It’s almost like I have a career now. Before, I was in the bleachers, and now I’m in left field. But I’m still not running the basepaths like Poison—I’m in the corner taking bets from Pete Rose.”

In 1990, Nixon performed at the Gothic Theatre, singing the cruelly honest “Don Henley Must Die”—“He’s a tortured artist/Used to be in the Eagles/Now he whines like a wounded beagle.” His record company claimed it had to remove a sticker (a round picture of Henley with a line through it and containing the warning “Please Don’t Play ‘Don Henley Must Die’—It Might Upset Him”) from the album due to “legal saber-rattling from a certain powerful record industry mogul.” The label said the mogul (undoubtedly Eagles manager Irving Azoff) feared—correctly—the sticker might actually have the opposite result and encourage airplay.

“I’d love to have Don Henley come and play a few songs with me in front of 500 crazed Mojo fans,” Nixon said. “We probably agree on a lot of left-wing political issues.” Sure enough, in 1992, Henley appeared in the audience at one of Nixon’s Texas shows, climbed onto the stage and instigated a rowdy rendition of the song.

Like most in the industry, Nixon wasn’t above a bit of seasonal exploitation. At a 1992 performance at the Mercury Café, he and his band the Toadliquors performed material from an album called Horny Holidays. “You can’t find it in the big chains,” he said, “but it’s in the weird record stores—the ones run by guys with the funny haircuts, who’ve got things pierced that you didn’t know you could pierce.”

For the past two decades, the rabble-rousing musician shifted his focus to radio, joining a show on SiriusXM satellite radio’s Outlaw Country channel in 2005, “The Loon in the Afternoon.” He suffered cardiac arrest after performing a show on the Outlaw Country Cruise, an annual music event where he served as a co-host and regular performer.

Wayne Kramer, the co-founding guitarist of the seminal rock band MC5, whose social activism carried on throughout his lengthy solo career, died on February 2, 2024, after battling pancreatic cancer. He was 75.

Kramer roused the rabble long ahead of his time, one of a handful of guitar players who changed the direction of rock music from his early days in the MC5. Though the storied group’s lifespan was brief, its influence was vast, providing the prototype for what would later divide into both the heavy-metal camp and the ’70s punk-rock revolution. Formed in Detroit when rage and uprising was tearing apart the city, the MC5 first rose to fame as the cultural spearhead of John Sinclair’s White Panther Party, whose radical politics cost the band its first record deal.

The MC5 battled its high-energy course through three albums—notably the incendiary 1969 debut Kick Out the Jams, whose expletive-inclusive title track put the band in hot water immediately, and Back in the USA, produced by critic Jon Landau before he shepherded Bruce Springsteen’s career. Kramer and his bandmates brought flash and fury to performances, from riots and street parties to legendary psychedelic venues such as Detroit’s Grande Ballroom and New York’s Fillmore East to some of the great open-air festivals of the time.

But the members found themselves ignored by the mainstream, slugging it out in the no-man’s-land between the commercial music industry and political extremism. The MC5 burned hot—and, by 1972, burned out. Kramer went downhill for years, including a high-profile stint in federal prison for dealing cocaine and a decades-long war with his personal demons.

The new millennium signaled a rebirth for Kramer as a happy and healthy solo artist, writing and producing projects and launching a label. In 2002, he promoted his loose ’n’ loud Adult World album with a club tour, hitting the Bluebird Theater in Denver.

“It was a long road,” he said. “I got off track for a while. I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict, and if I’m in the active part of that disease, it’s a full-time job. So a lot of those years, nothing got read and nothing got written and records didn’t get made. In the process of getting sober, I realized our time here is finite. If I’m going to make any mark, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Kramer still wanted to rock hard, but his lyrics touched on thoughtful, deliberate topics, among them a mid-century noir fiction writer (“Nelson Algren Stopped By,” featuring X-Mars-X, a Chicago avant-jazz group) and Fidel Castro (“Love, Fidel’). “I was intrigued with the idea that Fidel Castro was having an affair with this wife of a bourgeois doctor in Havana society,” he said. “I always loved Fidel—he’s one of my old revolutionary heroes. But to find out how human he was, too, that song had to be written. I write ’em because I have to.”

Kramer continued to rage against the machine. A dollar from every ticket sold on his tour went to the West Memphis Three Defense Fund, to aid three young men who were convicted in 1994 of murdering three 8-year-olds (supporters believed their conviction was in error and blamed “Satanic panic” due to the defendants’ alleged Satanic practices). Adult World was released on Kramer’s own MuscleTone records.

“You gotta get up in the morning and go to work, nothing but,” Kramer said. “And I’m loving it. We went to the (Small Business Administration), which I find ironic—here’s the same government that in the ’70s locked me up, and today is giving me a small business loan to start a record company. I feel like Don King—‘Only in America! Land of opportunity! Horatio Alger!’ They required us to go to business school, and I thought that was going to be a holy bore, and it was anything but—the instructors were high-end corporate consultants, very sharp. It was fantastic to learn why people really buy the things they buy, because I always thought everybody bought things according to price. But if that was true, we’d all eat at Taco Bell and drive Yugos.

“Ultimately, I would like to be the guy that could say yes. Maybe take these years that I’ve been in this game and apply them to good purpose, to help somebody else’s music find an audience.”

And that he did, spending the last two decades walking the talk. In addition to numerous musical endeavors, he served as an advocate for Jail Guitar Doors—a charity, named for the 1978 Clash song, that provides musical equipment to prisoners as a means of rehabilitation.

Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, whose brand of laid-back island escapism on hits like “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise” made him a hero to devoted fans known as Parrot Heads, died on September 1, 2023.

Raised in Alabama, Buffett had never seen the mountains until a friend from Colorado’s Timberline Rose turned him on to the Rockies in the early ’70s. “I had been up to Montana to visit people, but I hadn’t spent a long period of time out West,” Buffett said. “Denver was the first place I went on tour—I got out of humidity and came to the mountains to play. The Cafe York on Colfax was my first gig in Colorado.”

Dressed in Levis and a cowboy shirt, his hair long, Buffett carried his two Martin guitars from the small coffeehouses to college campuses. There, with a distinctive southern-flavored accent, he entertained. “No flashing diamond rings, no skin-tight tuxedo, no Las Vegas marquees,” he said. “I lived in a little sleazy hotel in metropolitan Denver, and then I went to the mountains, as everybody has done—up to Evergreen, Bailey, then Breckenridge where I did the summer mountain circuit, having a glorious time. I wound up the tour in downtown Pueblo, not known as the most beautiful spot in Colorado. But seeing every side of Colorado eventually led to me settling there for a while.

“Circa 1971, when I was doing my mountain touring summers in Colorado. I’d gone out to San Francisco and was living in a Howard Johnson’s in Marin County. I left my girlfriend, who later became my wife, in Aspen. I was thinking about her and I wrote ‘Come Monday.’” The song became Buffett’s first hit single in 1974. The song “A Mile High in Denver” eventually appeared on Buffett’s Before the Beach album. 

The artist made his home in Aspen for many years before relocating to the Caribbean. “Most people always consider going to Colorado for the winter, but my attachment was a summertime thing,” he testified, having made yet another survey of Aspen’s bars. “There’s so much to do.”

With the million-selling Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, Buffett’s following had swelled gradually to reach major proportions. “Margaritaville” was a perfect example of his charming brand of let’s-go-down-to-the-Caribbean lifestyle, and its huge popularity shot him into the national spotlight and cemented his status as a Colorado favorite. He considered his Red Rocks Amphitheatre show in 1977 as the greatest of his career to that point. For his 1978 concert at McNichols Sports Arena, Dan Fogelberg came down off his mountain to join the band for an encore; Buffett had the entire audience hanging on his every word. His appearance at the CU Events Center in 1982 was notable as singer Katy Moffatt returned to Colorado as a backup singer in his entourage.

By 1985, Buffett was still a performing animal first and foremost, maintaining his status as a top-drawing concert attraction. As part of his show at Denver’s Mile High Stadium, the Denver Symphony Orchestra joined him and his Coral Reefer Band on stage for three songs. But he’d recently diversified—he’d finished a screenplay for a long-rumored film version of Margaritaville and opened a store in Key West called Margaritaville, selling all sorts of Buffett paraphernalia and merchandise, including his own line of “Caribbean Soul” clothing. His Last Mango in Paris album contained an entry form to win a cruise aboard Buffett’s yacht for three days.

But radio ignored his music in the ’80s. “It stands for the quality of our stage show that when the record business went a different direction from where we were, we kept going,” he shrugged. “Hey, you know me—I never work too hard. When the weather’s beautiful, I’m on my way to the golf course.”

In 1986, for a special Sunday afternoon concert, the only daytime gig on his Floridays tour, 9,000 Parrot Heads crammed into Red Rocks Amphitheater in the midday heat. “They know every word to every song I ever wrote,” he marveled. “They seem to be relatively normal people most of the time—but when they come to my shows, they put on their ‘feathers’ and go nuts.” The show resembled an oversized backyard barbeque—the Hawaiian shirts were off, imbibing was mandatory—and Buffett maintained his usual upbeat atmosphere for his following of “cultural outpatients.” “I haven’t seen this much white meat since Thanksgiving,” he surmised.

The tropical rocker performed two shows at Denver’s Fiddler’s Green in 1988. “You can be the president of the band or work at the 7-Eleven, but on that day when I come to town, if you’re a Parrot Head, you can act pretty insane—and get away with it.” The “son of a son of a sailor” had added a new element to his lifestyle by piloting his own seaplane, a Lake Aircraft Renegade. “Flying gives you total freedom,” he said. “I haven’t given up sailing, but when you’re up there, you can really let go of things. The plane’s opened up—pardon the pun—a lot of horizons for me.”

Many fans assumed Buffett was the laid-back, carefree character portrayed in his songs, but his protean output revealed an industrious side. He was also an author (The Jolly Mon, a children’s book), an environmentalist (chairing and doing major fundraising on the Save the Manatee committee) and a restaurateur (his “Margaritaville Café”).

“I basically run it like a boat,” he said of his business empire. “The secret is to find competent people to work for you, to keep it within a family. A lot of folks who were on the road with me for years decided they didn’t want to tour anymore, so they stay home and run the Florida businesses for me.” He had aborted plans for his Margaritaville movie. “I’m gonna take a little more time off next year and work on my book, because with a book you don’t have to have meetings with accountants and lawyers. If I want Godzilla to eat the conch train, they can’t tell me it costs too much.”

His 1989 summer tour came to Denver’s Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater for two sold-out shows. “This is the 17^th consecutive year I’ve gone out on tour and wound up in Colorado,” he said. “I’m glad people have liked me for so long, because I don’t want to remake myself. But even when you’re sailing in one direction, you still have to tack a lot. In other words, every now and then you’ve got to scrape the roux off the bottom of the gumbo pot—it makes it better.”

He was so pleased with his 17^th album, Off to See the Lizard, that he finished a collection of 16 short stories that Harcourt Books published, titled Tales from Margaritaville. “I wanted to be a writer long before I ever thought about music, so I’m real proud. I finally used my journalism degree (from the University of Southern Mississippi). I forgot how much motivation putting Catholic guilt in front of a deadline was.”

At a winter book signing at Lakeside Mall, 1,500 people came in freezing snow. “It was overpowering how everybody expressed their opinion as to where I should play in Denver—which is Red Rocks. It was definitely on their minds, so I listened intently to them. If we’d have gone back to Fiddler’s Green, I think people would have started not coming. I wanted to play Red Rocks if I could get reserved seating instead of general admission, because G.A. is a combat zone in the front rows. It’s fine if people want to camp out all day, but if that’s what I’ve got to play over to get to the other 90 percent, it’s hell up there. I know reserved seating makes for a better show.”

And that’s what he got for two nights at Red Rocks in 1990. “I saw some shows this year that my daughter is interested in. I won’t name names, but one begins with an ‘M’ and ends with an ‘a.’ And the lack of true performing sense that’s out there really dawned on me. A show is considered good if somebody actually sings live! I guess I’m showing my age, but to me, lip-synching in performance is appalling, the lamest excuse. It’s just fear—the point of being a live performer is taking the risk that anything can happen.” Instead of playing golf or sailing before showing up for days of rehearsal, he worked for weeks enhancing his show, dissecting harmonies and beefing up theatrics. “My daughter paid me the ultimate compliment. She said, ‘Dad, it sounds so good they’re gonna think you’re lip-synching.”

Buffett did return to Fiddler’s Green for two nights in 1992. While delegates at the Republican convention in Houston were supporting President Bush, the sold-out audiences at Fiddler’s boosted the campaign of another nominee with “Jimmy Buffett for President” bumper stickers. “My success is still unexplainable. I defy all odds—no hit singles, no videos, and I’m the top concert draw in the country. I’ve done it my way—I haven’t taken a summer off in 20 years, and it’s paid off. I’ve regenerated my audience—I’m 45 and the demographics at my shows are getting younger. I’ve got the war babies’ babies.”  He was playing “A Mile High in Denver” in his sets. “It’s dated, but sort of funny—I guess you could say I hear the potential,” he laughed.

By 1994, when he played Fiddler’s Green for two nights, he was a record company CEO (his Margaritaville Records) and a best-selling author (Where Is Joe Merchant?, his novel about a seaplane pilot investigating the disappearance of a rock star in the Caribbean). And he’d begun working with Herman Wouk on a stage musical based on Don’t Stop the Carnival, Wouk’s 1965 novel about a Broadway press agent who quits his job and buys an island hotel hoping to find paradise (he doesn’t).

Fans saw snow on the ground three days before Buffett’s two performances at Fiddler’s Green in 1996. “The October outdoor dates don’t bother me,” he said, wondering if the Parrot Heads would turn into Penguin Heads and the drinks they dragged out of their coolers would be frozen margaritas. But his musical with Wouk opened in April 1997 at the Coconut Grove Theater in Miami and had a seven-week run.

“I had no expertise in the theater, but it hasn’t been that hard to cross over,” he said before previews. “I’ve got 30 years of successfully navigating the waters of rock ’n’ roll, which is pretty similar. I said going in, ‘There’s nothing that I have not seen in maintaining a band that they could throw at me,’ and, so far, it’s rung true. My experience lies in the fact that I believe I’m a good showman, and that’s why I love musical theater as a consumer.”

By 1999, only six authors had reached No. 1 on both the New York Times’ fiction and non-fiction lists: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Irving Wallace, Dr. Seuss—and Buffett. Where Is Joe Merchant? had achieved No. 1 in 1993, and he reappeared at the top with A Pirate Looks at Fifty, a prose documentation of a three-week, 17,000-mile trip around the Southern hemisphere he took with his family upon turning 50 on Christmas Day 1996.

“It’s funny that I’ve never won anything for music, but the awards are selling out venues and going to the top of the best-seller list and selling tens of thousands of hardback books. You’re reaching and pleasing your audience. I’ve always run on my own set of rules and bucked the establishment in every way—but not head-on. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. But when all of a sudden they can’t deny the fact that you’re successful—yeah, there’s a great bit of satisfaction.

“I don’t consider myself a musician—in the lineage from theologians, we’re descendants of court jesters. Our job is to make people happy. It’s not to save the world. The core of what I do is entertain. I can entertain on stage, or I can entertain in a book now.”

By 2002, Buffett didn’t expect to receive airplay between the teen-pop stars and rap-rockers of the world, but his ability to draw audiences hadn’t diminished. He did a show at Pepsi Center in 2003, and it was like his previous tours. Otherwise normal human beings came arrayed in hula skirts and coconut bras—women included. They drank beer until their aim got fuzzy, then hurled beach balls at the stage. They danced the land shark.

“I’m simply a working guy who gets up there to do a show and give everybody the bang for their buck—Southern work ethic meets Catholic upbringing,” he said with a laugh. “There’s no end in sight, so I’m going to ride it, keep doing exactly what I’m doing. People will tell you when they’re tired of you. You can never please everybody at once—they’re going to bitch about anything from ticket prices to not getting tickets to whether you’re doing their favorite songs. But as long as 99 percent of the people talk about how much fun they have, I’ve got to think I’m doing something right!

“How much more do I need? Nothing. But if you’re somebody that loves what you do, why would you quit? (Football coach) Don Shula once told me, ‘Jimmy, do it as long as you can. There are only so many fishing and golf tournaments you can go to.’”

Born in 1941, Purnell Steen grew up in Denver as a student of classical piano and part of a musical dynasty, with cousins including 5-time Grammy Award-winning vocalist Dianne Reeves; keyboardist, composer and producer George Duke; saxophonist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson; and legendary bassist Charlie Burrell. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the Five Points neighborhood was a sanctuary for the African American community and the heart of Denver’s thriving jazz community, with over fifty bars and clubs playing host to local players and all the greats, from Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Jack Kerouac called the cultural and entertainment mecca the “Harlem of the West.” For nearly 40 years, with his bands Le Jazz Machine and the Five Points Ambassadors, Steen has been a favorite on the Denver scene, dedicated to preserving and playing the “Five Points style” of jazz at clubs and festivals. In September 2022, the Ambassadors toured Denver’s sister city, Brest, France, as part of a cultural exchange.

Time Code

Robbie Robertson, the legendary guitarist and songwriter who led the Band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, died at age 80 on August 9, 2023.

Robertson had the magical skill to evoke places and people of early rural America with such Band classics as “The Weight” and “Up on Cripple Creek.”

“I have great gratitude and respect for the musical journey that got me here,” Robertson said over breakfast at Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel in 1998. “But I’m not real good at retracing my footsteps. One of the things that I’m thankful for is my curiosity factor. What makes me uncomfortable is not knowing what’s going on in music. I can’t hide under a rock. A lot of my friends from my generation decided a few years back that everything happening now is shit, and they just don’t listen or acknowledge it. Well, it isn’t for me.”

Robertson devoted the middle years of his career to the moody, atmospheric byways of popular music, making nods to his Native American roots. He had long hoped for a project to explore the music of indigenous Americans. He was half-Mohawk—his mother was raised on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Canada. He formed a group called the Red Road Ensemble for The Native Americans, his soundtrack to a six-hour TBS documentary series by the same name in 1994.

“In the late ’60s, it was easier to find some ‘juice’ to take out of the air—there was incredible music coming from every crack in the woodwork,” he recalled. “Now I don’t have the same kind of juice. I’ve got to challenge myself. Rather than Paul Simon going to Brazil or Peter Gabriel going to Africa, what’s wrong with helping some people who live right here? It’s about time somebody made the effort to send out a taste to the world.

“I thought that the documentary was honorable, based on the fact that Native Americans would be speaking on their own behalf. It’s giving me the opportunity to make a record that’s been building in me ever since I was a little kid. We all try to find some events in our lives that give us inner satisfaction. This was it for me, a calling.”

Using Native Americans at all levels of production, Robertson teamed with a variety of talent. “For months, I listened to thousands of pieces of music—a lot of it is very local, you can only buy it on the reservation where it’s made. There are 400 nations. At the end, I thought, ‘Well, I’m the guy—I’m the foremost authority on Native American music in the whole world, thank you!’ Well, I’m not, but I felt that way.”

Robertson, who went into the project “thinking in traditional terms,” said he soon “discovered you can’t pretend it’s 100 years ago—you can only be inspired by that. We live here and we naturally think that Native American music is the cliched stuff we hear in movies, that the people live on the plains or in the woods. But I recorded in Manhattan—all of the people I worked with are very contemporary in what they do.”

When we spoke, more than two decades had passed since the Band had broken up. Robertson said he wasn’t the impediment to a reunion—it was Levon Helm, who accused Robertson in a book of taking sole credit for many collaboratively composed Band songs. In 1993, Helm, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson had put out Jericho, the first Band studio album since 1977.

“I have no problem with those people making a living—it’s with my blessing,” Robertson said. “I’m not interested in doing anything with the Band anymore—a lot of it has to do with Richard (Manuel, who committed suicide in 1986) not being there. But I’d hate to be carrying around that bitterness and anger. I didn’t even know it was there. If I was in Levon’s shoes, I’d be bitter, too. Things haven’t gone great for him, and he’s trying to blame me for it. But sour grapes just doesn’t play.”

On 1998’s Contact from the Underworld of Redboy, Robertson set out to plumb more of his past. “I returned to the reservation, and it triggered all these things that I felt I had to deal with. In Indian country, these traditions are all handed down to you like a gift. And you’re not supposed to hoard the gift, you’re supposed to pass it on. I had taken the gift and stored it in a trunk in the attic. And it didn’t feel good to me.

“And I didn’t know how to share it without it coming off wrong—a few years ago, I didn’t feel that there was a receptive place in people’s hearts. But the stars have moved into position or something. This is original roots music of North America that’s been so secretive, so sacred, so private. And to think that people would not be interested in it and embrace it is strange.”

Robertson crafted a unique, charming album that owed very little to the Band’s enduring sound. The music blended traditional Indian tribal chants and rhythms with an up-to-the-minute electronic and ambient vibe interspersed with Robertson’s coarse guitar phrases and vocals. It was disquieting and richly textured.

“When Elvis Presley mixed country music and R&B, or when I first played with Bob Dylan and we were mixing folk and electric music—on paper, it didn’t look right. And not only that, people resented the change. But when those sparks do fly, it’s mystical. This was the experience of a lifetime. We didn’t have another record to compare it to. We knew that we were making a record that people had not heard before. That’s the good news. And the bad news, too, because it’s a little scary. You’re treading in unknown territory. So your barometer can only be, ‘Is this working for me emotionally, pushing buttons that send chills down my spine?’ That’s the reason we all like music.”

The rhythms came courtesy of London club underground deejay/mixer/producer Howie B (whose credits included U2, Bjork and Massive Attack) and Marius de Vries (the Romeo & Juliet soundtrack). A 53-year-old rock star keeping company with cool beat programmers, Robertson was also executive producer of the Phenomenon soundtrack—he put Eric Clapton and producer Babyface together with the song “Change the World,” which subsequently won Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. He also rekindled a creative relationship with director Martin Scorsese, producing the soundtrack to his film Casino.

But Robertson hadn’t toured since “The Last Waltz,” the band’s final concert held in San Francisco on Thanksgiving of 1976. “Touring was like smoking,” Robertson said. “It was unhealthy for me. So I gave it up—so badly that I made a movie and a three-record disc about it. That lifestyle is tremendously beneficial financially, but I’m not interested in it. People go on the road and say, ‘Oh, I just love to feel the audience.’ Trust me—I did it for a long time and made that connection, but it becomes a business. And when it was no longer a growing process, I thought, ‘I want off this train.’ And then to come back and say, ‘Just kidding’?

“When it became clear to me that I needed to make this record, it wasn’t a decision that I weighted up in dollars and cents. It was, ‘What’s the best medicine for your soul?’ Nobody is telling me what to do. I don’t have to account for some pop formula. I’m fortunate enough to be in this free zone. I need to take advantage of that position and make whatever contribution I can.”

Randy Meisner, a creator of the Southern California rock sound as a singer, songwriter and bassist who achieved fame with the Eagles and Poco in the ’70s, died on July 26, 2023. He was 77.

Growing up on a farm near Scottsbluff, Nebraska, Meisner pursued his musical ambitions working clubs and bars throughout the Midwest. An affable, easygoing sort with a sweet high voice, he cut his teeth playing with the Drivin’ Dynamics and arrived in Denver in 1966 to play a battle of the bands. He linked up with one of the competing groups, the Soul Survivors—not the New York-based blue-eyed soul group of “Expressway to Your Heart” fame, but a well-produced pop-rock act that scored two No. 1 hits on Denver’s Top 40 giant KIMN (“Can’t Stand to Be in Love with You” and “Hung Up on Losing”).

“When they lost their bass player, they asked me if I wanted to jump ship and move to Los Angeles with them,” Meisner said. Hard times inspired a name change of his band to the Poor. Meisner shared a space on the living room floor of a one-bedroom apartment with four other people for $85 a month. Gigs were few and far between. “We didn’t realize how much competition was out there,” he recalled. “My jacket was my first pillow. We really had nothing at all.”

The one plus was that the Poor shared management with Buffalo Springfield. When that group disbanded, Jim Messina and Richie Furay formed Poco and recruited Furay’s friend, Rusty Young from Colorado’s Böenzee Cryque. Young called in two buddies from Colorado—drummer George Grantham, also from Böenzee Cryque, and Meisner. Poco’s Pickin’ Up the Pieces debuted in 1969, blending sweet country harmonies with a driving rock beat.

But Meisner left in a dispute over the final mixes to the album. Rick Nelson, a Fifties rock ’n’ roll legend determined to establish an adult identity and gain the respect he deserved as a country-rock musician, marshaled the Stone Canyon Band with Meisner, who contacted lead guitarist Allen Kemp and drummer Patrick Shanahan, his buddies from the Poor, the band that first brought him from Denver. Meisner recorded two albums with the Stone Canyon Band, stacking his vocals in angelic high harmony on top of Nelson’s.

He quit and rejoined, then quit again to hook up with Glenn Frey and Don Henley, deciding to fly with the Eagles. He experienced the high of co-writing and singing the signature hit “Take It to the Limit,” but he left in 1977, disenchanted, to pursue a solo career, giving up the security of one of the country’s top bands.

Meisner recorded a self-titled album in 1978. “It was a revelation,” he said. “I had to do a lot of things I’d never encountered before, like come up with a full album’s worth of songs, sing all the leads and put together my own band. I was very excited, but I wasn’t prepared for what was involved—I left a lot of things up to other people.”

After a brief club tour, which included a performance at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver, Meisner spent time reflecting in his Nebraska hometown. “I had to take a hard look at myself and my strengths and weaknesses as a musician, my personal and creative barriers. I decided I wanted to make another record, and I was fortunate that things clicked.”

Meisner’s saga resumed with One More Song, produced by Val Garay, a highly reputed engineer with a string of platinum albums by Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor to his credit. Garay introduced Meisner to songwriter Eric Kaz. As a team, Meisner and Kaz came up with two Top 40 standouts—“Deep Inside My Heart,” featuring a guest appearance by Kim Carnes, and the rollicking “Hearts on Fire” with Wendy Waldman on harmonies.

In 1982, Meisner released his third solo album, featuring help from members of Heart and a sonorous single, “Never Been in Love.” In the late ’80s, he toured with the Roberts-Meisner Band, joined by former Firefall singer-songwriter Rick Roberts. Reuniting with Poco for the Legacy album and tour, he sang lead on “Nothin’ to Hide,” a Top 40 single. But Meisner never took part when the Eagles resumed touring; his health deteriorated and he eventually stopped performing. In 2020, he made remote appearances via video with his friend Furay at two livestream concerts.

Sinéad O’Connor, the outspoken Irish singer-songwriter who went to the top of the charts at a dizzying speed with her biggest hit, the Grammy-winning “Nothing Compares 2 U,” died on July 26, 2023. She was 56.

O’Connor roared into view in 1988 releasing The Lion and the Cobra, which garnered rave reviews and topped alternative music playlists. With her shaved head and doe-eyed stare, the 20-year-old Irish singer generated an auspicious aura when she performed at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver. She claimed that she was simply a novice albeit precocious talent.

“I’m trying very hard not to be mysterious,” she said quietly between sips of coffee and drags on a cigarette. “Before they even hear me, people tend to think I’m a rather dramatic, fiery person because I’m Irish and I’m a woman. But I’m not.”

Yet she readily admitted to an independent streak, wanting to be a source of conflict. She first recorded at age 14 with the Irish band In Tua Nua. She worked with U2 guitarist The Edge on his soundtrack for the movie The Captive, although she was careful to downplay any affiliation with the famed supergroup. She co-produced The Lion and the Cobra herself after an aborted effort with an outside producer. “I didn’t feel I could explain to anybody else exactly what I wanted,” she shrugged. “A complete fool could produce an album—I think I’m proof of that. As long as you can punch the right buttons…”

The Lion and the Cobra was indignant and angry, her attempt to exorcise the effects of her turbulent childhood. She wrote the majority of songs, vehicles for her remarkably flexible voice. The spacy atmospheric textures of her music had drawn uninvited comparisons with Laurie Anderson and Jane Siberry. “It’s bound to happen because I’m another girl artist,” she sighed. “But it bothers me when I’m compared to people I can’t stand. I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else, but I’m certainly not like Suzanne Vega.”

O’Connor was touring America with her nine-month-old son in tow, striving to keep the experience “as normal as possible—I can’t understand why the album has done so well,” she admitted. “It never occurred to me when I was writing the songs that any of this would be happening. It proves that it’s not a problem to do what you want to do. I don’t want to be considered a poet or a genius, and I don’t try to convey any image in my music. I just write songs for myself. I’m just Sinéad.”

Then came the massive success of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” her cover of an obscure Prince ballad that became a No. 1 hit and MTV staple. In singing intimately about her quest for serenity, she sounded like she’d learned a lot in her 23 years—her seductive commentaries about philosophical transformation and personal exorcisms were sensitive and straightforward. At Red Rocks Amphitheatre, her voice covered a symphonic range, shifting octaves in mid-syllable from banshee wailing to a child’s whisper.

But the only thing greater than her magnificent voice was her talent for being at the center of controversy. Audiences were outraged when she refused to allow the national anthem to be played before a concert in New Jersey (Frank Sinatra said she deserved a “kick in the ass”). The following year, she tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, making front-page headlines around the world. The incident led to a demonstration in New York, where protesters hired a steamroller and drove over a stack of her records. Two weeks later, she was booed off stage at a New York Bob Dylan tribute concert.

O’Connor’s Universal Mother album expressed her sadness, and it coincided with a near-nervous breakdown. After intensive therapy, she retreated from public view to quietly put her life back together. She concentrated on loving herself, her son Jake, 10, and daughter Roisin, 1.

“I remember that I was voted the ‘most loved’ and the ‘most hated’ in Rolling Stone, which is really an achievement,” she said prior to a concert at the Paramount Theater in Denver in 1997. “America is full of people who are jumping out of every doorway dying to have a fight over something. How the media writes does not reflect how people feel. I’ve never experienced anything but the utmost respect from people on the street with regards to the actions I’ve taken in public. The only hassle or disrespect I’ve ever gotten has been from the media.

“But that’s been all across the globe. It’s worse in England, to tell you the truth. It’s just that in America, people are more inclined to come out and march, or hire a steamroller. In a way, you have to admire it. In England, they wouldn’t have the courage to do that. Basically, I think an artist’s job is to create conversation about things which need to be talked about. I’ve done a good job there.”

At age 30, the confessional singer-songwriter had reached a turning point. She was preoccupied with motherhood and spirituality, as indicated by the sweet, comforting tones of her Gospel Oak EP. She’d started a healing process toward her abusive mother, the Catholic Church and those who had victimized her in the past. She considered herself more of a Rastafarian than a Catholic. “Catholicism teaches that God is dead, that he was crucified on the cross. Rastafarianism teaches that God is a living creature, some sense that lives in all of us and is present in every moment of every day in every conversation.”

At the Paramount, she didn’t perform any songs from her debut album or “Nothing Compares 2 U.” “I do the songs which don’t hurt me—I don’t do miserable songs because I don’t feel like that anymore,” she said. “I always wanted to be 30. The 20s were a very fearful time, and I figured that when I got to be 30, I’d acquire a certain serenity. And that’s how it turned out.

“Fame is a curse. It’s a weird ol’ thing, because there you are and the world thinks you’re great and you think you’re a piece of shit. It was the worst phase of my life, which I thank God I’ll never have to go through again. I think we all have to go through that dark night of the soul, and I’m just grateful I got mine over with when I was young. The only way to handle it is to learn by your mistakes.”

Tony Bennett, the legendary pop and jazz crooner who famously sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” died on July 21, 2023. He was 96.

In the early ’90s, Bennett was an aging hipster at a crossroads. He’d had a prolific recording career, becoming a star with a chain of major hits in the ’50s that included “Because of You,” “Cold Cold Heart” and “Rags to Riches.”  But he hadn’t had a record deal since the ’70s.

With a management team led by his son Danny, Bennett popped up in some unusual places—appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, then a cartoon cameo on The Simpsons, then a Nike commercial. And in 1993, he stole the show at the MTV Video Music Awards with the tuxedoed Red Hot Chili Peppers, strolling on stage in a velvet top hat, T-shirt, shorts and sunglasses and crooning a few lines of a Chili Peppers song.

The gig really lit the firecracker, and after his Grammy-winning 1994 MTV Unplugged set, Bennett enjoyed a newfound cachet among a generation that was barely around for Watergate. The hair on the heads filling his shows ranged from blue to green. In 2001, the singer teamed up with k.d. lang for a tour that visited Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in Denver. He had just celebrated his 75^th birthday, exuding a mellow happiness that was contagious.

“You know what it is? A wisdom sets in. You accumulate a lot of knowledge,” he said in his smoky rasp of a singing voice. “I was lucky to catch the tail end of the old vaudeville days, when you went from town to town and they took time to allow you to break in. It takes about ten years to really learn how to work on a stage and feel competent.”

Musically, Bennett had never crossed the line between cool and campy. He was a conservationist of music history. The voice was thicker, but he still loved to belt Berlin, Porter, Gershwin and Ellington—the popular American songbook.

“That’s the treasure chest of the ’30s and ’40s. Beautiful music, a lot better than the music that is out today. In those days, it was people like Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee that went right to the top, because they were doing the best music. It’s a different era now. It’s who just sold the most records—the obsolescence, the super-greed going on.

“In America, we’ve made a lot of money, we’re very successful a lot of times, but down the line a couple of hundred years from now, they’ll say, ‘Well, what did you guys contribute to the rest of the world? It’s jazz—that’s our only tradition, that and baseball.”

Also an accomplished painter, Bennett exhibited his landscapes, portraits and still lifes in galleries worldwide under his real name, Benedetto. But painting was a choice for him. Singing was not.

“I love to work. I don’t have to do it, but I love it. I learn every time I hit the stage. The only advice I could give anybody that sings is to drink a lot of water and get a lot of sleep! Take care of yourself and you start singing good.”

Bennett walked the talk—and the song. Despite an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2016, he continued to sing at an impressive level until 2021, joining Lady Gaga—with whom he’d recorded albums in 2014 and 2021—at Radio City Music Hall on his 95^th birthday.

George Winston, a solo pianist whose Grammy-winning sound helped define the new age genre, died on June 4. He was 74.

Winston’s soothing instrumentals, released on the Windham Hill label in the ’80s, sold millions, but he never cared much for efforts to pigeonhole his music as new age. A self-described “rural folk” pianist, the alternative superstar put his records of evocative ponderings high on the pop and jazz charts, but he still performed barefoot at his concerts—including a show at Macky Auditorium in Boulder in 1982 in support of a Christmas album, December, his fourth solo piano recording.

“People think I have a classical background, and that’s funny,” Winston allowed. “I consider myself the total antithesis of everything having to do with classical music, from stage manner and dress on down to practice. I do solo concerts where I can play anything I want and not have to watch the time. Maybe I’ll tell a few jokes. It’s better for me to spend my time playing three hours at a concert than to waste my time playing five minutes on The Tonight Show. Once the concert is happening, it doesn’t matter if one person is there or 10,000. A concert isn’t the big sacred act of all time, but it’s an event made for that point in time—that’s what the audience wants.”

December contained original, impressionistic pieces in tribute to the winter season, but it also included arrangements of seven traditional songs. It came to be his highest-selling album, and Winston raked in a lot of revenue. He used it to fund new artists through his own Dancing Cat Productions (to record practitioners of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, a genre he admired) rather than shopping at Famous Footwear.

“The money’s good, but so what?,” he reasoned. “You can have a bunch of money sitting in the bank and you may still be saying, ‘Ouch, I don’t want to wake up this morning.’ Money doesn’t increase happiness, it just lets me make other people happier. If this business didn’t make me more friends, I wouldn’t be in it.”

Tina Turner, whose modest beginnings balanced out her emergence as one of the most admired entertainers in the world, died on May 24, 2023. She was 83.

With her 1987 performance at Denver’s McNichols Arena, the sexy godmother of rock ’n’ roll, who had just turned 49, was concluding a phase of her long career. The show was the final stop on her US tour, which she claimed would be her last ever. She cited her years of roadwork with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, plus the incessant touring that had ensued when her Private Dancer album topped the international charts in 1984.

“I’ve been around long enough,” she laughed. “I’m leaving people with enough! They’ve got videotapes to play now.”

Turner’s assertiveness about her career jibed with her give-it-all-you-got image—the resounding voice, the heartbreak face, the wild hair, the great legs. But that expansive spirit had emerged as she triumphed over adversity, making her own way in the world to survive.

Turner was on her own from the beginning, after her parents, who sought work during World War II in Knoxville, left their three-year-old in the care of relatives in Nutbush, Tennessee. Turner (née Anna Mae Bullock) eventually left her sharecropper cousins to rejoin her mother in East St. Louis, Illinois, where her sister brought her to the Club Manhattan to see the hottest band in town—the Kings of Rhythm, led by a guitarist named Ike Turner.

Having found her voice in the church choir, Anna Mae approached Turner to sing with his band, but he ignored her. One night she simply took hold of a microphone and started to belt out a B.B. King tune at her table. Ike stopped playing the organ, ran off the stage and told her, “I didn’t know you could really sing. What else do you know?”

After marrying in 1958, Ike gave Anna Mae (whom he renamed Tina) her start fronting his powerhouse rhythm & blues show. Starting in 1960, they strung together more than a decade of hits as the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, including “A Fool in Love,” “Come Together,” the legendary “River Deep, Mountain High” and their Grammy-winning version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.”

But her lifestyle as Ike’s prisoner was hellish—her professional career was marked by his increasing violence and dependence on drugs, his dominating and brutal behavior.   “He kept control of me with fear,” she said.

Tina’s desperation and disappointment eventually led her to walk away from Ike and strike out on her own—with 36 cents in her pocket and her newfound Buddhist beliefs. A year after their split in 1975, Tina launched a solo career that faltered.

But in 1984, she soared into superstardom with Private Dancer and the hits “What’s Love Got to Do with It” (a multiple Grammy winner), “Let’s Stay Together,” “Better Be Good to Me” and the title track. The album sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

“I learned not to typecast myself after my experience with the song ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It,’” she said. “That was something I wouldn’t have taken on normally, but my manager’s guidance told me that it could be one of those moves that end up in something good.”

Turner, who in 1975 had portrayed the Acid Queen in the film version of the Who’s Tommy, then accepted the role of Aunty Entity, the despotic boss of a post-holocaust Dodge City in the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. She sang on the historic USA for Africa recording of “We Are the World.” She performed with Mick Jagger at Live Aid, acted with David Bowie in a Pepsi commercial and schmoozed on her million-selling Break Every Rule album with Phil Collins (drums on the hit “Typical Male”) and Steve Winwood (synthesizer on “Afterglow”).

Turner got the celebrity biopic treatment in 1993—What’s Love Got to Do with It, the feature film based on I Tina, her best-selling 1986 autobiography, opened. But she didn’t plan to see the movie, which focused on her relationship with Ike Turner.

“The movie compresses 16 years into two hours,” she said prior to embarking on her first American tour in six years—like many stars who had announced retirements from the stage and then returned. “I didn’t have approval in my contract. I’ve got fans who are going to see that movie and think it’s true, but it’s embellished bits and pieces.”

The primary focus of What’s Love Got to Do with It was on the dark times. Audiences sat through the ferocious beatings that Turner endured in her marriage to her ex, who was jailed in the late ’80s on drug and drunken-driving convictions.

“I’m not supporting any causes,” she said in reference to anti-abuse advocacy. “I can’t. It’s too much responsibility dealing with people who aren’t able to handle those kinds of situations. Anything that anybody wants to look up to me for, fine—that’s their need. But I don’t try to live up to any image. I’m the same woman I was when I went out to get myself to where I am now.

“I was just a country girl who worked her way through life, and I’m still continuously doing that. And I’ll just keep going, because I don’t want to get caught up in anything ever again.”

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Doug Kauffman founded Nobody In Particular Presents in 1987 and became a fixture in the Denver music industry, promoting concerts by emerging alternative rock acts as well as jazz, folk, rock and blues artists. He rented and then bought Englewood’s Gothic Theatre, and in the early Nineties, to save the Ogden Theatre from demolition, he purchased it with a loan from the City of Denver and turned it back into a live music venue. He then partnered to control concert promotion access to the Bluebird Theater as well. NIPP grew into a 25-person company, promoting concerts at numerous music venues in Denver, from Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Pepsi Center to the Denver Botanic Gardens and the Lion’s Lair, a small dive bar. In 2001, NIPP filed a lawsuit alleging antitrust violations against Clear Channel Entertainment, one of the largest radio and entertainment conglomerates in the world, claiming Clear Channel muscled artists into turning over promotion of their concerts rather than risk losing airplay and promotional support on the five local radio stations owned by Clear Channel. The lawsuit was settled three years later; Kauffman was pleased with the agreement, which many saw as a clear victory for independent concert promoters.

Time Code

Guitarist and songwriter Gary Rossington, the last surviving original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, died March 5, 2023. He was 71.

Lynyrd Skynyrd formed during the late ’60s in Jacksonville, Florida, taking its name from the members’ authoritarian P.E. teacher, Leonard Skinner. Discovered by producer Al Kooper while playing Southern bars and clubs, the group quickly became established as America’s most celebrated rock ’n’ boogie band of the mid-’70s, plugging in British hard-rock influences where most other Southern acts placed country roots. The powerful three-guitar lineup debuted on the Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd album, which included “Free Bird,” the group’s anthem, followed by three reputation-solidifying Top 40 hits, “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Saturday Night Special” and “What’s Your Name?”

Beloved by fans and industry figures alike for its aggressive, uncompromising approach, the band was poised on the edge of superstardom when, in 1977, its rented twin-engine plane crashed in the swamps near Gillsburg, Mississippi en route to Baton Rouge. The accident took the lives of vocalist Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines and shook the rock music world. Lynyrd Skynyrd was silenced at its peak.

The physical and emotional pain took time to purge. In 1980, Rossington and guitarist Allen Collins were the catalysts in approaching music once again as the Rossington Collins Band. “Don’t Misunderstand Me” charted before the group disbanded in 1982, and Collins was paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a 1986 car accident.

In 1987, Rossington reteamed with four other surviving Skynyrd members (Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson, Artimus Pyle and Ed King) in celebration of the original band. Lynyrd Skynyrd released two albums, the archival Legend and the live Southern by the Grace of God, and embarked on the Lynyrd Skynyrd Tribute Tour, which included two shows at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

“I’m sure there are people who think it’s wrong, and I felt like that until this year,” Rossington said. “I didn’t ever want to go back out as Lynyrd Skynyrd without Ronnie Van Zant and Allen Collins. I always felt Skynyrd was the three of us, and without those two, the band was gone for me. It was a hard decision for all of us whether to play. But it finally got to the point where it was time to do it. The last thing we did was have a plane crash together. Now we’re having a good time together.

“We’re just real tight—we grew up together, went to school together, went through so many life tragedies like the plane crash. We always were a family and best of friends.”

By 1991, the South was rising again. The great Southern rock bands of the ’70s—Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band, 38 Special—had released new recordings. And their skills were intact—they all had Top 10 songs on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart. Lynyrd Skynyrd returned to Red Rocks.

“Music happens in circles,” Rossington noted. “I’m happy to see it. Too often today, music is secondary to dancing and Broadway-type performances. It’s fun for us to walk out, plug in an amp and play with no effects or synthesizers or tapes—it’s the real deal. That’s why our fans relate to us—we say simple things in simple songs. Working-class people like to hear that. We found out we have something here, and we’re proud of it. I think we’re better than we were in some ways. Like George Foreman says, just because you’re old doesn’t mean you’re over the hill.”

In 1994, Lynyrd Skynyrd included an acoustic segment in a show at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre—“back porch” versions of the band’s classics. “Our writing has always been based around acoustic guitar,” Rossington said. “It’s roots music.”

By 1996, the legendary band was nominated on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot—and for once in rock music history, fans were listening to the same music their parents did. “And I thank God every day for it,” Rossington said. “It’s fun to see people in their 40s and 50s—like us—and then their kids, and now there’s even a new generation that hadn’t even been thought about when the band started. They stop us when we get off the bus and say, ‘All I do in college is listen to “Free Bird” and do homework.’ And they seem to know all the tunes and sing the lyrics with us—they’re clapping and dancing during the fast ones and crying during the sad songs. It’s not like they’re just coming to check us out. It’s strange to explain.”

Cynics said Rossington was backing into the prospective place in rock history, but he continued to rock, sustaining on the integrity and joy of playing music for people. By 1999, the lineup had been revamped, and the frontline of guitarists Rossington, Rickey Medlocke (ex-Blackfoot) and Hughie Thomasson (an Outlaws alum) made Lynyrd Skynyrd a Southern rock supergroup. In the wake of the Columbine High School tragedy, the reconstituted Skynyrd headlined a concert to benefit the Never Forgotten Fund, established to raise scholarship funding for Columbine. On the karmic tote board, the effort struck a nerve.

“Being in that plane crash, in a Mississippi swamp with all my friends laying around and dying and screaming, was just like being in Vietnam,” Rossington said. “So were the Columbine shootings for these kids—going to school and sitting in a library, and all of a sudden these two freaks come in firing away and saying what they said…Columbine hit us good and hard. We all have kids in school. It makes you think about going to school in my day—you used to go outside and fight by the bicycle racks. Nowadays you don’t even know the person that’s killing you—it’s worse than a war. There wasn’t any reason, it was the devil’s evil.

“We want to challenge Marilyn Manson and the rap people with the bad lyrics to write some positive songs. I’m not blaming them for Columbine. But they have a gift where people listen to their music—try to help a little bit instead of hurt so much. If Marilyn Manson would write a song that says ‘Do your damn homework,’ it’d make the world a better place and it wouldn’t hurt him at all. And if he doesn’t like it, to hell with him. He can come fight us—by the bicycle racks.”

David Lindley, who died on March 3, 2023 at the age of 78, pursued a peculiar—some would say nutty—path through more than five decades of music making. His encyclopedic knowledge of traditional forms, the arsenal of odd-shaped and stringed foreign instruments and his deft touch in every style was legendary. On top of his virtuoso facility, he was amusing—“the Prince of Polyester” was invariably garbed in something loud and tacky from his vast collection of ’70s leisure wear.

Lindley was best known for his work with Jackson Browne through the ’70s and ’80s—his impressive slide solo on “Running on Empty,” his marvelous falsetto vocals on the live version of “Stay.” His diverse musical talent put him at the top of everyone’s list of most sought-after sidemen.

“That was all good work, but it’s been an albatross,” the multi-instrumentalist wizard said when his tour brought him and his reggae-rock band El Rayo-X to Boulder in 1988. “Unfortunately people approached my own music with a preconception—‘Gee, he’s well off, is he doing this for a lark?’ They were primed to come to my shows and see the teacup as full, no room for anything else. But it’s empty—there’s more room for stuff that’s interrelated.”

Poly-ethnic interests informed Lindley’s music since his days with the ’60s-era semi-legendary California rock group Kaleidoscope. Along the way, he collaborated on albums and film scores with Ry Cooder. Like his friend and peer, Lindley got labeled as an archivist, a term he dismissed as lazy, unimaginative and inaccurate.

“If I was a scholar or historian, it would apply. But it’s different as a musician. I get ahold of something like Zaire drummers as a fan, and it fascinates me—I listen and march around the house like anyone else. But my tastes are weird, I assimilate everything I can, so my records are called ‘ethnic.’ I want to play acoustic, Middle Eastern instruments. If I could do that, I’d go to the Himalayas and eat berries for the rest of my life.”

Lindley reserved the more weird and wonderful twists for his own somewhat more experimental solo work, first with El Rayo-X. In 1992, he camped out in Colorado for a week doing acoustic shows with Hani Naser, a Jordan-born percussionist influenced by Arab and Western music. He had recently roved to an island off the southeast coast of Africa to record with Henry Kaiser, who knew Lindley had been intrigued by Madagascar since the ’60s.

“That’s when I went to the San Francisco Zoo,” Lindley explained. “I walked by a cage of ring-tailed lemurs (a species nearly exclusive to Madagascar), and they all came over and reached out with their little dark gray hands. It was creepy, a lot more than cute, furry little animals looking at me. An intelligence was there, all but inviting me to Madagascar someday.

“It’s a poor country—we paid the musicians the same good session fees they’d get in America, and they went out and bought houses and cattle. I felt like Elvis—‘Here, go get a Cadillac.’ Some of the established recording people were mad at us for setting that precedent. But I still wanna go to some other places. I’ll probably have to get shots for years to do it.”

Long before “world music” had a name, Lindley fused African, Celtic, Middle Eastern and Asian influences on pretty much anything with strings on it—delta blues on the Turkish saz, or Kurdish melodies on the five-string banjo.

“Now I look around and say, ‘Mission accomplished,’” Lindley said during his Colorado dates in 2003. “That’s the realistic way to look at it. Maybe even split world music up into two categories—traditional world music, and then kind-of world music 2%, like milk. I’m glad that people know who King Sunny Ade is. Peter Gabriel, Mickey Hart and Paul Simon did a lot for making things a little less ‘us-and-them—that’s their music, those people’. When you look at it, it’s notes and spaces, sound and no sound. People react to music all over the world in the same way. So maybe we’ll see that we’re all really similar and things will change—but probably not! At least we’re giving it a good try!”

At that point, Lindley was in partnership with locomotive hand drummer Wally Ingram, another long-haired, Hawaiian-shirted freak with the kit—plus chimes, blocks and a World War I German army helmet. Their recordings brimmed with Lindley’s playful, pan-cultural approach and tasteful arrangements, as well as wry satire—the self-effacing “When a Guy Gets Boobs” was a crackbrained number.

“I actually had that happen—I looked in the mirror one morning and went, ‘Ah, boy, that’s real good.’ I thought I should write about it…”

By his own estimate, Lindley played about nine different instruments at his live performances—the Turkish saz, bouzouki, 12-string guitar and an assortment of Hawaiian guitars.

“The one thing that’s suffering right now is the fiddle—I haven’t played that in a long time, because I’m playing the oud, and it takes a lot of practice,” he said. “At one point I had to choose what to work on. I only got so much time left, so there’s certain things I want to do before it’s all over.”

Burt Bacharach died on February 8, 2023 at the age of 94. Spoken of with such names as Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers, Bacharach’s hit-single track record ran the gamut from rock and soul to polished Broadway scores. Few writers could match the golden era of his work.

The diminutive son of the famous nationally syndicated columnist Bert Bacharach might have been expected to have a talent in words rather than music. Spending most of his youth in New York, he rebelled briefly, wanting to stop his piano lessons so he could play football. His parents required that he continue, for which he thanked them later.

“My dad was an All Seven Conference fullback, and he played professional football and basketball,” Bacharach said prior to a performance at Denver’s Paramount Theater in 2000. “When you’re a kid going through your dad’s scrapbooks, sure, you want to be like him. But I’m glad it turned out like it turned out.”

In the ’60s, Bacharach’s distinctive compositions combined airy melodies, Gershwin-esque jazz fanfares, Tin Pan Alley craft, unusual time signatures, innovative orchestrations and stylish chord changes and rhythms.

“The material had an urban, citified nature,” he explained. “I was writing for R&B artists like Chuck Jackson at Scepter Records, and at the same time I was traveling around the world conducting for Marlene Dietrich. That’s a pretty wide range there.”

With lyricist Hal David, Bacharach wrote dozens of timeless tracks, from “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa” (for Gene Pitney) and “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” (Dusty Springfield) to “What the World Needs Now” (Jackie DeShannon) and “Close to You” (the Carpenters), all from 1963 to 1970.

At an arranging session, Bacharach found the singer who became the ideal interpreter for the Bacharach-David team’s songs—Dionne Warwick, who was working as a member of the Drifters. Warwick went on to make 15 Top 40 singles, with “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk On By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Alfie,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and “This Girl’s in Love with You” among them.

In 1965, Bacharach and David wrote the score for the film What’s New, Pussycat? and Tom Jones scored the hit title song. Three years later, they wrote their only Broadway score, for Neil Simon’s Promises, Promises, which included the hit “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”—it ran for more than 1,200 performances and won a Tony. They won two Oscars in 1969 for the music in the movie Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and the song “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”

But Bacharach entered a meager period in the ’70s. His pairing with David ran out of gas, he had a falling out with Warwick and his marriage to actress Angie Dickinson failed. “People make stupid mistakes. I did,” Bacharach admitted.

He was married to singer-songwriter Carole Bayer Sager from 1982 to 1991—they co-wrote the 1981 Oscar winner “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” with Christopher Cross. Then he reunited with Warwick and guests Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight on “That’s What Friends Are For,” and also “On My Own” for Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald, both No. 1 hits in 1986.

In the ’90s, such alternative bands as R.E.M. and Stereolab began name-checking Bacharach in the media, and Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher joined him onstage at the Royal Albert Hall as well as including a picture of him on the cover of Oasis’ Definitely Maybe album. He was on soundtracks (My Best Friend’s Wedding, Grace of My Heart) and on the CD players of lounge music devotees. He signified the mostly lost art of pop songwriting. “There are some very good writers,” he said. “I think Babyface is outstanding. Diane Warren and David Foster write terrific songs.”

His songs had become Muzak staples, but the prolific pop composer enjoyed greater popularity than at any other time since his ’60s heyday. In 1998, Bacharach was honored during a New York City tribute concert—pop stars including Barenaked Ladies, Sheryl Crow and Ben Folds Five covered his classics and spoke warmly of his influence. The result was the TNT special Burt Bacharach: One Amazing Night.

Later that year, veteran British rocker Elvis Costello collaborated with Bacharach on a duet album of new songs, Painted from Memory, that earned them a Grammy for “I’ve Still Got That Other Girl.” Rhino Records issued a definitive box set, The Look of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection. And to secure his cultural status, Bacharach appeared in the Austin Powers movies.

“I was there in a second. Did the first one, did the second one—and suddenly you’ve got 12-year-old girls who know you!” he said. “Oh, sure I care! You want to be liked and appreciated and have young people who weren’t even born when these songs were hits the first time discover them. There’s a whole new audience.

“Why have they lasted? I don’t really have an explanation, because a lot of other songs from that time don’t hold up 30 years later—they’re unfashionable, like clothes or hairdos. But these songs are solid, with maybe a little more substance to them than three chords…I guess. You can’t plan something like that. You have to be justly surprised and appreciative of things coming back again, you know?”

Tom Verlaine, whose band Television was one of the most influential to emerge from the New York’s CBGB punk scene in the late ’70s, died on January 28, 2023. He was 73.

Back in that fabled era, while many New York-based bands were recycling the venom of various English counterparts, Television surfaced to rave reviews. The enterprising, oblique band was doomed to cult status, but Verlaine’s untrained vocals and complex, circular guitar style distinguished two excellent albums—the classic debut Marquee Moon and Adventure—before Television disintegrated.

Verlaine released a self-titled solo album in 1979 before dropping out of sight. The following year, David Bowie recorded Verlaine’s “Kingdom Come” for his Scary Monsters album. A new music audience had developed, and Verlaine was in a strange position—“art rock” fans who delighted in dropping the names of up-and-comers weren’t aware of Television’s groundbreaking role.

He resurfaced with Dreamtime, a weighty album that showed he hadn’t been twiddling his thumbs. Tunes such as “Always” and “Penetration” retained the best kinetic factors from the Television albums, while Verlaine’s guitar work remained among the most compelling in rock—an amazingly clean, trebly sound that was at once dissonant and dynamic. 

He toured the US extensively in the fall and winter of that year, which brought him to the Blue Note in Boulder. He was a static stage presence—not as spooked as he was with Television, he merely stood and played like a kid in his bedroom. But there was no denying his demotic lyrics and the ringing, cutting tone of his chops—his solos verged on drifting to all the wrong places, almost like Jeff Beck trying to play a Charlie Parker riff on guitar. But Verlaine framed his excursions with mercurial rhythms and some solid band interplay, and the result was hypnotic (a casual listener noted that his extended guitar flights sounded “like Devo trying to play Dire Straits”).

“I’m not into theater at all—if it’s good enough, it gets across,” the lanky, pale artiste explained. “I dunno much about my style. It’s just the way I play that comes out. I listened to a lot of Roland Kirk and jazz when I was a kid, and I guess I’m trying to do some of the same things in a rock context. All I know is that I play my solos on a Jaguar—a lot of surf groups used to use them, but I can’t play on anything else.”

Dreamtime was Verlaine’s most commercially successful solo album. He released six more albums that failed to introduce his lyrical, piercing style to a wider audience. But they maintained his exacting standards and his critically acclaimed status—a perfectionate, genre-resistant guitar genius.

At the forefront of rock stardom for six decades, David Crosby was a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee—as a founding member of the Byrds in the mid-’60s and the iconic Crosby Stills & Nash (winners of the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1969). The folk-rock legend created songs that resonated as cultural touchstones (“Almost Cut My Hair,” “Wooden Ships”), serving as the social conscience for the baby-boomer generation. He enjoyed success as a solo performer, collaborating with dozens of world-renowned artists, including Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia, Melissa Etheridge, David Gilmour and Phil Collins. Crosby was the subject of the 2019 documentary Remember My Name, produced by Cameron Crowe. He passed away on January 18, 2023, at the age of 81.

Time Code

Jeff Beck, the iconic guitarist, died on January 10, 2023, after contracting bacterial meningitis. He was 78 years old.

Commencing in the mid-’60s, a handful of respected and influential guitar heroes made it happen for the classic rock generation. Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page come to mind. And then there was Beck—on an inspired day, his novel playing eclipsed that of his peers. Clapton himself called the reclusive Beck “the best guitarist around.” But he never achieved the same commercial success, primarily because his fragmented career was filled with idiosyncratic, stormy behavior and long intervals between albums.

Beck decided to emerge once again in 1999 with Who Else!, his first new material in more than a decade. He performed at the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver. “I’m overly appreciated—I’ve taken more accolades and praise than I can handle,” a kinder, gentler Beck said of his inconstant course. “It’s all a bit worrisome, because I know sooner or later, if I step out into the deep end of the pool, I might get drowned.”

Recommended by Page, his boyhood friend, Beck faced the daunting job of replacing Clapton in the Yardbirds in 1964. But it was his experimental sound that gave the British band a string of hits: “I’m a Man,” “Heart Full of Soul,” “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down.”

His time with the Yardbirds established Beck’s near-mythic reputation—his virtuosic command of the fretboard, his daredevil feel for veering, cartwheeling riffs and distorted power chords and feedback. And there was his near-impossible touch on the whammy bar, which lets a player depress or sharpen a note.

“You could hardly move the lever on the old Stratocasters—I suppose it was a natural progression to explore that,” the guitarist explained. “It’s my thing, really, to play tunes on it. Everybody knows what Hendrix did—he’d put it on the ground and sit on it, do other vulgar activity with it. I don’t think too many people use it to melodic effect—it’s a bit pedal-steely.”

Briefly, Beck and Page were co-lead guitarists in the Yardbirds, but Beck’s unpredictable behavior led to a split in 1966 on the pretext that he was retiring from music. “My presence in that band was a pair of U.S. tours that hardly spanned three weeks apiece!” Beck marveled. “And yet we had four or five hits there, and the excitement was astonishing. But unfortunately, we didn’t have the right kind of send-off in terms of management and promotion.”

From there, Beck founded the Jeff Beck Group, featuring singer Rod Stewart—a then-obscure British dandy—and bassist Ron Wood and Mick Waller (drums) and later Nicky Hopkins (piano). The band’s two releases, Truth and Beck-Ola, were excellent in spots. The innovative act provided the blueprint for ’70s heavy metal—the teaming of Beck and Stewart was like nothing to be heard in rock again until Page sparred with Robert Plant in Led Zeppelin. The music was basically biting, R&B-edged hard rock, with exciting reworkings of blues songs and contemporary material.

On Truth, which became something of a classic, Beck and Stewart squared off with each other constantly. High-powered tunes included a loud and lewd retooling of the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things,” “You Shook Me,” “Blues Deluxe” and a version of “Morning Dew.” The pièce de résistance was the howling, screaming “I Ain’t Superstitious,” where Stewart’s distinctively raspy vocal riffs cajoled Beck into new flights of frenetic wah-wah wizardry.

A year after Truth, the Jeff Beck Group came back with Beck-Ola, which was even more crushingly loud. The heaviest tracks were “Rice Pudding,” “Spanish Boots,” “Plynth (Water Down the Drain)” and an entertainingly energetic cover of Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up” that reset the limits of just how startling a slide guitar could sound.

The Jeff Beck Group’s reputation also increased with a series of bawdy U.S. tours. On the first date, Stewart suffered such stage fright that he sang the opening songs from behind the amplifiers.

“It was the weirdest thing,” Beck said with a laugh. “He had plenty of ego in England—he was upfront and stomping around. When we went to America, it was all a bit much for him—the fact that we finally were standing on the stage in New York, the Fillmore East in the summer of ’69. We couldn’t have had it better. It was a momentous occasion.

“We only did a 40-minute set, opening for the Grateful Dead. The people were just riveted—you could hear a pin drop between the solos. I said, ‘Look, believe it or not, there is a singer lurking somewhere.’ Then Rod went, ‘Oh, this is great, I’ll tell them who I am now!’ And he came out and took a bow and they got up and went absolutely bananas. It cemented the band together for the rest of that year.”

But the hassle-prone outfit was disposed to battle regularly, and Beck eventually dissolved the Jeff Beck Group in 1969—just before it was due to play Woodstock. Stewart and Wood then joined the Faces. And Beck never again hooked up with a lead vocalist as charismatic as Stewart. “One thing I regret is that the Jeff Beck Group didn’t make another album,” he said later. “We could have been the biggest band in the world.”

Beck sustained a fractured skull in a car accident. Returning to health, he formed a new, funkier version of the Jeff Beck Group in 1970, then teamed up with his friends from the Vanilla Fudge rhythm section, fashioning the power trio Beck, Bogart & Appice; a noteworthy track on their 1973 debut album was a version of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” After a hiatus, Beck began playing jazz-rock instrumentals—and he racked up three successful albums. Blow by Blow, a 1975 collaboration with Beatles producer George Martin, was one of his career peaks, a top seller that received much critical acclaim.

“But I was completely torn up with the fact that George is so musical, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to go on making records that were too musical!” Beck explained. “I wanted to make some ugly sounds, some jagged, nasty records, not too smooth—and with Blow by Blow, I was a bit worried that it was bordering on pop easy-listening.”

Beck worked jointly with ex-Mahavishnu Orchestra keyboardist Jan Hammer on Wired and There and Back, but he spent much of the late ’70s out of the public eye. On a 1980 tour, Beck performed at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver. Called back for an encore, with the audience cheering “More! More!,” he returned to the stage, waited for the crowd to quiet down, then played a beautiful melody on his guitar—“More,” the pop standard adapted from the film score for the Italian documentary Mondo Cane. Most fans didn’t get the joke.

As the ’80s continued, he had established a routine—unless he had session work he really wanted (he played on Mick Jagger’s albums, among others), he stayed home. An avid hot-rod enthusiast, he collected classic cars and considered becoming a car restorer.

Beck linked with Stewart again for a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s soul classic “People Get Ready” and the more rock-oriented Flash album, both in 1985. On 1989’s Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop, which won a Grammy in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance category (one of six in his career), he used keyboardist Tony Hymas and ex-Frank Zappa drummer Terry Bozzio. But again, upon the completion of The Fire Meets the Fury tour—where he co-headlined with Stevie Ray Vaughan at venues such as McNichols Sports Arena—he entered semi-retirement as a result of tinnitus, a sensation of noise in the ears.

“The Bozzio/Hymas trio was too terribly loud. The last two gigs were in England, and I was nervous at being there with that band—for some reason I cranked all the side fills full up. Afterwards, I had a ringing in the ears for a week, then it went away, then it came back—and it didn’t go away.”

Beck didn’t make as much of a stir afterwards. He played on Roger Waters’ comeback album, Amused to Death. In 1993, he issued Crazy Legs, a tribute to ’50s rocker Gene Vincent and his band the Blue Caps. Who Else! (an arch reference to the other, younger Beck in the CD bins), the first pure Jeff Beck project of the ’90s, featured 11 instrumental tracks, one of the most eclectic releases in his 35 years of recording. On tour, Beck was complimented by Jennifer Batten, a second guitarist and first-rate player.

“I was getting a little edgy about moving keyboards away, because they take up so much sonic presence and space nowadays—you hit one key and the whole theater collapses! Little ol’ guitar gets left out of the picture in terms of impressive sound,” Beck said.

“But I’ve got a really great girl—Jennifer provides the right foil. She comes up with her own Midi interface and can provide me with organ, strings, whatever I want. There’s no end to what we can do, really. I don’t care too much if an album doesn’t sell millions, but I love doing a satisfying tour—then I can enjoy other things. If people turn up in decent numbers and they enjoy what we’re playing, I’ll still be around.”

Beck remained active, performing in Colorado at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in 2003, 2014 and 2016.

Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley, died on January 12, 2023, after a medical emergency and brief hospitalization. She was 54.

Presley developed a career in the music business and issued three albums. Her first, To Whom It May Concern in 2003, reached #5 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and was certified gold. “Lights Out,” her first single, received positive reviews and was on adult Top 40 radio playlists in major markets. KISS (95.7-FM) in Denver played it in rotation.

Pop success had visited many in the ranks of rock star progeny, from Jakob Dylan to Julian Lennon to Wilson Phillips. But no son or daughter arrived on the music scene encircled by as much public scrutiny as Elvis’ only kid.

She released To Whom It May Concern and talked in public for the first time—about living with her famous father, about her 1994 union with Michael Jackson, about her recent three-month marriage to Nicolas Cage…oh, and about her music.

“It’s neat, trying to get the record across and combating all the years of bullshit—pardon my sailor mouth,” she said. “It’s a crap shoot. Everything is focused on me talking about Nic, Michael and my dad. I do have to discuss those things, because it’s been so long where I haven’t said a word. And I understand the curiosity—I’m just trying to clear the air on some issues. However, it’s upsetting—‘Oh, by the way, she has a record…’”

Why was Presley, 35 at the time, emerging then as an aspiring singer-songwriter? Without even hearing it, cynics would dismiss To Whom It May Concern as a passing novelty, a psychodrama set to music for enquiring minds. It couldn’t have been a quest for fame—the unfolding story of her life had been revealed in America’s tabloids since before she could read. Nor fortune—she was head of Elvis Presley Enterprises, his sole heir.

“It’s a cathartic thing for me,” she explained. “I just got tired of the accumulation of the bullshit. So I used the record to do what I needed to do—approach and expose myself. I figured out that I can do that in a song. So I got quite comfortable with writing and singing.”

Presley had been moving gradually toward making a record for a long time, working through various versions and producers. She had every reason to be nervous, and she spent more than four years at Capitol Records honing To Whom It May Concern before she felt at ease with it. She ultimately hooked up with Glen Ballard, who co-wrote “Lights Out” with her. He was best known for his work with Alanis Morissette on the Grammy-winning Jagged Little Pill.

The result was a professional pop-rock collection with angry, guilt-ridden reflections on experiences and relationships. Presley said her lyrics were autobiographical, but people shouldn’t expect any Hollywood tell-alls. “I knew it was going to be on the darker, haunting side, because that’s where I pull from when I’m writing. But I didn’t have any particular direction. The songs are all different.”

When young, Presley would regularly visit her father, usually at Graceland (she was raised by her mother, actress Priscilla Presley). She was nine when he died in 1977. “Lights Out” was a bluesy and bittersweet contemplation on that heritage.

“I was crying every time I’d leave you/Then I didn’t want to see you/I still keep my watch two hours behind,” she sang in a low, breathy voice that sounded a little like Cher’s. “Memphis…that’s where my family are buried and gone…in the damn back lawn.”

“I like the song, but the first single?” Presley said. “It went against the whole point of doing a record, which was to assert myself as myself and not as anything else. And that song puts me (with my dad) right off the bat. So I shied away from the idea. Not that I’m trying to run from it, but that defeated the purpose, in my mind, of making my own statement, my own fingerprints.

“But at some point I came to grips with it—I’ll just get it out of the way. It was a tossup, and I let the record company do their thing.”

Most musicians discover their style over years of preparation. Presley had barely performed in front of anyone but had assembled her first-ever band for TV appearances and perhaps live concerts.

“Right now, they’re throwing me out into these really unnerving live situations right off the bat. My first-ever showcase was in front of (Los Angeles Times music critic) Robert Hilburn. It was, ‘Hi, what am I doing? Why am I putting myself through this?’ The second one was the NARM (National Association of Record Merchandisers) convention, the third was Good Morning America.

“Put me on the road so I can get my feet wet—even small clubs, I don’t care. I definitely am doing more records—I’m contracted for at least two more. It’s simply wanting to possibly do for others what music’s done for me my whole life, which is to get me through it. If I can move people in some way, make them feel something—like it, hate me, anything—then I’m happy.”

In November 2005, Presley performed in the Denver area at the Gothic Theater.

Savoy Brown leader and founder Kim Simmonds died on December 13, 2022, while in treatment for a rare form of colon cancer. He was 75 years old.

A seminal blues-rock boogie band from England, Savoy Brown formed in 1965, when Simmonds was 18. Promoting albums with nonstop touring, the group released several recordings before it caught on in the US with 1971’s Street Corner Talking. The album, which included “Tell Mama” and the title track, earned heavy play on FM radio, and its follow-up, Hellbound Train, made the Top 40.

Stardom perpetually evaded Savoy Brown, though, in part because of frequent shake-ups to the lineup. More than 30 personnel changes had occurred by the time Simmonds organized the band with new players to record the 1981 Rock ’n’ Roll Warriors album. That year found Savoy Brown recording a live album of greatest hits at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver, with the ever-present Simmonds—the only original member—in the lead guitar spot.

“Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous,” the British rocker admitted. “But it seems to be a natural progression of different people. Every time someone splits, I think of doing the Kim Simmonds Band, but someone says, ‘Let’s give it a try as Savoy Brown,’ and the reaction has always been good.”

Simmonds had laid off music for a short while before gearing up the new edition of Savoy Brown. “I started working again after finding a new manager and agent,” he explained. “I worked out the concept and moved to Los Angeles, where I put the band together.” Among the recruits was singer Ralph Morman, who had just been dismissed from the Joe Perry Project. Rock ’n’ Roll Warriors gave the group more success than it had seen since the mid-’70s.

“The album is all blues, all rock ’n’ roll,” Simmonds noted. “I hadn’t written anything in a while, but that’s where my strength is. The band is new, so the interpretation has changed quite a bit.” 

The Greatest Hits Live in Concert album was a coup for the staff of the Rainbow, which had become one of the most prestigious venues in the nation. 15-year-olds camped out overnight to see Savoy Brown—kids who weren’t even born when the band started out.

“We’re doing every old standard at the Rainbow—‘Tell Mama,’ ‘Hellbound Train’ and the rest of the lot,” Simmonds promised. “We want to do a great blues-boogie album. It’s what Savoy Brown’s past is all about.”

Greatest Hits Live in Concert featured “Run to Me,” a sole studio track that became the band’s highest-charting single in the US. Despite the success, Simmonds was once again on his own by the spring of 1982. Undeterred, the talented guitarist continued working with various lineups of Savoy Brown, touring the world and recording regularly until his death.

Welcome, Terrapin Patrons!

Billy Strings has made it his career mission to find, mine and reinvent traditional bluegrass music. Ten of his many influences have a Colorado connection!

BILL MONROE

For many years, Monroe, the attested “father of bluegrass,” refused to appear at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival because he objected to the presence of electric instruments, and his contempt for long hair was widely known.  But he came to appreciate the fact that the players had an abiding respect for his musical style. In 1983, Monroe finally performed at the 10^th anniversary show.

Songs covered:

“Uncle Pen”
“I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky”
“I’m Coming Back but I Don’t Know When”
“Kentucky Waltz”
“In the Pines”
“I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome”
“Big Mon”
“Roll On Buddy, Roll On”

PHOTOS: Telluride Bluegrass Festival

JIMMY MARTIN

The self-proclaimed “king of bluegrass,” Martin (lead vocalist for Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys) was one of the country music stalwarts gathered for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the landmark three-record set that changed the direction of popular music. The album was initiated at Tulagi, a music club in Boulder.

Songs covered:

“Sophronie”
“Tennessee”

VIDEO: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
PODCAST: John McEuen
PROFILE: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

DOC WATSON

The world’s nimblest flat-picking guitar virtuoso, Watson first played Colorado with his son Merle at Ebbets Field, Denver’s premier concert venue of the mid-’70s.

Songs covered:

“The Train That Carried My Girl from Town”
“Walk On Boy”
“Way Downtown”
“Nashville Blues”

MUSIC: Ebbets Field

JOHN HARTFORD

The royalties from “Gentle on My Mind,” one of the most widely recorded country songs of all time, bought Hartford’s freedom. He used it to mentor a rising generation of singers, pickers and storytellers at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, bridging a gap between traditional bluegrass and the hippie spirit. “Without (Hartford), there would be no ‘newgrass’ music,” the legendary mandolinist and fiddler Sam Bush has said.

Songs covered:

“In Tall Buildings”
“With a Vamp in the Middle”
“I’m Still Here”
“Steam Powered Aereo Plane”
“Today”

PHOTOS: Telluride Bluegrass Festival

NEW GRASS REVIVAL

In 1974, New Grass Revival, founded by Sam Bush, was shaking up audiences at traditional bluegrass festivals, introducing an amplified rock music element into the acoustic bluegrass orthodoxy. The output of the long-haired hippie types offended many purists, but Grateful Dead and Flying Burrito Brothers fans were wildly enthusiastic. New Grass Revival set a standard for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival—a commitment to cutting-edge acoustic music that would endure to this day.

Songs covered:

“Whisper My Name”
“This Heart of Mine”

PHOTOS: Telluride Bluegrass Festival

BÉLA FLECK

During Fleck’s tenure with New Grass Revival, his reputation as one of the world’s most innovative banjo players grew on the Telluride Bluegrass Festival stage. He then made a groundbreaking departure from five-string conventions with the jazz explorations of his ensemble, the Flecktones, ultimately receiving Grammy nominations in more categories than any other musician.

Songs covered:

“Slipstream”
“Down in the Swamp”
“White Water”

PHOTOS: Telluride Bluegrass Festival

HOT RIZE

Hot Rize got the nod to play Telluride in 1978, becoming regulars at the event through the ’80s. The Boulder-based band—featuring Tim O’Brien (fiddle, mandolin, guitar), Nick Forster (bass), Pete Wernick (banjo) and Charles Sawtelle (guitar)—went on to a long and storied career, bringing respect for tradition and progressive elements to the bluegrass genre.

Song covered:

“High on a Mountain”

VIDEO: Hot Rize
PROFILE: Hot Rize

STRING CHEESE INCIDENT

A phenomenon of the jam band movement, String Cheese Incident was welcomed with enormous raw adulation by a young neo-hippie crowd. Billy Nershi, the group’s guitarist and songwriter, had lived in Telluride during the late ’80s and early ’90s, skiing a lot, working a little and practicing guitar until his fingers ached.

Song covered:

“Black Clouds”

PROFILE: String Cheese Incident
PODCAST: Kyle Hollingsworth

LEFTOVER SALMON

The jam-grass revolution of the ’90s was headed up by Boulder’s Leftover Salmon, whose members first met picking in Telluride’s Town Park campground in 1989. The group’s style of playing, which they called “polyethnic Cajun slamgrass,” found favor with a devoted following.

Song covered:

“Down in the Hollow”

PROFILE: Leftover Salmon

YONDER MOUNTAIN STRING BAND

Nederland’s Yonder Mountain String Band became a regular act at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. In 1999, the little-known group moved overnight from a local front porch to the Elks Park stage. The following year, the group debuted on the main stage—and played a vigorous bluegrass-style rendition of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” for an encore.

Song covered:

“Sorrow is a Highway”

PROFILE: Yonder Mountain String Band

There’s a whole lot less shakin’ goin’ on these days. Rock ’n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis—whose pounding piano, impassioned vocals and raw, uninhibited performing style captured the rebellious essence of the new genre—died on October 28, 2022 at age 87.

Nicknamed “the Killer,” Lewis’ story was the stuff of legend. In 1957, when Sun Records of Memphis released “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” the bootlegger’s son became an international star. He was a rock ’n’ roll wildman who embodied everybody’s nightmares about crazy rednecks.

But almost immediately, the news of his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin—it was his third matrimony and second bigamy—torpedoed his career. Left to eke out an existence playing bars and honky-tonks, he became a star for the second time—in country music. Yet again and again, there were sprees of drunkenness, assaults, divorce, scandal and addiction.

He was still, as he put it, “hanging in like Gunga Din.” In the ’80s, Lewis became a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. By the ’90s, he had overcome his obstacles and continued to be a hard-rockin’ concert attraction. He drew a worshiping crowd of all ages at the Grizzly Rose in Denver on a nippy December weeknight in 1997, and for fans of rock ’n’ roll, there was no more heartwarming sight than that of the 62-year-old man romping over his piano.

He was still a singer and player of great stylistic range. He boogie-woogied with intensity, tackled doleful country ballads and plowed through blues shuffles. In the one-hour set, Lewis stormed through his hits and other favorites (“Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Johnny B. Goode”).

His tight band included guitarist James Burton, who used to enliven the work of everyone from Rick Nelson to Elvis Presley. Even Lewis’ critics would have been swayed by his endurance and vitality. He claimed to be off the pills and alcohol.

He no longer slammed himself all over the stage, playing the keys with his heels and dancing on his piano. He wore a cable-knit sweater and blue polyester slacks.

But he was still a little crazy. He showed up just five minutes before the gig. At its end, he kicked over the piano stool, hitched up his pants and swaggered off the stage.

Someone gave Lewis an 86-proof shout: “Keep on playing, Jerry Lee!”

“Okay, killer,” he said with a smile.

“I love my music and I love my fans—they’re my life,” he said moments later. “I’m working a lot, three nights a week.” He gave a little frown. “I can’t do more than that anymore.”

Robert Gordon, a fixture on the ’70s New York City downtown club scene who resuscitated rockabilly music, died on October 18, 2022. He was 75.

Gordon made his vinyl debut fronting Tuff Darts on the Live at CBGB’s compilation album. His time with the punk band brought him together with producer Richard Gottehrer and resulted in his debut album and the single “Red Hot” in 1977, working with guitar legend Link Wray. Fresh Fish Special, his second album, premiered “Fire,” written by Bruce Springsteen.

Gordon then signed with RCA Records, the company that had helped make Elvis Presley a star, and released Rock Billy Boogie, which teamed him with London guitar ace Chris Spedding. The album featured a rendition of Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” alongside a wild version of “Black Slacks” (rescuing a classic originally performed by Joe Bennett & the Sparkletones in 1957) and “The Catman,” Gordon’s evocative tribute to another early idol, Gene Vincent.

In 1979, Gordon performed at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver in what would be his lone Colorado appearance.

He remembered “really flipping out” at the age of nine, when he heard Presley’s debut RCA single, “Heartbreak Hotel.” “Ever since I was twelve or thirteen, I knew I was going to pursue a musical career,” he said. “It occupied just about all my time, except for cars and motorcycles. My family didn’t dig my black pegged pants, but I went through it, all through junior high and high school.”

He gained his first performing experience in his teens with schoolmates and pickup bands. One of his favorite spots was the Glen Echo amusement park in Maryland, where he picked up stylistic influences from seeing Little Richard, Wray and other big-name rockers. “That’s where I really saw the rebel types—these cats with motorcycle boots and these chicks with beehive hairdos,” he recalled. “Not that I emulated them, but it definitely left an impression. It was something different.”

The mixing of styles garnered Gordon garnered a following with rock, country and new music audiences. “Ultimately, I gravitated to the music I do best, which I guess you could call updated rockabilly,” Gordon said. “I don’t mind comparisons—that’s flattering in a way—but some people think that anyone who does this music is a Presley imitator, and that’s just people who are uneducated, who don’t know the music. Vocally, I don’t sound like Presley—it’s just a feeling. I live this music. It’s a part of me.”

Paul Revere & the Raiders were a pop-rock group formed in Portland, Oregon, circa 1960 around keyboardist Paul Revere and lead singer Mark Lindsay. Their guitarist, Drake Levin, had grown up in Boise, Idaho, playing in Revere’s teenage nightclub, Crazy Horse, in a band with Phillip “Fang” Volk, who in 1963 would go on to attend the University of Colorado on a scholarship. Intending to be a music major, he studied opera and classical music. In the meantime, he kept playing guitar in a band in his fraternity.

While Volk headed to Boulder, Levin joined Revere’s band. A year and a half later, after Levin had become a road warrior with the Raiders, he eventually talked Revere into inviting his old friend into the band. “Drake and I could do dance routines together,” Volk said. “Paul had seen us at his club every weekend. They needed a bass player, and I was a guitar player. Paul called me in college and said, ‘You’d better start learning the bass.’ I wasn’t very good at first.”

Volk would replace Mike “Doc” Holliday on bass, the final piece in what would come to be considered the “classic” Raider lineup. His toothy grin earned him the nickname “Fang.”

“I went right from the University of Colorado with my wing-tip oxfords and my blue blazer and my grey slacks and short hair, looking like Joe College right out of the fraternity, to Las Vegas, and joined Paul Revere & the Raiders at the Pussycat a Go-Go on the Strip. You talk about two worlds colliding. It was an amazing metamorphosis.

“My fraternity brothers took me to the airplane and got me a little bit soused. They were sad to see me go, and you know how they like to drink. The airline almost didn’t let me on the plane because I was a little bit nuts. In those days, you walked up a stairway off the tarmac to the airplane, and I jumped off that onto the wing, doing a little boogaloo. People didn’t appreciate that…”

Paul Revere & the Raiders went to Los Angeles in 1965 and got on a daily ABC-TV show called Where the Action Is.

“It ran five days a week for two years, which is a phenomenal thing for any band, to be in front of a national audience every day,” Volk remembered. “Even Columbia Records didn’t realize the kind of popularity the show had given us. They said, ‘Well, let’s take the boys on a promotional tour, set up appearances at supermarkets and amusement parks.’ They were shocked at the response. Every city we went to around the country, there were massive crowds gathered, riots. A couple of vehicles were destroyed when kids would jump on them trying to get a peek at us. They weren’t ready for that.”

Top 40 hits included “Steppin’ Out,” “Just Like Me,” “Kicks,” “Hungry,” “Good Thing” and “Ups and Downs,” Volk’s bass lines helped to revolutionize how the bass guitar was used in rock music.

“We had a really hard-edged sound, and we were a viable rock band,” Fang said. “We played our own instruments during (those) years. Yeah, we had a couple of extra friends come into the sessions to augment the sound, but we were always there playing the chops.”

On leaving the Raiders, Volk formed a new band called Brotherhood with Raider bandmates Levin and Mike “Smitty” Smith. Following the breakup of Brotherhood, Volk headed several groups of his own.

Based in Boulder, Rare Silk—originally a female trio consisting of sisters MaryLynn and Gayle Gillaspie and Marguerite Juenemann—started out revisiting tunes from the swing era of the late ’30s and early ’40s. At the 1978 inception of KGNU, a Boulder community radio station, they created a regular public access show. The three got their break in 1980 when they opened for Benny Goodman, “the King of Swing,” at Macky Auditorium in Boulder. Goodman fell in love with the girls’ tight, precisely harmonized material and asked them to accompany his tour. Joined by male vocalist Todd Buffa, the innovative ensemble then began modernizing its approach with stylistic versions of Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea songs. An A&R exec at PolyGram Records soon heard Rare Silk’s sound, and the group’s debut album, New Weave, made its way to #2 on Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart. It was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal – Duo or Group at the 1984 Grammy Awards, and Buffa was nominated in the Arrangement – Two or More Voices category. Juenemann was replaced by Barbara Reeves, then Jamie Broumas. Rare Silk recorded two albums on the Palo Alto label and toured perpetually, winning over audiences with perfected harmonies, choreographed sequences and a diverse mixture of material. The group disbanded in 1988. MaryLynn Gillaspie returned to singing circa 2011 and released Secret Language, her solo CD produced by Kip Kuepper, in 2022.

Time Code

On September 3, 1972, the Grateful Dead performed before approximately 32,000 fans at the University of Colorado’s Folsom Field in Boulder. The band’s first stadium show in Colorado was marked by torrential rains, rare performances (“Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu”)—and, at one point, hundreds of lids of pot were tossed into the air from the crowd and from the stage. (Comments have been edited for length and clarity.)

Bill McKee, dead.net: “I was a country bumpkin, right off the farm in Illinois, on my first trip west. I was traveling with two friends and we had no idea that the Dead were playing in Boulder. We just happened to be in the right place! I remember walking into the stadium and my life immediately changed. Couldn’t believe it…frisbees, balloons, beautiful women twirling up by the stage…a father telling his son to remind mommy to not forget the peyote…”

sailing vessel…, dead.net: “I drove my 1966 Ford pickup down from Aspen for that, my first show. There were half a dozen of my mountain hippie friends on board. $3.50 got us in the gate, and I remember crowds flocking through the entrances to the field.”

clark cowboy, dead.net: “We had bought tickets to pick up at the ticket office. We got there and our tickets were not waiting for us. What to do, waiting for the gates to open and no tickets? After the first rush of people got in, they went straight to the top of the stadium and threw their tickets down, right into our hands. It was a miracle.”

sailing vessel…: “The day and the music went on forever, through sun, heat, rain and fun…and to my amazement, beautiful bags of green herb, each with papers and matches, flying into the hands of any head who could catch ’em.”

Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead: “That blew our minds! The audience thought we were doing it, but it wasn’t us—we couldn’t afford it.”

Buffalo, dead.net: “Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted what looked like birds being released into the air, but they disappeared. I asked my friends if they saw it and they were like, ‘Sure, man, whatever you say.’ A few minutes later I saw the birds coming at us and I caught one and it was a perfect lid of good Mexican weed complete with rolling papers and farmers matches. It looked like the Dead’s roadies had bushel baskets or cardboard boxes full of lids and they were grabbing them and throwing them out to an appreciative crowd.”

Bill McKee: “Yep, survival bags of pot filtered all the way back to us. My cousin found us in the crowd and brought us a bag. To this day he still believes that the bags were dropped from a helicopter!”

niusteve, dead.net: “I was high up in the stadium, too far to catch any of the free dope, but it was fun to watch. I seem to remember security trying to get to the folks who were vaulting the prized packages, but they kept popping up at different parts of the field, and all we could see were the plastic baggies shooting up into the crowd like fireworks.”

Gregor, dead.net: “I was the person who came up with the idea to give away 1,000 four-finger lids of Rainbow Cannabis. We were the Range Riders, having met the boys when they played the Glenn Miller Ballroom, April 13, 1969, a gig we actually helped book…for $800.”

Buffalo: “I know I rolled all mine up and passed it around. About that time, Jerry Garcia said something to the effect of ‘We love you, Boulder’ or ‘Enjoy it, Boulder.’”

Captain Rex, dead.net: “Many persons were wandering through the crowd with large bags of pot and throwing them into the crowd. The smoke got so thick you could hardly see the stage. The army showed up and surrounded the stadium. Officer in charge went on stage, an obvious threat to shut it down and arrest everyone. The band played on. Could not hear the conversation but was clear that Garcia said, ‘Arrest 20,000 people, go ahead.’ The army left.”

Jerry Garcia: “That was truly a cosmic day—the look of the concert, the weather.”

Bob Weir, Grateful Dead: “It rained rain and ounces of marijuana, and we almost burned down the place. It got real crazy—it looked like St. Elmo’s fire all over the stage at one point.”

Buffalo: “When the rain came, we were too messed up to move, so we just put the blanket over us and waited. People were worried that someone on stage would be electrocuted like what happened to Les Harvey from Stone the Crows a year or two earlier.”

John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist: “Bear (Owsley Stanley) had a whole bunch of notions about electricity, and one of them was that the stage should always be grounded to itself, thereby becoming what is called a ‘floating ground.’ Once this huge electrical storm started, the energy potential of the stage was different from its surroundings, so we literally had Saint Elmo’s fire on everything. Balls of lightning were rolling around the equipment, but the band went right on playing while standing in two inches of water. There was a big canopy over the stage, and we ripped holes in that because of the wind, so the water onstage just got even deeper. At one point, some madman with an electric Skilsaw in his hand began cutting holes in the stage so the water would drain away. For some reason, nobody got electrocuted. Which I guess we could all thank Bear for.” (from the book The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III by Robert Greenfield)

clark cowboy: “I had enough rain gear to hunker down and wait the storm out. They played ‘I Know You Rider’—I swear this is true—when they sang ‘I’d shine my light through the cool Colorado rain,’ the sun came out for the first time, lighting up the Front Range of the Rockies, right on cue. Everyone who sat high enough in the stadium to see it let out a roar. I’ll never forget it.”

Bill McKee: “I also remember wandering down onto the field and smoking a joint with a couple during ‘Johnny B. Goode’ as the rain poured down. Spent the last set right down front. The bus definitely stopped for me that day.”

Buffalo: “We were at the field for over six hours and it goes down as one of the two best concerts I have ever attended.”

sailing vessel…: “My life has never been the same…Over the years, my wife and I have been to countless Dead and Dead-related shows, but I’ll never forget the feeling that day in Boulder. It was truly Christmas for the senses—the amazing music, the loving people, the charm that oozed from the band and their roadies. We drove back up to Aspen that evening and I knew I had found my home. It was wherever the Grateful Dead were, because that’s where I knew my new family was.”

John Hazlett grew up in east Boulder County and formed a garage band, Jefferson, in the late ’70s with Centaurus High School classmates. He joined local bands Soft Punk and the School Boys and studied communications at Community College of Denver before moving to California with musician and producer Gerard McMahon to launch the band Kid Lighting. Along with the move came a name change, from Hazlett to Massaro, his mother’s maiden name. Massaro played guitar, keyboards, harmonica and provided background vocals on Kid Lightning’s sole album, 1981’s Rue Blue, and went on to perform for several years in the Steve Miller Band, contributing to four songs on the hit album Abracadabra. The baby of the long-tenured group at 23, he also toured with the band in the US and Europe, duplicating the harmonies Miller himself had recorded in the studio. He also wrote and sang on ace guitarist Lee Ritenour’s 1984 release, Banded Together. Massaro returned to Colorado and lived there until his passing in March 2022.

In Denver’s Fort Logan Cemetery, among the seemingly endless rows of white stones marking the final resting places of military veterans, is one marked “Walter B Conley.” The stele reads “U.S. Navy Korea” and gives his years on earth as May 20, 1929, to November 16, 2003. What it doesn’t reflect is that Conley served most of those years as a Denver-based folk singer of note.

Born in Denver with the given name Billy Robinson, Walt Conley, who was of Black descent, was soon adopted by Wallace and Ethel Conley, a white couple who moved to Scottsbluff, Nebraska. A year after Wallace’s passing in 1944, Walt and his mother moved to Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. After graduating from Manual High School in 1948 he went to Northeastern Jr. College in Sterling on a football scholarship, but didn’t last long due to lack of funds. He returned to Denver and joined the Communist Party in search of racial equality.

While he would eventually renounce his leftist leanings, his character was formed when he worked during the summers of 1948-1950 at a San Cristobal, New Mexico ranch run by folk singer and activist Jenny Vincent and her husband Craig. There, Conley met such musical luminaries as Earl Robinson (composer of “Joe Hill”) and Pete Seeger, who helped him buy his first guitar. Back in Denver, he performed at Denver’s B’nai B’rith in a 1950 program honoring Mayor Quigg Newton for his work in the Human Relations Council.

That December, Conley enlisted in the Navy, where he served as an aviation boatswain’s mate and chaplain’s yeoman. One port of call was New York City, where he was enthralled by the opportunity to meet and see legendary performers Josh White, Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie. Upon his discharge in 1954, he was involved in the low-budget film Salt of the Earth, which was a failure upon release (reviewers called it simplistic and leftist) but has gained in stature since. Conley then enrolled at Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, where he graduated in 1957 with a degree in physical education and drama. That year, he performed in civil rights activist Dorothy King’s Showagon, a traveling talent show that appeared in various Denver parks. He then made a six-month attempt at teaching junior high school in Gilcrest, Colorado before quitting to devote his time to folk singing.

As a Harry Belafonte-styled calypso singer, Conley performed mainly in the bars of the Windsor Hotel at 1802 Larimer St. His appearances there led to other engagements including the Red Ram in Georgetown, where Hal Neustadter saw him and offered an opportunity to play his Little Bohemia club on Lipan Street near 38th Ave. along with another Denver singer—Judy Collins.

When Neustadter opened the Exodus at 19th and Lincoln, he took Collins and Conley with him, which resulted in their appearance on the album Folk Song Festival at Exodus, released in 1959 on Skylark Records. That same year, Conley recorded a 45 for Bandbox Records, “Colorado Story”/“Colorado, Queen of the West,” released with a lavish picture sleeve as part of the tribute to the Colorado gold rush centennial that was taking place. He also waxed “Passing Through”/“Worried Man Blues” for Bandbox.

Conley and Collins worked the same Colorado club circuit, which also included Michael’s Pub (on Pearl St. in Boulder, owned by Mike Bisesi) and the Limelite in Aspen. There, Conley met the young Smothers Brothers, whom he booked for the club he managed for a time at 1920 E. Colfax—the Satire Lounge (owned by Sam Sugarman, a former University of Denver football player). At the Satire, Conley gained lasting notoriety for booking a scruffy Bob Dylan in 1960 and letting him crash at his house on 17th near Williams. Dylan, whom the more polished Smothers Brothers apparently saw as a “faux hobo,” wasn’t popular and was dispatched to play the Gilded Garter in Central City. Upon returning to Denver, he was ostensibly accused of stealing Conley’s record collection before hightailing it out of town.

Conley spent the early ’60s playing around Colorado while Collins leapt to national fame on Elektra Records. He produced two local albums, Passin’ Through with Walt Conley on Premiere Records (1961) and Listen What He’s Sayin’ on Studio City (1963). In addition to standard folk songs (“Joe Hill,” “Hey Nellie Nellie”), the former recording included “The Klan,” an Alan Grey song that reflected Conley’s racial concerns. In a similar vein, he made a spoken-word single for All American Records in 1963 titled “Ballad of the Walking Postman (The Freedom Walk of William L. Moore),” about a white civil-rights protester murdered in Alabama that year.

“My style and presentation were set thirteen years ago when I sang my first song around a campfire in New Mexico,” Conley stated. “That song had a phrase in it—‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.’ And I guess what I’m trying to say is I will always be trying to improve, but I set a pattern at that time, and it’s my own.”

Conley hosted a radio show on KDEN for a time and guested on other Denver stations, and he provided the narration and music for the TV show Colorado Legend in 1961. The last half of the decade saw him performing at clubs from New York’s Bitter End to Pasadena’s Ice House.

The ’70s found Conley leaving Colorado and folk music for a time to try his hand at acting. He landed small parts in movies and on television’s Get Christie Love!, The Rockford Files and The Six Million Dollar Man, among other roles. Music proved too much of a lure, however, and in 1983 Conley returned to Denver, where he opened Conley’s Nostalgia. The closing of the south Broadway club in 1987 led to his interest in Celtic music, which he performed regularly at Sheabeen Irish Pub on Iliff and Chambers in Aurora, forming the band Conley & Company.

Conley’s discography from the end of his career lists After All These Years (1991), Conley & Company Do the Sheabeen Pub (2001) and Black & Tans (2002).

Researched and compiled by George W. Krieger

Widespread Panic, 2000 (photo by Garrett Hacking)

For years, Widespread Panic never cracked Billboard’s Top 200 album chart or had a music video on MTV. But the neo-hippie jam band, formed in the early 1980s in the college town of Athens, Georgia, dominated the Colorado market in a way few bands have ever accomplished. For many summers, the road-friendly group headlined three consecutive nights at Red Rocks Amphitheater, officially holding the record for sellout performances at the famed outdoor venue.

From the early days playing in small bars, Widespread Panic staked its reputation on a freewheeling, amorphous mix of country-blues with touches of jazz-fusion and Southern rock. Without traditional music industry support, the sextet used extensive touring and the internet to cultivate a vast, dedicated following. The group changed its set list every night, allowed fans to tape shows and generate hundreds of websites dedicated to the music and mission. Standout performances at Blues Traveler’s H.O.R.D.E. festival and other locales increased Panic’s grassroots appeal.

In the late 1990s, Panic targeted Colorado, and fans were quick to get on board. Photos of Red Rocks Amphitheatre appeared prominently on 1998’s two-CD live release, Light Fuse Get Away, and Panic’s 2000 summer tour kicked off at the famed outdoor venue, with the three shows (some 27,000 seats total) selling out in 44 minutes. 

“It might not be the path that everybody treads down, but it seems to be working with us,” lead singer and guitarist John Bell said. “You just do what you feel is right at the time. We’re well-practiced at that kind of loose formula.”

That formula, Bell explained, dated to the 1980s. “Back in ’87, America was experiencing a recession. A lot of the ‘hair bands’ had big light shows, very flashy and effect-laden presentations. That stuff carried such a high dollar that it wasn’t really affordable.

“We were still in our little world, just getting our sea legs as far as touring went. We endured for a couple of years, and then there was the recognition that there was some value to what we were doing. We didn’t have to be gimmicky. We could just be ourselves, and there was a market out there that would help sustain us as a band, to where we could eat once a day and play music.

“A few years later we met Blues Traveler, Phish and Col. Bruce Hampton & the Aquarium Rescue Unit. From Colorado, we met Leftover Salmon and Big Head Todd & the Monsters. Here were bands that had also acquired established niches. We were very different, but we all seemed to attack the music and crave what was going on—‘Hey, there’s a common experience in different parts of the country.’

“That was a good feeling right there. Nobody was into hyping themselves as a band—the egos were at a minimum. You could just get on with playing music. You were satisfied with pushing yourself, and you were excited to see what other people were doing. Instead of competition, there was inspiration.”

Widespread Panic did big business on the road—according to trade publications, the band was a Top 30 concert draw in 1998. In the south, the group’s influence was legendary. A record 63,000 people came to its New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival show in 1999, and 100,000 attended an album release party in the streets of Athens.

In Colorado, the band continued to inspire unprecedented devotion. June 27, 2008 marked Widespread Panic’s 32nd sold-out show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, more than any other band in the venue’s history. Mayor John Hickenlooper proclaimed it “Widespread Panic Day” in Denver.

“There’s so much depth to being part of a band relationship,” Bell said. “All of a sudden you’re looking at life-long friendships. Music plays a powerful role in communicating some of these feelings that you’re going through as human beings.”

Widespread Panic keeps making Red Rocks history. In 2021, the group broke its own record, becoming the first band to perform more than sixty shows at Red Rocks.

Bill White Acre, 1996

Born in 1964 in Canada, Bill White Acre moved to Boulder, Colorado after high school to study music at Naropa University. Becoming known for his versatility as a composer and his use of open tunings and percussive guitar playing, White Acre was voted “Best Solo Performer of Denver” by the readers of Westword in 1987. Along the way, he played many shows with Electric Third Rail and Big Head Todd & the Monsters, as well as supporting gigs for Roy Buchanan, Bobby McFerrin and Suzanne Vega. He also recorded two albums, Atlantis Ripples and 9 Songs, in the studio he built. White Acre migrated to Los Angeles in 1989, where he distinguished himself as an award-winning songwriter, vocalist, guitarist and founder of Big Planet Music, Inc., scoring music for television, film and advertising.

Sean Kelly moved from Vermont to Boulder in 1987 and started the Samples, quickly becoming a fixture on local club stages and building a grassroots network of fans across the country. Known for his striking voice and original songs that mixed rock, reggae and folk, the Samples put Colorado on the musical map as a popular and talented touring band. The group was also busy in the studio over the decades, recording more than 15 albums ranging from major-label experiences to their own independent releases. Kelly has fronted different iterations of the Samples over the decades; when not touring with the latest lineup, he plays his songs acoustically.

Time Code

GALLERY: KCUV radio 2003-2008

Photography by Chip Garofalo

Chip Garofalo, a Denver native, built an impressive photography portfolio of artists who performed at KCUV radio, which he shares with the Colorado Music Experience. He is the president of GARO Productions and Media, Inc.

Mark Lanegan, an integral part of the grunge scene of the ’80s and ’90s, died at his home in Killarney, Ireland on February 22 at the age of 57. Lanegan first became prominent as the lead singer for Screaming Trees, and the alternative radio hit “Nearly Lost You” delivered the band to the mainstream.

The post-punk indie rock of the American Northwest produced many strains of noise.

Screaming Trees originally called Ellensburg in central Washington home. Surrounded by hunting and fishing wilderness, the members were raised on Seventies classic rock, whatever punk records they could get their hands on, and plenty of beer and weed. Boredom was a catalyst for creativity.

The ramshackle quartet compulsively wrote and recorded music in the independent sector, producing some albums, EPs and side projects. Amidst the sudden popularity of the Seattle music scene, Screaming Trees then signed with a major label, but low-budget touring was still a strain when the band performed at Ground Zero in Boulder in 1991.

“There were years where we had everyone sleeping in the same room, if we got a room at all—oftentimes we’d sleep in a van and wouldn’t eat,” Lanegan said. “It wasn’t a career or a hobby, it was more like prison. We’re older now, so it’s hard on us to live like that. But we try to enjoy the hell out of it—we’re incapable of holding regular jobs.”

The Trees worked in a real 24-track studio for the major label debut, Uncle Anesthesia, yet the band’s garage-rooted sound had been preserved. Gary Lee Connor’s massed guitars made powerful, grungy noise, and Lanegan’s surly baritone vocals called to mind memories of early Iggy Pop.

Screaming Trees finally got some national attention for their sixth album. The band broke with tradition making Sweet Oblivion, recording in New York, using a real producer and writing songs together. “We got used to making entire records in a day for a thousand bucks,” Lanegan said. “But there just came a point where we needed to get paid for doing it.”

The sound was laden with undeniable pop sensibilities and infectious hooks, elements condensed on “Nearly Lost You” (which also appeared on the soundtrack to the Cameron Crowe film Singles) and “Dollar Bill.” In 1996, an entire album was recorded but then rejected by Screaming Trees themselves, but Dust finally settled and “All I Know” became a favorite on rock radio. 

Screaming Trees disbanded in 2000. Lanegan later drew attention for his stint in Queens of the Stone Age and as a member of the Gutter Twins (a collaboration with Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs). 

Meat Loaf—real name Marvin Lee Aday, “but nobody ever calls me that”—died on January 20, 2022. He was 74. His Bat out of Hell albums were perhaps the most grandiose, bombastic, melodramatic—and multi-platinum and Grammy-winning—series of rock pseudo-operas in history.

In 1978, the beefy singer broke onto the rock scene with Bat Out of Hell, which was shopped around for years before it was finally released, and it took months to gain traction. But fueled by three hit singles, it roared up the charts, going on to sell 30 million copies worldwide.

Meat Loaf presented an unforgettable image to the public—at a time when rock musicians took pains to appear as traditionally waif-like as possible, he resembled a grocer who was eating up all the profits. And from inside his man-mountain stature came a voice of near-operatic proportions. It served as the messenger for writer Jim Steinman’s over-the-top mini-dramas, which treated teen angst in terms of Wagnerian excess. Todd Rundgren’s dense production of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” and “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” made Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” look like a white picket fence.

But that powerful, passionate voice failed Meat Loaf as suddenly as it had catapulted him to stardom. At the height of Bat Out of Hell’s popularity, the pressures of that success stripped him of his singing powers and left him in a career limbo. He was just finding his way out of it when he performed at Denver’s Rainbow Music Hall in 1983 in support of his third album, Midnight at the Lost and Found.

“Hey, I’ve only been to Colorado once before,” he recalled. “I was up at Caribou, the recording studio up in the mountains, and we were having a big dinner with a lot of people. Record company executives, managers—people were flying in from everywhere. The dinner was scheduled for 11 at night. But the air was so thin that I passed out at 8:30 and slept through the whole thing! So if I’m not onstage when I play Denver, everyone will know the reason—Meat’s asleep!”

Meat Loaf had a well-developed sense of humor about himself, and he had no qualms about dissecting the ups-and-down of his career. “The problems with my voice were all stress-related,” he admitted. “I just let myself go wacko from and during the success of Bat Out of Hell—it was psychosomatic. I spent over two years just doing nothing but wondering where my voice had gone. I finally decided to work, so I starred in the movie Roadie. My psychiatrist told me to do it just to be doing anything.”

Meat Loaf had plenty of prior acting experience—he had performed in a touring company of Hair and made a memorable appearance as Eddie in the classic cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “And more work in film will come,” he predicted. “It only takes 10 weeks when you want to do it. Right now, I just want to tour and record. Tom Dowd (producer of Midnight at the Lost and Found) was the one who helped me get my confidence back. He just said, ‘Ah, there ain’t nothing wrong with you, kid. They’re just songs—get in there and sing ’em!’”

Before meeting up with Dowd, Meat Loaf had made a previous attempt at recording a follow-up to Bat Out of Hell. Steinman grew tired of waiting for Meat Loaf’s voice rehabilitation to finish and used the material intended for a second Bat album as his first solo album, Bad for Good. Meat Loaf gathered other Steinman songs for his eventual release, 1981’s Dead Ringer.

(Steinman: “When Meat came off the road, his voice was shot to hell. There was a little physical damage, but a lot of it was mental—he couldn’t deal with having to follow such an amazingly successful record. He went to doctors and specialists everywhere, and no one could find anything wrong. Meat finally found this doctor in California who did his voice some good. The guy is either crazy or a genius, but he took Meat and induced a violent allergic reaction in him—Meat’s allergic to a thousand things, but he used cat hair. Then he injected Meat’s urine back into his bloodstream. Then he covered him with mats and beat the living hell out of him. It was pretty strange walking into therapy and seeing Meat all swollen and screaming under those mats while this guy pounded on him. He’d stop yelling just long enough to look up and say, ‘Isn’t this weird?’ But I swear to God, it was the only treatment with any results.”)

“Dead Ringer for Love” from Dead Ringer was a smash hit in the UK—nearly everywhere except America, a fact that still irked Meat Loaf.

“Radio had closed minds just because it was a duet with Cher,” he fumed. “It was a hit song, as was proven elsewhere, and when we do it live, the crowds get off on it even though they don’t really know the song. In other countries, it didn’t make a difference that Cher had played Las Vegas and Atlantic City, but over here the radio people said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, but we don’t play her kind of music.’”

Midnight at the Lost and Found was his first album not to feature the songwriting prowess of Steinman, which had forced Meat Loaf into taking on that responsibility. “I don’t like songwriting, but I’m getting better at it. I learned a few tricks from the best guy in the biz—Steinman. I’ll be working with him again, as soon as he gets away from his fucking manager who’s suing me for all my money.”

Steinman was currently hotter than ever, with two hits on the charts that he had written and produced for Bonnie Tyler (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”) and Air Supply (“Making Love Out of Nothing at All”). A Meat Loaf-Steinman reunion was worth waiting for, but by that time Meat Loaf knew that things never came as easy as they should.

“I’m serious—I’m poor,” he laughed. “I mean, I’m being forced to eat Twinkies and tuna fish sandwiches, and to walk from gig to gig…”

In 1993, Meat Loaf once again partnered with Steinman and recaptured the magic. Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell continued the original’s story and duplicated its thunderous sonics, propelling it and the single “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” to No. 1. He released another single from the smash album, “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are.” It was collaborator Steinman’s metaphor for the pain of coming to terms with the past and embracing the present.

“I spent three days in a rehearsal studio with Jimmy and his notebook, forcing that song out. He had some lyrics floating around and that line about, ‘If life is just a highway and a soul is just a car, then objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are.’ I sat there and made him put it together. He came with the arrangement for ‘I’d Do Anything for Love’ all written, but ‘Objects’ was the tough one. It’s very difficult for him to write a song, really hard. He can turn out plays or scripts, but he hates writing songs. I don’t know if he gets possessed or what. He loves it when he’s done, but the actual process—he’d just as soon have open-heart surgery with no anesthesia. So there are very few songs of his that you don’t know about—they’ve all been placed somewhere.”

Meat Loaf sold out a show at Denver’s Auditorium Theatre in March 1994, and he returned to town that August to perform at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater. He was taking the impending Major League Baseball strike hard—he was a New York Yankees fan and a fantasy league geek. He had sung the national anthem at the All-Star Game that season.

“I have the Colorado Rockies Opening Day program in my collection,” he enthused. “But I’m an American League guy. I like the realignment, I think it’s good for baseball. The playoffs bring people to the ballpark, they like to see their teams competing. So I’m devasted (by the strike). All along, the inside information I got from owners and players was that there isn’t going to be a World Series this year.”

Meat Loaf performed at Denver’s Universal Lending Pavilion in 2003 to promote Couldn’t Have Said It Better, a stylistic cloning of the Bat series. The plus-size singer worked with a roster of eclectic songwriters, and the compositions sounded exactly like Steinman’s work, particularly the title track and the tear-jerking “Did I Say That?” Meat Loaf was calling it his best collaborative effort since the original Bat Out of Hell, but he planned to devote himself to his rekindled acting career (in 1999, he appeared as Bob Paulson in Fight Club).

“I was on tour from ’83 to ’91, then ’93 to ’97. I can’t tour like that anymore—I have to stop. I was planning to make this my last album as well.”

But his rock ’n’ roll retirement plans looked premature. “I got an e-mail from Steinman saying ‘We gotta do Bat III,” he said. “The problem was, my ex-manager was Steinman’s manager. For a while, he’d try to keep Jim busy doing other things. Last year, Jim finally got rid of him.”

Work began on the final installment of Bat Out of Hell. Meat Loaf knew no other singer could pull off the humor and theatricality of Steinman’s grandly cinematic songs.

“I don’t want to sound like George Lucas, but Jim always said he thought of Bat in terms of a trilogy. But it’s a slo-o-o-w process.”

Released in 2006, Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose included some songs but no production involvement by Steinman, who died in April 2021. Meat Loaf issued his last studio album, Braver Than We Are, in 2016.

Bill Stevenson is the drummer and only constant member of Descendents, a legendary punk band formed in 1978 in California. He recorded several albums with Black Flag, then focused his attention on Descendents until lead singer Milo Aukerman left the band to pursue a graduate degree. Stevenson and the remaining members formed All, eventually relocating to Fort Collins, Colorado, where he built the Blasting Room, a recording studio financed with money acquired from All’s contract with a major record label. All and Descendents continue to make music while Stevenson also pursues his career as a record producer.

Time Code

Hot Rize

YouTube

Bringing respect for tradition and progressive elements to the bluegrass genre, the eclectic Colorado band went on to a long and storied career.

Named after the secret leavening ingredient in Martha White Self-Rising Flour—a longtime sponsor of bluegrass music—Hot Rize debuted in 1978. Balancing innovation with reverence for the roots of bluegrass, the four members gained renown for a stage show featuring their ill-concealed Western Swing alter egos, Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers, who lovingly parodied ’50s country music. Hot Rize enhanced its legacy in Americana music by embarking on several world tours, winning the first-ever International Bluegrass Music Association award for Entertainer of the Year and receiving 4-star album reviews in Rolling Stone.

Graeme Edge, drummer and co-founder of the Moody Blues, died on Novermber 11, 2021, at the age of 80. Described by frontman Justin Hayward as “one of the great characters of the music business,” Edge was the only person to be a member of the British band’s entire existence.

The Moody Blues became one of rock music’s most dominant forces between 1968 and 1972, when the splendor of the hit “Nights in White Satin” and such classic concept albums as In Search of the Lost Chord and A Question of Balance established their brand of orchestral rock. Edge’s drumming and introspective spoken-word poetry played a major role in the group’s success.

A six-year hiatus interrupted the band’s career in the ’70s, but the 1986 hit “Your Wildest Dreams” introduced the Moody Blues’ music to a new generation of fans. Edge celebrated the group’s survivor status on a supporting tour that brought the “veteran cosmic rockers” to Denver’s Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater.

“The common ground that’s stayed the same in the band is a sense of old-fashioned decency,” Edge noted. We were all raised in good families, so we don’t like breaking up hotel rooms or throwing girls into vats of Jell-O. And musically, we share with millions of people that wonderful idealism of the ’60s, when we were going to change the world. We’ve kept that flame alive a little bit.”

Yet the group’s ’80s output was criticized as more hit-oriented and less progressive that early releases. Edge said the band had lost a little spontaneity as a result of exploring technology.

“On tour, the use of pre-programmed sections tends to ossify the arrangements, and I think the new records are a little to sanitized by sequencers,” he said. “I want to hear more bacteria, more rock ’n’ roll. But we’ve got to explore these things—we can’t shut our minds. When the saxophone was invented so many years ago, some people argued that it took away the contact between the musician and the instrument—it used mechanics, where previous to that it was all fingers-over-holes. But musicians always use the technology of the day, be it a saxophone or the latest result of the microchip revolution.

“So we’re working to become virtuosos with this new stuff. I’m still the band’s conductor—try and play together without a drummer,” he laughed. “Drum machines? You can spill beer on me and I still work. In fact, in the early days, you had to spill a beer in me to get me to work.”

Through the ’90s, the Moodies heralded their longevity by collaborating with major symphony organizations throughout the US and Europe, a concept that the band debuted with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra at Red Rocks Amphitheater in 1992. A successful album and a PBS television special followed.

“The project has made it exciting to get back on the road again,” Edge said when the Moodies returned to the Rocks in 1994. “It’s usually so boring, especially when you get to our age when you can’t drink as much as you used to. And with the diseases that are about now, you can’t play around. And after the first 10 gigs, you start feeling a bit like you’re churning it out like a sausage factory. If you’re not enjoying the playing, it starts to get jaded.

“But with orchestras, it’s a different one every night, and you’re wondering what it’s gonna be like. I hadn’t paid any attention. I didn’t realize that, apart from skill levels, you could tell the difference between orchestras from their sound. But you can tell rock bands apart—why not orchestras? The resident conductors actually impress their personalities on these people. So you hear some of them where the strings speak really slowly, and some more onto the beat, some where the brass is harsh and hard, some where it’s really got a warm, rounded tone.”

How did the CSO rate? “They were the first, and I was in such a blue funk that night I can’t remember listening to them! For 25 years, if somebody slipped up—missed a verse or came in a couple of beats early—we were used to playing as a band, so it wasn’t a problem. I’d quickly switch over and back whoever was the lead player. But Red Rocks was the first time I’d been the drummer for 60-odd people. If they’ve all got is ‘tadpoles on washing lines’ (sheet music), they’re going to stay on that. So I was concentrating on staying with the orchestra, really concerned of speeding up or slowing down a little. Most of that concert, the only thing I heard was myself going ‘one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four!’”

Commander Cody, alias pianist and vocalist George Frayne, died September 26, 2021, at age 77, after a long battle with esophageal cancer. The crazy Commander was a fixture on the American music scene for most of the ’70s. His brand of good-time boogie-woogie rock ’n’ roll—notably the gonzo barroom country classic “Hot Rod Lincoln” and a breakneck reading of “Daddy, Beat Me Eight to the Bar”—endeared him to audiences throughout the world.

But Commander Cody was just another character to Frayne, a talented individual in many areas. After graduating with honors from the University of Michigan with a degree in fine arts, he discovered that the straight world held no charms for someone with diverse interests. While simultaneously trying to promote himself as an author and painter, he invented the Cody character to conquer rock ’n’ roll, but found himself pigeonholed.

In 1981, his critically acclaimed sculpture and paintings were touring the US, part of the Star Art travelling exhibition, and he stopped in Denver to promote his work. He had reemerged on record with Lose It Tonight, featuring the single “2 Triple Cheese (Side Order of Fries),” already a hit in England.

“I wrote and produced it myself, and that’s the last thing that record companies want from me,” Frayne explained in Denver. “Ever since my first record, they’ve always stuck me with a producer and it’s gotten worse, all the way up to my last album when I had two slipped discs and they slipped me some clown who didn’t know what was going on. That was Clive Davis’ deal—he met me at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, sends up a piano, I play some boogie and he signs me with Arista Records. I figure, ‘Hey here’s a guy that believes in me.’ But he just thought he was getting a ‘name’ that he could push into the Top 10. You can’t do that with me—I won’t fit. It takes some kind of fire under these record company guys to get them going, because they don’t wanna hear from Commander Cody. They think of hicks, drunken cowboys and fiddle music. All it takes is for someone to say, ‘Hey, listen, George, you’re more than a stoned hippie that doesn’t know what he’s doing; you’re a stoned hippie that knows what he’s doing.”

Financial success wasn’t important to what Frayne was trying to accomplish. “There’s a big difference between getting what I want and getting money,” he explained. “I’ve been rich, and that’s no fun unless you can do what you wanna do. I used to get down on myself—‘Only a handful of people are digging this, what’s the problem?’ But screw trying to figure things out. That’s something I’ve learned over the last couple of years—just relax. I have no financial goals other than to pay the rent, eat regularly, and buy enough pot so I can smoke it all the time and think of songs.”

Frayne hoped “2 Triple Cheese (Side Order of Fries)” could top “Seven Eleven,” his infamous hymn to shoplifting.

“I did pretty good with that one,” Frayne boasted. “In San Francisco, a guy went through a store’s aisles grabbing stuff whistling that song. He then punched out the owner and split. Every radio station in the Bay Area dropped the song from their playlists within a half-hour. I’ve got a lot of stuff that is not frankly controversial, but out-and-out controversial. I’ve got a nasty song about John Wayne because I don’t like John Wayne. Stuff like ‘Under that tan he was a helluva man/He tried to send me to Vietnam.’ And ‘In the end, of course/He got off on his horse.’ They don’t wanna hear that in Nashville.”

Frayne’s inspiration came in one form. “I’ve tried ’em all, and the only drug I consistently like all the time is marijuana. Cocaine is fine, but it only works if you’re drinking or vice versa. That’s good stuff on the road, that’s real rock ’n’ roll. Hey, we play these gigs in front of college kids who are drunk on their butts, and how else do you face them? Three guesses. After that, I can play a gig like Red Rocks straight—or on acid.

“With me, you really expect something different. I mean, Frank Zappa can do it because people believe in him. What’s the difference between Frank Zappa being a schmuck and a genius? It’s that a whole bunch of people think he’s a genius. If people thought I was a genius, I’d be making some funny fricking albums.”

Asked what he was planning to do next, Frayne laughed. “I’m gonna go light up a fat one.”

After attending college, majoring with a focus on jazz piano, Kyle Hollingsworth set out on a career in music. Moving to Boulder, Colorado, he eventually joined String Cheese Incident, writing and performing in a mosaic of styles with the acclaimed jam band. The innovative and virtuosic musician has collaborated with a horde of major acts and leads a solo project, Kyle Hollingsworth Band. He is also an avid craft brewer and has hosted events and concerts spotlighting his collaborative beverages.

Time Code

Paddy Moloney, the leprechaun-like founder and indefatigable guiding spirit of the Chieftains—the world’s most popular exponents of traditional Irish music—died October 12, 2021, at the age of 83. Moloney formed the Chieftains in 1962 and fronted the band for nearly sixty years—performing across the globe, selling millions of albums and rubbing shoulders with popular music’s biggest names.

The Chieftains had obvious credentials when the band performed at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver in 1981, having won an Oscar for the score of 1975’s Barry Lyndon. But most fans became familiar with the group through its work with rock artists, and the charismatic Moloney indulged in name-dropping.

“Art Garfunkel came up after a concert four years ago, and shortly thereafter he asked us to play on his album. Previously we did something with Mike Oldfield (of Tubular Bells fame). We’ve collaborated with Eric Clapton. And we were invited to jam on Van Morrison’s encore at a festival in Edinburgh.”

Moloney added some elbow pipes to a track for Paul McCartney’s Tug of War album, and Don Henley of the Eagles called the Chieftains to play on his solo album. “It’s nice to meet these people like Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Baez when they come backstage. But I’m not into the American music scene at all. I’m into my own stuff.”

Moloney’s loyalties were with Irish music, and he was quick to point out that an American band playing traditional music could only draw upon 200 years of influences, while the Chieftains had centuries of music to master and execute. The band staked out a unique musical territory with a repertoire ranging from ancient Celtic tribal reels to wedding serenades of the Georgian era. The members played it all on authentic Irish instruments—uillean pipes, bodhrans, harps and flutes—that most contemporary musicians didn’t even know how to hold, much less coax delicate sounds.

By performing a foot-stomping legacy of Ireland’s jigs, airs and reels, the band came to be enthusiastically appreciated by pop artists and audiences across the world, bringing traditional Irish music out of the back corners of Ireland’s pubs to the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China. “These are places where they can’t understand a word of the garbage I’m speaking,” Moloney said, “but it’s always the music that speaks for itself.” The Chieftains claimed the record for playing to the largest live audience in the world—the band performed for 1,350,000 when Pope John Paul II visited Dublin in 1979. The kicker from Moloney—“But the Pope was headlining.”

The Chieftains’ 25th anniversary tour brought the band to Denver’s Paramount Theater in 1988. By that point, members of the group had recorded or performed with high-profile stars ranging from the Grateful Dead to Dan Fogelberg. Moloney guested on Primitive Cool, Mick Jagger’s solo album. “I’ve known Mick since the mid-’60s—he and Marianne Faithful came to a concert we were doing in Ireland,” he enthused. “I do meet him at a lot of parties, because we’re both friends of the Guinnesses, the beer people.”

Tours sent the Chieftains far and wide, and North American concerts nearly always led to Colorado. The special package tour of summer 1995, which came to Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, was a mutual admiration society of the band and Sarah McLachlan, Canada’s alternative diva. That year’s The Long Black Veil marked the Chieftains’ first gold album, filled with friends like Sting, the Rolling Stones, Mark Knopfler, Ry Cooder, Tom Jones and Sinead O’Connor. “There was no clash breaking down personality barriers—and once that disappears, it becomes an Irish party for me,” Moloney exclaimed.

The Chieftains performed with O’Connor at Red Rocks in 1998. The group kicked off a North American tour at Denver’s Paramount Theater in 2001 and returned to the venue in 2002, exploring the link between Irish music and bluegrass. The members would always bring area dancers onstage to enhance their shows.

The Chieftains pulled off a long, interesting list of achievements—six Grammy awards and countless nominations, even an Emmy—but one eluded Moloney. “I’ve always said I wanted to be the first musician to play on the moon,” he said. “My son is a rocket scientist—he graduated in 2001. The astronauts down in Houston all come to our show every year—they have a group called the Astronautics, and I’ve played with them. One of these days I’ll make it, don’t worry.”

Herb Kauvar, the owner of the Sink and Tulagi, helped define Boulder’s burgeoning music scene. He steered the Sink through the turbulent ’60s, and Tulagi was known in the early ’70s as a launch pad for every significant act on the upswing—future stars such as the Eagles, Bonnie Raitt and ZZ Top—in every genre, from rock, blues and country to jazz, folk and comedy. He died on October 24, 2020, at age 93.

Time Code

Mollie O’Brien

Mollie O’Brien, a nationally venerated interpretive singer of folk, blues and R&B, has issued acclaimed albums with her brother, Tim O’Brien, and her husband, guitarist Rich Moore, and equally lauded solo releases. She had a regular stint with the Hopeful Gospel Quartet on “A Prairie Home Companion” in the early 2000s.

Esmé Patterson

Singer-songwriter Esmé Patterson is a former member of Paper Bird, an indie folk band that started as sidewalk buskers, performing its joyful blend of roots, folk and indie pop on the streets of Breckenridge. The septet was voted a “Top 10 Best Underground Band” by The Denver Post three years in a row, and Ballet Nouveau Colorado commissioned the act to score a ballet entitled “Carry On.” Patterson began her solo career in 2012 and released her fourth album in 2020 titled There Will Come Soft Rains.

Born in Chicago in 1948, an adolescent Otis Taylor moved to Denver with his parents after his uncle was shot to death. He cultivated his interest in blues and folk at the Denver Folklore Center, where he learned to play banjo, guitar and harmonica before forming his first groups. He ventured to London for a brief time until returning to the US in the late ’60s, and stints with the 4-Nikators and Zephyr followed. Taylor left the music business in 1977 to pursue dealing in art and antiques, to coach bicycle racing and to raise a family. During the ’90s, he was drawn back into music, performing and releasing his debut album, Blue-Eyed Monster. Over the course of two decades and 15 albums, Taylor has emerged as a singular voice in the blues scene, garnering international acclaim for his “trance blues” and unflinching honesty in writing about racism, struggle, freedom, heritage and the complications of life. Taylor has earned a long list of awards and nominations. He was recognized in 2000 with a composition fellowship from the Sundance Institute in Park City, Utah, and 2001’s White African captured a W.C. Handy award for Best New Artist Debut. Director Michael Mann picked up his song “Ten Million Slaves” for the movie Public Enemies in 2009. His 2017 album Fantasizing about Being Black chronicled the historical trauma of the African-American experience, from the voyages of slave ships to the Mississippi Delta.

Time Code

Rick Nelson & the Stone Canyon Band

Rick Nelson was the first teen idol to use television as a way to promote records. In 1948, he joined his parents’ radio show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which moved to television in 1952 for a 14-year run. Eight years into the show, Nelson became an “overnight success” when he released his first single, “A Teenager’s Romance”/“I’m Walking.” Television’s commercial power was unrealized at that time, and almost as an afterthought, a Ricky-sings-at-the-party sequence was aired. “A Teenager’s Romance” sold a million copies the following week.

Nelson released an endless stream of hit singles, such as “Stood Up,” “Poor Little Fool,” “Lonesome Town,” “Travelin’ Man” and “Teen Age Idol,” to name but a few. By the mid-’60s, when The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet went off the air, his hits began to dry up and his music was eclipsed by the British Invasion.

Determined to establish an adult identity and gain the respect he deserved as a musician, Nelson put together the Stone Canyon Band with Poco bassist Randy Meisner. “The Stone Canyon Band came together almost from a negative standpoint,” Nelson said. “I didn’t know what kind of music I wanted to do. I couldn’t verbalize it, really, so I just got to thinking about how I started, the kind of music I liked. I was really fortunate in getting a unique type of style and then clicking with musicians who played along those lines. The first guy I found was Randy Meisner.”

Denver’s Soul Survivors

Meisner grew up on a farm near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. He traveled throughout the Midwest working the road and pursuing his musical ambitions. An affable, easygoing sort with a sweet, high voice, he cut his teeth playing with the Driving Dynamics and arrived in Denver in 1966 to play a battle of the bands. He linked up with one of the competing groups, the Soul Survivors—not the New York-based white soul group of “Expressway to Your Heart” fame, but a well-produced pop-rock act that scored two No. 1 hits on Denver’s Top 40 giant KIMN (“Can’t Stand to Be in Love with You” and “Hung Up on Losing”).

“When they lost their bass player, they asked me if I wanted to jump ship and move to Los Angeles with them,” Meisner said. The name of his new band was changed to the Poor. Meisner and lead guitarist Allen Kemp slept on the living room floor of a one-bedroom apartment in East Los Angeles for $85 a month. Gigs were few and far between. “We didn’t realize how much competition was out there,” Meisner said. “My jacket was my first pillow. We really had nothing at all.”

When Meisner took the job with Poco, the Poor broke up. With drummer Patrick Shanahan, Kemp moved to a cheaper three-bedroom house in Sherman Oaks and got a job washing cars. Meisner left Poco in a dispute over the final mixes to the country-rock group’s first album. Upon leaving the band, Meisner was contacted about working with Nelson.

Meisner contacted Kemp and Shanahan, his buddies from the band that first brought him from Denver. Nelson got the Stone Canyon Band’s name from a remote area of the Los Angeles hills he used to drive by. The sound was crisp and clear—Meisner and Kemp stacked their vocals in angelic harmonies on top of Nelson’s. Meisner quit and rejoined, then quit again to form a band with Glenn Frey and Don Henley. They hit it off so well, he decided to fly with the Eagles.

On October 15, 1971, Rick Nelson & the Stone Canyon Band were special guest stars at the Richard Nader Rock & Roll Revival at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The concert program acquired an integral place in Nelson’s own legend.

“At sound check, everybody else was looking out of the ’50s and doing just their strict old hits. Rick refused to do that. He wanted to do something different,” Kemp said. Nelson started out feeding the Garden crowd pure nostalgia, but when he sat down at the piano and performed new material, he was booed off the stage for departing from the rigid oldies program, for having long hair and for his band’s drugstore cowboy appearance.

The experience inspired Nelson to pen a song six months later featuring a mildly scornful mood and the resolute conclusion: “If memories are all I sing, I’d rather drive a truck.” “Garden Party” climbed all the way to No. 6 on the Billboard pop singles charts, one of the most extraordinary comeback hits in rock history.

Rick Nelson & the Stone Canyon Band went through several personnel changes. Allen Kemp and Pat Shanahan went on to play with the New Riders of the Purple Sage in the ’80s. Nelson died in a plane crash in 1985 at the age of 45.

Lee “Scratch” Perry, one of the most influential forces of Jamaican music, died at the age of 85 on August 29, 2021.

There was no doubt about the notoriously eccentric Perry’s legend when he visited the Fox Theatre in Boulder in 1997. The innovative producer, songwriter and indie-label entrepreneur had been working since the ska genre, a precursor to reggae, began in Jamaica in the late ’50s. From 1975 to 1979, Perry made history, launching Black Ark, his four-track home studio in the suburbs of Kingston.

The period was being celebrated in Arkology, a gorgeous 3-CD set released by Island Jamaican Records. Arkology included such chestnuts as Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” Max Romeo’s “War in a Babylon,” several of Perry’s own (“Roast Fish & Cornbread,” “Curly Locks”) and other Black Ark recordings with Perry at the controls.

Perry also helped shape Bob Marley’s sound, and the Clash recorded “Complete Control” with Perry at the board in 1977. Perry had introduced himself to the members of the Clash after hearing their version of “Police and Thieves.” The meeting of punk and reggae was the inspiration for Perry’s next collaboration with Marley, “Punky Reggae Party” (a UK Top 10 single).

Stoked on rum, weed and Rastafarian sensibilities, Perry manipulated his primitive equipment to create deep, hypnotic reggae rhythms beefed up with pulsating reverb, futuristic electronic textures and scary noises. He was known for such studio antics as dressing up in a tree costume and blowing ganja smoke onto the spools of recording tape.

“I was only four (tracks) written on the machine, but I was picking up 20 from the extraterrestrial squad,” Perry, then 62, said in his thick Jamaican patois.

The radical productions proved visionary—many of the dub, hip-hop, rap and reggae techniques exploited by ’90s musicians were forged by Perry’s sound. But the Black Ark era was short-lived. In 1980, Perry apparently burned down the studio.

“Some funny things happen in Jamaica. I was amongst too many thieves and criminals, vampires. I could not take them anymore. I was not going back to reggae. I was not going backward to where I start. I was going forward into international music, making dub form.”

Perry began a self-imposed exile, living briefly in London and Amsterdam before settling in Zurich, where he lived for most of the ’90s. He collaborated with such contemporary deejays and producers as Mad Professor and Adrian Sherwood.

“But those are the past. No more work with them. Times have changed. I’m not interested in recording anymore, no interest in reggae music whatsoever. I lose too much money and too much time in it. All my years I didn’t get any money. Everybody else has my tapes. Every time I think about my tapes, it get me more mad, more angry. I do not intend to get back into it. I will not go back to Jamaica and make any reggae music. There is nothing there for Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. I’m interested in tours and show biz.”

Yet Perry had been a rare presence onstage. “There was a problem with the visa, so there was no tour for me. I was not allowed to come in the States.”

But after a 17-year hiatus from America, Perry was performing once again. “Everywhere I tour is a big success. The vibration from the people is good for me everywhere I go, better than sitting in the recording studio, where you’re not getting anything.

“I am named ‘Scratch’ because all things start from scratch. So check it out—who am I?”

Mando & the Chili Peppers

Latinos were under-represented in early rock ’n’ roll. In 1957, a year before “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens and “Tequila” by the Champs (written by saxophonist Danny Flores aka Chuck Rio), Armando Almendárez was leading Mando & The Chili Peppers—one of the first Hispanic rock ’n’ roll acts.

Born in 1935 in the Rio Grande country, Almendárez played conjunto music on his accordion in San Antonio, a predominately Hispanic town in the ’50s. As Conjunto Mexico, his band recorded local Spanish-language records before waxing a version of Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” on Rio Records, using accordion as the lead instrument. The lineup also included Jesse “Chucho” Perales on baja sexto, a 12-string Mexican guitar.

Almendárez’ next band, Mando & the Latineers, featured Rudy Martínez (piano), Abel Garcia (sax), Juventino Elizondo (drums), Aaron Lasater (bass) and Chucho moving to electric guitar. They played at the Dunes in Las Vegas (acquiring a Packard to transport the members and their gear), and were advised to try their luck in Denver, a city short on rock ’n’ roll talent. Arriving in town on January 3, 1957, in the middle of a snowstorm, the group was drawn to the lights of the Saddle Club, in the 1200 block of 20^th Street. Mando & the Latineers auditioned and were hired.

Within a month, the owner of Golden Crest Records, Clark Galehouse, had his plane grounded on his way from New York to a music convention in Idaho; he found his way to the Saddle Club, where he was impressed enough by the band to offer them a chance to record in New York. By now, Lasater had returned to San Antonio, and Almendárez was handling bass along with singing.

The first single was a version of the classic “South of the Border” b/w “Don’t Say Goodnight” in May 1957. The members were surprised to see that the name on the label read “The Chili Peppers vocal by Armando,” as Galehouse had changed their name. The A-side had a New Orleans feel with Fats Domino-style piano triplets, which generated airplay in that market as well as charting on Denver radio. Denver Policeman Abe Levine penned the band’s next single, a novelty titled “I Love to Eat Chili in Chile,” released in October 1957; it was backed with a rocked-up cover of the George Morgan country tune “Candy Kisses.” The record was credited to Mando & the Chili Peppers.

The band shortly released a full album, On the Road with Rock ’N Roll, mixing originals (“Swingin’ Baby”) and country songs done in a rock ’n’ roll style (“San Antonio Rose”). Mando & the Chili Peppers performed all over the region and in California, where they were introduced as “Mando & the Chili Peppers, the band that made the Rocky Mountains rock.”

In 1958, the band cut its final single, “Baby Baby I Can’t Believe” b/w “Someday (You’ll Want Me to Want You).” The sound captured dance music by a spirited if unpolished bar band.

By 1960, most of the band was out of music and back in San Antonio. Mando went to Chicago and played bass with bluesman Eddie Clearwater. Chucho’s obituary from June 2014 stated that he returned to conjunto music and taught bajo sexto for decades at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and Palo Alto College.

By George W. Krieger

Stanley Sheldon

Stanley Sheldon, a longtime member of Peter Frampton’s band, was a musician with fusion master guitarist Tommy Bolin’s groups from 1971 to 1974, including Energy.

Nanci Griffith, a Grammy-winning singer, guitarist and songwriter, died on August 13, 2021. She was 68. Griffith emerged from the same generation of folk/country stars as Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle, and her compellingly honest, crooning vocal style was as delicate and vulnerable as her appearance. Her music was country, but she sang sweet, knowing love songs in a clear, reedy voice without the genre’s swoops, growls and drawn-out syllables.

“Years ago, I coined the term ‘folkabilly’ to point out that, even though I’m from Austin, I’ve drawn more from folk and hillbilly styles than traditional Texas blues,” she said.

Popular recordings included “Love at the Five and Dime” (later a Top 5 hit for Kathy Mattea), “Once in a Very Blue Moon,” “Outbound Plane,” “Late Night Grand Hotel” and “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go.”

An engaging live performer, Griffith appeared at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 1987, and her star continued to rise there over the decades.

“That first time was amazing,” she recalled. “I’d played Cambridge in England and I had been playing the Kerrville Music Festivals every year since 1976. I got to Telluride and I said, ‘How long do you want me to do?’ I was on at night, and I’d only brought a bass player with me. They said, ‘Go out there and do 90 minutes.’ I’m like, ‘What? Wow!’—at Cambridge, it was always a 60-minute set, and at Kerrville, it’s 45 for everybody. Onstage, I reached down to pick up my glass of water and it had ice floating in it—it had gotten so cold. And people wouldn’t let me leave—they were still out there dancing and singing.”

Griffith performed with her Blue Moon Orchestra at the 1991 American Music Festival in Winter Park. Her insightful set included “From A Distance,” which she had recorded in her affecting soprano in 1987 (before Bette Midler made it a smash hit). She was excited about her new album, Late Night Grand Hotel. “I recorded in England, and that was wonderful—I finally got the orchestral sound that I loved on early Tom Waits albums.”

Arguably Griffth’s greatest legacy was her commitment to presenting the rich tradition of folk music in America. She paid homage to songs and performances of underappreciated artists on her 1993 Grammy-winning album, Other Voices, Other Rooms, featuring guest appearances by Bob Dylan and John Prine, and 1998’s Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful). Random House published her book, Other Voices—a Personal History of Folk Music, a companion piece to the albums that was full of interviews and photographs.

“During the late ’70s and all through the ’80s, when I emerged with my self-described ‘folkabilly,’ folk music was such an f-word in the music industry,” she explained. “In order to market these incredibly talented people that they couldn’t call folksingers, they relabeled them singer-songwriters. I kept thinking, ‘These songs are going to die if we don’t sing them.’ It’s like Pete Seeger says—it’s not his job as a writer to put his name on the lips of his audience, it’s his job to put the song on the lips of babes. That puts it in a nutshell.”

Brad Corrigan

Dispatch, a jam band based in the Boston area, developed a following via word-of-mouth and file-sharing in the late 1990s; drummer Brad Corrigan grew up in Littleton.

In the late ’90s, Brethren Fast earned a reputation along the Front Range for white-hot live shows that were reckless adventures in self-described “electrified hillbilly hot-rod funk.”

Guitarist “Dynomite” Don Messina and his bassist brother, Mik “The Stik” Messina, played in different bands and developed their own styles before deciding to join forces. Brethren Fast combined Don’s old-school rockabilly guitar licks with Mik’s funkified bass grooves. After a revolving cast of drummers, the band stabilized in 1998 with the addition of Gordon Beesley (who had short stints in Durt and Sponge Kingdom, and went on to become the founding drummer of the Railbenders).

Brethren Fast was chosen to be sponsored for Budweiser’s “In-Concert Program,” and the band played on the main stages of some of Colorado’s biggest outdoor festivals, including the People’s Fair, LoDo Music Festival, KTCL’s Big Adventure, Cherry Creek Arts Festival and the Taste of Colorado. The band performed live during intermissions at Colorado Avalanche games and was voted by Westword readers as one of Denver’s best bands for four years running. 

Channeling Johnny Cash, George Clinton and Elvis Presley, Brethren Fast recorded the CDs Sideburns from Hell, What in the Hell?, 500 Laps of Beer Drinkin’ Fun and Diesel Drivin Buddies. Jeremy Lawton, who eventually joined Big Head Todd & the Monsters, was among the additional “pit crew members,” recording and playing keys. Several original songs were televised on MTV, the Fox Sports program Ski Prime and the series Outward Bound on the Discovery Channel.  

The band was known for its relentless touring and relentless partying, logging around 200 raucous live shows each year throughout Colorado and the Midwest, as well as brief tours through Texas and Florida and the West Coast. The members’ Brian Setzer-inspired sideburns, handsome looks and often hilarious on-stage antics drew scores of loyal female admirers. Their lives—and their songs—were largely about drinking and having a good time. 

Sadly, after the band’s heyday, Brethren Fast’s story took a tragic turn. Don Messina died in a 2015 car crash on Lookout Mountain. Beesley, who found his true calling as an Arvada police officer in 2002, was killed in the line of duty in June 2021. Mik Messina died of organ failure in July 2021.

David Crosby

As a member of such seminal bands as the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash (and occasionally Young), David Crosby was assured a place in rock history. But his legacy was overshadowed by a public decline that began in the mid-’70s, when the arrests piled up—cocaine, heroin, guns, assault and battery. He was music’s most tragic figure, lucky to be alive and seemingly destined to become another rock ’n’ roll casualty.

His career reached a nadir in 1985 when he was sentenced to a five-year term at the Huntsville State Penitentiary in Texas stemming from drug and possession charges.

But Crosby beat his addiction—he finally went cold turkey, serving nine months of hard time before being paroled from prison on August 8, 1986. Arriving in Colorado for solo acoustic performances in Aspen and Denver, the 45-year-old musician spoke of his transgressions in his first face-to-face interview since his release.

Crosby’s face was lined, and he still carried some extra pounds. But his eyes were clear and inquisitive, and, as he sat in Stapleton International Airport, awaiting his flight to Aspen, he spoke with humor and confidence.

“I am incredibly lucky to be alive,” he said with a smile and a shake of his head. “Everybody—even my closest friends—expected me to do a ‘Belushi.’”

A previous solo appearance in Colorado in 1983 provided a sobering glimpse of his lifestyle. The man nicknamed “The Lion” by friends and fans appeared at Denver and Boulder gigs wearing a down parka in 80-degree temperatures. He walked stiffly, and the open sores on his puffy face were covered with makeup. His road manager explained with surprising candor, “He just stays on the tour bus with his (freebase cocaine) pipe except when it’s showtime.”

When the bus arrived in Vail for the next day’s show, the entourage discovered Crosby wasn’t aboard—he was still in Denver, found asleep under his bed by a Holiday Inn manager. The police were called and, as Crosby was quickly escorted out by a concert promoter’s employee, he reportedly broke down crying and passed out.

It was not an isolated episode. Spin, Rolling Stone and People magazines as much as printed his obituary. Finally, Crosby surrendered to authorities.

“I was going to leave the country,” he said. “I was so scared of going to jail, I went to Florida with every intention of sailing off in my boat. But at the last minute I realized there’d be no more music, no more group, no more anything. And so I stayed.”

The stint behind bars forced him to clean up. “I played in the prison band, but I also pushed a mop and worked in the prison mattress factory,” he said. “If you ever stay at a place where they use state-made goods and you find yourself sleeping on a real bad mattress, I may be the guilty party.

“But the point is, for two or three years before I went in the can, I didn’t write a song. And that’s what scared me to death in prison. Not the guys saying, ‘Hey, rock star, c’mere—where’s all yer money?’ It was the fact that God put me on earth to write songs, and I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore.

“But after six months, I woke up one day and it came to me. And now I know the reality of it all—it’s not hip to be fucked up anymore, not if you want to do creative work.”

Crosby was then certifiably clean—he underwent drug testing three times a week under the terms of his parole and attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He claimed to be re-entering public life with no anger or remorse, “just joy and a great deal of gratitude.” He had attended his 11-year-old daughter’s school pageant before his arrival in Colorado, and he brimmed with pride about the experience. “I didn’t get a chance to do that before,” he said grimly. “I was so preoccupied with drugs, I never was much of a father.”

His tour wound up with a 70-minute performance on guitar and piano at Denver’s Mardi Gras. The supportive crowd of over 200 was composed equally of curious minds and burnouts who still looked to him as an outlaw role model. Crosby sang more strongly than he had in years, offering such staples of his repertoire as “Guinevere,” “Almost Cut My Hair,” “Triad” and “Wooden Ships.” He spiced his between-song patter with some gentle digs at his hosts during his Texas stay.

But midway through the show, Crosby got serious and premiered a song he wrote in jail. “I got loaded for a very long time,” he mused onstage. “I enjoyed it at first, started with a few joints. But when I finished up, I was very unhappy—I got strung out, and it was very hard for me. I’m not gonna preach about drugs—that’s up to each one of you to decide for yourselves. But if you watched my life, you can figure it out.”

Crosby then launched into the only new composition of the evening, a confessional piece titled “Compass”: “I have wasted 10 years in a blindfold/Tenfold more than I have invested in sight.”

While Crosby believed his own songs had special merit, he readily admitted that he was at his best when collaborating. “I love working with other people,” he said. “Right now I live five minutes away from (Graham) Nash, 10 from (Stephen) Stills in Los Angeles. I don’t want to go back and live in Marin County for a while, maybe for good. There’s too much history.”

Crosby’s musical partners had dealt with him in different ways. While Stills had adopted a he-can-take-care-of-himself attitude (“David is David—he’ll be okay,” he said in 1985), Nash was much more involved. “I’ll be there for David whenever he gets out,” Nash vowed while Crosby was incarcerated. “Glass and Steel,” a song on Nash’s Innocent Eyes album that appeared in early 1986, was written for Crosby. The central lyric read, “It’s hard to understand just where you’ve gone/Still hope you find the strength to carry on.”

“He’s the best friend a man could ask for,” Crosby said. “I love him unequivocally.”

Crosby faced the coming years with the zeal of a man who was back on track for the first time in a decade.

“I’m starved for work,” he concluded. “I’m gonna be working all the time, even for fun. I still can’t believe I was that stupid—but I’m proof that it’s never too late to wise up.”

David Crosby passed away on January 18, 2023. He was 81.

The Colorado Sun, the award-winning, journalist-owned, community-supported online news outlet, asked Colorado Music Experience for a playlist of memorable songs that have Colorado connections. Click the song name below to listen on YouTube or click the artist name to see content on the CoME site.

“How to Save a Life” – The Fray

“Colorado” – The Flying Burrito Brothers

“Stubborn Love” – The Lumineers

“Baja” – The Astronauts

“Got to Get You into My Life”  – Earth, Wind & Fire

“Green-Eyed Lady” – Sugarloaf

“All the Right Moves” – OneRepublic

“Zombies Ate My Neighbors” – Single File

“Starwood in Aspen” – John Denver

“A Good Feelin’ to Know” – Poco

“Radio Boogie” – Hot Rize

“Ridin’ the Storm Out” – REO Speedwagon

“River’s Rising” – Leftover Salmon

“Need Somebody” – The Subdudes

“The Blizzard” – Judy Collins

“Wishing You Were Here” – Chicago

“‘Round the Wheel” – String Cheese Incident

“I Think She Likes Me” – Treat Her Right

“Her Own Kinda Woman” – Big Head Todd & the Monsters