Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Red Rocks in Colorado is breathtaking
Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre often upstages musical acts
IT was a half-cloudy night at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, with boulders looming and distant lightning in the eastern sky. Singer Colin Meloy was on stage with the Decemberists, chatting up the audience.
“There are very few places to play in the world that still make me nervous, and this is one of them,” said Meloy, who has been touring for close to 20 years. “It feels like we should be giving a talk on grizzly bear management.”
Red Rocks, 16 miles southwest of downtown Denver, is an American outdoor music venue like no other.
The stage and audience areas are sheltered between 300-foot monoliths, Ship Rock and Creation Rock, with another boulder anchored behind the stage, bouncing sound forward. Occupying Red Rocks is like being held in the palm of a vast sandstone hand.
I recently caught two shows here and spent several more hours exploring the trails, slopes and meadows of Red Rocks Park, which covers 966 acres.
If you are a sonic purist, this might not be your place — too many visual distractions. But for the rest of us, it’s a double thrill. In the rocks you see nature improvising over the slow click-track of the long geological clock. On stage, there’s a human invention every moment.
And every once in a while, human and natural events align in startling ways.
Naturally appealing
Show up at dawn, when the early light plays on the boulders, and the only music you’ll hear at Red Rocks is birdsong.
Still, you won’t be alone. Besides the 1.3 million concertgoers it drew last year, Red Rocks attracted an estimated 1.2 million tourists and hikers who never heard a note.
The park opens daily an hour before sunrise, and if there’s no show that night it stays open until an hour after sunset. (The performance season is April through October.)
Fitness buffs huff and puff up and down the amphitheater aisles all year long.
On show days — which is just about every day in summer — the venue closes to visitors in early afternoon. But the trails stay busy, especially the Trading Post Trail.
That route covers 1.4 mostly flat miles through foliage and around rock formations. I had plenty of company, including Jennifer Forsha, a Littleton resident who hikes the rocks almost every weekend with her husband and two kids.
“We run up the trail and we run up the amphitheater,” she said. “You see all this beautiful stuff. And if you go up to the amphitheater, it’s a bunch of amazing energy. … It’s my happy place.”
Musical accompaniment
We’ll never know who first made music among the boulders. But historians say the site was a longtime gathering point for native people. And we know that by 1906, a promoter named John Brisben Walker had bought the property, named it the Garden of the Titans and set up a wooden platform.
Pietro Satriano and his 25-piece brass band played that May. Five years later, soprano Mary Garden sang opera. In years to follow, Walker staged all sorts of events in the area and built a funicular railway, later scrapped.
The city of Denver acquired the amphitheater site in 1927, and architect Burnham Hoyt came up with the plans. Civilian Conservation Corps workers started swinging picks and shovels in 1936 or 1937, often earning $1 per day. By 1941, the workers had sculpted the space between Ship and Creation rocks into 70 rows of wooden benches. Then as now, there was room for about 9,500 people.
Through the early 1950s, the schedule was short and dominated by classical music, opera and ballet, with each season opened by an Easter sunrise service. Then pop culture crept in.
By the late 1950s, Jerry Lewis was doing stand-up, Ella Fitzgerald was scat-singing and Ricky Nelson was playing. Ray Charles appeared in 1962 but did such a slapdash show that the audience pelted the stage with beer cans and management briefly imposed an alcohol ban.
The Beatles played in 1964 (leaving about 2,500 tickets unsold at $6.60 each). Jimi Hendrix came in 1968. When Jethro Tull appeared in 1971, legions of ticket-less fans tried to breach a fence, security forces let loose with tear gas, and a five-year rock ’n’ roll ban began.
By the late ’70s, the amphitheater was again busy with rock and just about every other genre. In 1978 Steve Martin brought down the house with “King Tut,” a performance audible on his album “A Wild and Crazy Guy.” Five years later, a young U2 played amid fog and rain, a show featured in the film “U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky.”
“I did 37 shows last year,” usher Ben Miller, 33, told me one night. “Every show definitely does have a different energy to it.” His favorite performance: the alternative band Gorillaz last
September.