Star-studded CEREMONY
Garth Brooks, Joe Walsh and The Lumineers mingle at Colorado Music Hall of Fame event
I t’s little wonder why Sunday night’s Colorado Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony was filmed by PBS for a future episode of “Soundstage,” its long-running televised concert series.
The event, which sold out the 18,000-person Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in hours, featured what may have been the highestprofile class of inductees since John Denver and Red Rocks were admitted in the hall’s inaugural year.
Part awards ceremony and part live music medley, each induction organizes its regional luminaries around a theme. Big band boss Glenn Miller and Denver cabaret singer Lannie Garrett were notable among last year’s class, dubbed 20th Century Innovators. This year’s roster, called Rocky Mountain Way, welcomed Barnstorm — Joe Walsh’s underappreciated pre-Eagles and post-James Gang project — singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg and Nederland’s leg-
endary destination studio, Caribou Ranch, into its hallowed halls, physically located at Red Rocks Amphitheatre’s Trading Post.
“Every (class) has been great,” noted Chuck Morris, chairman of the CMHOF and president of AEG Presents Rocky Mountains, the state’s dominant music promoter. That said, Morris has a special interest in this year’s inductees, a class he’s angled to recognize for at least three years. Morris is a friend of Joe Walsh, and spent extensive time at Caribou Ranch as a young promoter. He also served as executive producer on an upcoming Dan Fogelberg tribute album that decided much of the latter portion of Sunday’s ceremony.
Surprise guests marked the early portion of the show, each honoring chart-topping hits written and recorded at Caribou Ranch. John Oates performed Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down on Me.” The Lumineers, days ahead of its own three-night stand on the Fiddler’s Green stage to close out its latest world tour, overcame early monitor trouble to play a stripped-down version of Supertramp’s “Give A Little Bit.” And ’90s rockers Big Head Todd & the Monsters got the crowd tapping their feet with a faithful rendition of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star.”
Record producer Bill Szymczyk, the man many throughout the evening credited for bringing this migration of seminal ’70s music institutions to the Rocky Mountain region, received a well-earned achievement award. Szymczyk also served as a connector through two of the night’s inductees: He recorded Barnstorm’s debut album at Caribou Ranch, the first record cut at the studio that Morris called “the Abbey Road of America.”
“When Bill Szymczyk suggested in 1971 that I pack up and move out to move to Colorado, I thought he was either crazy or brilliant,” Walsh said in a phone interview days before the concert. Having already experienced a measure of success in the Ohiobased James Gang, the future “Hotel California” guitarist had been offered countless opportunities in the more traditional music industry markets of Los Angeles and New York.
But Szymczyk, a Navy sonar technician turned ABC Records producer and engineer, offered a unique opportunity. After escaping a Los Angeles earthquake earlier in the year, he elected to relocate to the more seismicallystable Denver, where he started Tumbleweed Records with record executive Larry Ray and began working at KFML, a fiercely independent album-oriented rock radio station. He had also made a connection with Chicago Transit Authority and Blood, Sweat & Tears producer Jim Guercio, who was building a world-class recording facility on 4,000 acres he had purchased in the foothills north of Boulder.
“I had seen it in Europe,” Szymczyk said of Caribou, “but there was nothing like it in America at the time.”
The idea of getting away from busy and distracting entertainment epicenters to write and record in the country’s beautiful pastoral expanses was revolutionary in the early ’70s. Eventually, artists from all over the world would travel to track and mix some of their best recorded work — John Lennon, Elton John, Phil Collins, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, U2. But the first album committed to tape in the nascent facility was what would eventually be considered Joe Walsh’s first solo work, “Barnstorm.”
Barnstorm’s performance on Sunday was its first in about 44 years, according to Morris, and it didn’t disappoint. When Walsh took the stage along with drummer Joe Vitale and bassist Kenny Passarelli, the respectful, museum-like atmosphere of Fiddler’s Green immediately shifted to that of a proper rock show. The sun went down, the volume went up and the five-piece band on stage ripped into Barnstorm’s opening track, “Here We Go.” The band then immediately segued into a nearly 10-minute version of “Turn to Stone,” featuring poignant images — given this weekend’s events in Charlottesville — of protest and political unrest on the stage’s video projection screen.
And then came the moment the crowd was waiting for. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Walsh, “I present to you the anthem of Colorado.” Cue the opening riff of “Rocky Mountain Way,” Walsh’s first bonafide hit single. The crowd eagerly rose to its feet and sang along as the band jumped around on stage like it was 1971.
After a brief intermission, the festivities then shifted to the evening’s final inductee, Dan Fogelberg, who died in 2007. The tribute included performances by Amy Grant and her husband Vince Gill, a host of fellow CMHOF inductees ranging from Poco, Firefall and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Also included was a moving performance by Amanda Sudano and Abner Ramirez, better known as husband and wife duo JOHNNYSWIM. Sudano is the daughter of disco singer Donna Summer, who was a fan of Fogelberg’s work before she died in 2012. The last song Summer recorded was a rendition of Fogelberg’s “Nether Lands” from his 1977 album of the same name. Remaining members of Fool’s Gold, Fogelberg’s ’70s-era backing band, also performed.
And then came country crossover powerhouse Garth Brooks — last seen in Denver selling out the Pepsi Center for eight consecutive concerts over four nights in 2015. Brooks, a longtime admirer of Fogelberg’s work, took the stage to a raucous ovation in his famous black hat and laid into an upbeat performance of “Phoenix.”
With the night in hand, nearly all of the evening’s performers walked back on stage to help Brooks sing Fogelberg’s “Souvenirs” song “There’s a Place in the World for a Gambler,” belting the coda with the crowd into the Colorado night sky, likely just as the singer had intended when he wrote it more than 40 years prior.