Boulder Blues Legend Makes Rare Appearance at Dazzle by Adam Perry for Westword 12/21/2023
Colorado bluesman Otis Taylor, a Chicago native, remembers being at the Rolling Stones’ legendary Hyde Park concert in London back in 1969, but it wasn’t the music he found particularly interesting.
“I didn’t care — I was just chasing girls at the time. I was just doing my miniskirt tour,” he admits. “I didn’t really care that the Rolling Stones were on stage. Thousands of people and all these hot chicks, and I’m, like, ‘Fuck.’ I just had a different attitude about it, but I always had an attitude about that until I got married.”
Anarchy In the Mile High A Conversation with Subhumans Frontman Dick Lucas by Adam Perry for Denver Westword 11/3/2023
Punk-rock stalwart Subhumans burst out of England more than forty years ago, with angry, intelligent socio-political anthems such as “Parasites” and “Religious Wars.” And while fans of hardcore punk might believe Subhumans emerged fully formed from a Wiltshire sewer, singer Dick Lucas (who also fronts Citizen Fish and Culture Shock) says he was actually into Black Sabbath, Frank Zappa and even (gasp) David Bowie, before punk-rock group Crass blew his mind in 1977.
“Feeding of the 5000 was lyrically the most profound record I’d ever heard up to that point, and it just opened this door to a reality where there was such a thing as ‘the system,’” Lucas recalls. “I didn’t know what a ‘system’ was. I didn’t know what capitalism was. I didn’t know what corporate actually meant, and never considered the church to be anything other than dull and boring. Suddenly, [Crass] was a band not only thinking outside the box — they destroyed the box completely, and the music was just right in your face.”
Denver alt-country singer-songwriter Courtney Whitehead, who records and performs under the name Bison Bone, has long been a Baker neighborhood staple, but he’s an Okie at heart. Growing up in Oklahoma, the former jock even had quite the countrified nickname.
“Chicken gum,” Whitehead says, was his “baseball-superstitious” nickname as a teenager.
“Any championship game, any big game, my mom would always make fried chicken before the game. I’d always chew gum during the game; I would always I played third base, the hot corner, so there was a big game where I was playing really well and my coach was just, ‘He’s chewing that chicken gum today,'” he explains. “It kind of stuck.”
Bad Religion (with the Dwarves and Speed of Light) Mission Ballroom, Denver October 12, 2023
“Rock legends stand before you,” Blag Dahlia of the Dwarves told the Denver crowd last night from the big Mission Ballroom stage, just before diving into another of the group’s hardcore tunes, which fall somewhere between the Misfits’ Earth A.D. album and 2 Live Crew.
Nearing its 40th anniversary as a band, the San Francisco-based Dwarves play hardcore songs about hardcore sex, and have a hell of a good time doing it.
“The best-looking band in Denver is the Dwarves,” Dahlia said at one point, but amid the dick references, backseat sex and blazing punk-rock drums, Dahlia also sang the powerful song “I Will Deny,” which cut through the band’s set like an emotional knife.
“Nobody loves me, nobody cares / And when I die, there won’t be nobody there.”
Speed of Light, made up of young siblings from Santa Monica, conversely won the crowd waiting for Bad Religion over without singing anything we could understand. 16-year-old Riley Claire, on bass and raging vocals, led her two brothers through a punk-metal set that reached its unforgettable climax when she jumped into the mosh pit in front of the stage and kept singing.
When it comes to words, I joked repeatedly to several groups of local friends who came to see Bad Religion at Mission that singer Greg Graffin, a PhD in evolutionary biology, taught me a lot of words growing up, from “jurisprudence” to “ineffectual.” When he walked on stage last night, the sight of the 58-year-old immediately reminded me of staying up until midnight in the sixth grade to record Bad Religion’s 120 Minutes performance of “American Jesus” on MTV, because I knew that watching their drummer play it would help me learn it, as my band eventually performed the song at the middle-school talent show.
If Graffin is old, I’m certainly old, too.
Bad Religion played for about 90 minutes, as the sea of people about 10 rows deep in front of the stage swelled, pushed, sang along with nearly every lyric, and watched out for a few folks who considered throwing punches “moshing.” Graffin said at one point, “What’s going on up here is about half of what’s going on down there,” and hailed the guy moshing all night wearing a banana suit with “the masses of humanity have always had to suffer” drawn on the back.
Guitarist Mike Dimkich, very much like a Southern California version of Johnny Thunders, played tasteful punk while his counterpart, the legendary Brian Baker of Minor Threat and Samhain fame, was free to absolutely slay on world-class lead guitar, switching instruments numerous times, and nail the intros to burn-it-all-down hardcore classics like “Fuck Armaggedon, This Is Hell.”
Bad Religion doesn’t have a full-length album more recent than 2019, but many of Graffin’s intellectual and even educational lyrics are forever apt, plus “Infected” resonated in the COVID-era, especially while packed into a sweaty crowd of people struggling for footing, and the biggest crowd-pleaser, “We’re Only Gonna Die,” fit right into our modern times of war and greed. “We’re Only Gonna Die,” in particular, made it obvious how for Bad Religion has come in its 40-plus years as a band, turning songs like that, written when Graffin was a San Fernando Valley teen and released as a beautifully messy piece of seething genius in 1982, into impressive anthems by a band full of musicians who have honed their craft, and seen the world in Graffin’s songs come more to life each year, over all these decades.
Closing with “American Jesus,” Bad Religion made me remember Mike Mills campaigning for John Kerry in 2004, taking a swipe at George W. Bush by saying “I want my president to be smarter than me.” When I see Graffin preaching for a better humanity and against avarice and ignorance on stage, I think how important it is to treasure rock stars who are exponentially smarter than me.
Anyone who has engaged with the Boulder music scene over the past thirty years likely knows Danny Shafer. The Chicago native moved to Boulder in 1990; since then, he’s become a prolific singer-songwriter and performer while also booking bands at small Front Range venues and working as a house manager for bigger gigs.
“I was 22 years old when I moved to Boulder, and I had a lot of raisin’ to still have done,” Shafer says. “I had a lot of growing up to do. I had dropped out of college a couple years before to tour with a bluegrass band. I could sing high and the band needed me, so they took me under their wing and taught me [bluegrass]. Best decision I ever made.”
“Live music at Red Rocks is pretty good,” went the understatement uttered in a French accent by Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars. The romantic indie-rock band, co-headlining the storied Colorado venue with Beck for two nights, got the sold-out crowd bopping and cheering before and after the sun went down, and the 46-year-old Mars had the energy to walk all the way to the last row (there are 70 of them) and come back down to finish a song. It’s been a hell of a climb—no pun intended—for a band Mars formed when he was 10.
Taking the big Red Rocks stage around 9:15 p.m., 53-year-old Beck revealed himself to be even more of a showman than Mars. Those who haven’t seen Beck perform and remember him as the jaded eccentric from “Loser” or the lounge singer from “Where It’s At” would be surprised to see his semi-trained dance moves, his intermittent whirling around with the mic like Roger Daltrey, his improvised love-breaks like Boyz II Men or even Prince, his headbanging with his bandmates like Foreigner or Judas Priest, and—especially—his snarling, adept rock and blues guitar on electric and acoustic.
Grammy-winning bluegrass artist Molly Tuttle may not have played her first gig at a pizza shop in Menlo Park, California, as the Grateful Dead did in 1965, when the band was known as the Warlocks. But the Bay Area native’s first show was in a pizza store, and she does love the Dead.
“I think about them a lot because I’m from Palo Alto and my first show ever was at a pizza store down the road from my house,” Tuttle says. “That’s just really cool because when I think about, like, ‘How do I have any sort of place in this music that people associate with Kentucky and the South when I’m from California?’ I think [about how] so many great bluegrass records were made out in California. You have, like, Old & In the Way with Jerry Garcia and David Grisman and Peter Rowan, and so many of the albums that I grew up listening to that taught me about this music. I do think about the Grateful Dead a lot, and I’ve gotten to meet Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann recently, and it’s been really cool to kind of talk Bay Area with them. Bill Kreutzmann went to the same high school that I did in Palo Alto.”
Big Sky Son by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly 7/13/2023
The latest offering from Fort Collins-based singer-songwriter Cary Morin was inspired by paintings from his Montana childhood of an American West that was wild, beautiful, and populated by his Indigenous ancestors.
“This land is talking to me,” he sings in “Big Sky Goes Down,” the warm and sweeping opening track on his rich new folk-blues album Innocent Allies. “Sounds become familiar, yet they fade from memory. Nothing is ordinary when the big sky sun goes down.”
Each song on his new full-length LP, slated for a planned release this fall, was written by Morin as a sort of partner to a series of paintings by Charlie Russell that were ubiquitous in the Big Sky Country of Morin’s youth. The works were featured in magazines in big Eastern cities to show what was going on in the mystical and mythical West. Russell’s art, for better or worse, inspired many white people to move to the so-called “frontier.”
“He ended up hating that, because he wanted Montana to stay exactly like it was,” Morin says. “He hated the fact that people came and cut it up and plowed it under and, in his eyes, ruined what was already perfect.”
The song “Balladeer,” from Colorado country staple Casey Prestwood’s gleaming 2013 album Honky Tonk Bastard World, details the life he led until recently.
“All my friends are on the radio / I’m stuck working 9 to 5,” Prestwood, an Ameripolitan Award nominee, sings. “Got me a big show next weekend / turns out that I’m working that night.”
Prestwood — who lives in Denver with his wife, kids and enough reptiles to fill a small zoo — is known around the Mile High City, as well as in Nashville and beyond, as a ripping pedal-steel player and talented, sweet-voiced and sometimes hilarious country singer-songwriter. However, he pushed through a double life of full-time Whole Foods employee and moonlighting musician until recently.
“There was a point of, like, do I want to be a grocery-store guy for another 15 years?” Prestwood says. “I started playing in bars when I was 14 and did that from 14 to 27, so I’m just kind of dipping back into that.”
Reed Foehl grew up in Massachusetts, following his beloved Boston Bruins and listening to his parents’ records — quickly developing a passion, especially, for Neil Young.
“I could listen to Harvest over and over again,” Foehl says. “Just top to bottom, it’s a beautiful record. For my 16th birthday, I had Harvest shirts made. Everybody put them on.”
Foehl mixed all that ’70s Americana with a little jammy Boulder flavor when the singer-songwriter arrived here just over 30 years ago. The Samples and Leftover Salmon were taking off, and Foehl’s band at the time — Acoustic Junction — got a record deal and spent the ’90s, well, just a few feet off the ground.
Adam Perry 