Helios Public Art House Breathes New Life Into Longmont by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly 4/3/2024
Jamée Lucas Loeffler might not look like your typical artist, sculptor or gallery owner, but he’s actually all three. The burly and bearded 51-year-old definitely looks the part of his other life, though.
“I build,” says the New Jersey native who has lived in Colorado most of his life. “If you want me to come out and dig a foundation and build you a house, I could do it from the ground up. Whatever you want. I’m a builder, but I was a mason first.”
On Tuesday evening, I took my 14-year-old daughter to a Boulder Planning Board meeting in the municipal building. We were both mortified. Two representatives of Morgan Creek Ventures (the developer hell-bent on tearing down the iconic, beloved Dark Horse bar and restaurant on Baseline Road) presented plans to demolish the 50-year-old Boulder institution and everything around it to erect a combined commercial/residential village featuring six five-story buildings, with restaurants, shops and 600 apartment units.
“The area around the Dark Horse is broken,” one of the men said a few times. He and his colleague touted the benefits of a gigantic new development at Williams Village, including accessibility for students passing through from nearby student housing. Along with six five-story buildings that would greatly alter that part of town, and the mountain views for some residents in that neighborhood, the developers want to eventually get a pass from the city to build a 70,000-square-foot hotel on the site. They also plan to provide parking, including underground, for 800 vehicles.
My daughter and I heard promises of “open space” on top of a few of the proposed buildings, a small amphitheater for music, and a plaza for food trucks and community hangouts to juxtapose the six gigantic buildings and accompanying 800 parking spots. We also heard the developers’ suggestion that they’re “open to” throwing upset locals a bone by allowing the Dark Horse to move some of its famous decorations into a much smaller new space somewhere amid the new five-story buildings, creating what they called “The Dark Horse 2.0.”
If the area around the Dark Horse is indeed “broken,” why was this public meeting not about fixing it, rather than razing it and building a money-making behemoth on top of it? I have been living in the Boulder area for 16 years. My child has spent only one year of her life anywhere else. The Dark Horse, the Trident and the Boulderado are a few of the places I can now count on just one hand that truly feel like Boulder the moment you walk in the door. Admitting that most of what’s around the Dark Horse is a parking lot that could be made into something wonderful for the community is just fine; in fact, it’s inspiring to imagine Boulder’s residents and government coming together to save the Dark Horse and make Williams Village into a welcoming, even bustling—and green, in foliage and energy—little townlet around it.
The Dark Horse does not qualify as historic, despite its rich 50-year history, so it’s susceptible to “development,” i.e. being torn down and—if we’re lucky, as these developers say—scrapped for parts. Still, anyone who’s lived in Boulder over the last half century knows the Dark Horse’s charm, its tasty food and colorful staff, its pool tables and other games, its karaoke nights and tricycle races, sometimes even live music. The Dark Horse’s layout is strange and vast, including an upstairs and an outdoor patio that some people have never visited even if they’ve been to the Dark Horse dozens of times. And the antique-store decorations? You could visit the Dark Horse every day for 50 years and still smile at something on the walls you’d never noticed.
Doesn’t all that qualify a business as “historic” and worth saving?
I agree with Boulder Planning Board member ML Robles, who said on Tuesday night, “This project is not meeting the intent of a neighborhood center” after the representatives of the developer had spoken. I also agree with Sarah Silver, who said “I would suggest that it be a smaller development.”
Businesses in Williams Village such as Sprouts have already volunteered to close for years and then reopen after construction of the proposed commercial/residential behemoth. If there is to be redevelopment of the area, Sprouts and Cosmo’s and the adjacent liquor store can survive, although it would be far better for the city of Boulder to ensure that they survive in a new Williams Village that is community oriented, beautiful, sparse and green, and overall not aimed at making as much money as humanly possible by cramming as many apartment units, parking spots, businesses and hotel rooms as the developers can convince Boulder to allow.
Does this supposedly creative, unique, funky college town that’s become one of the most expensive places to live in the United States really need one of its few remaining truly iconic, special establishments torn down in order to create even more brand-new, expensive shops and restaurants and brand-new, expensive apartments? If their plan moves forward, the developers, as most of us know, will have the choice to either make a percentage of the 600 apartment units permanently affordable or just pay the city a fee; it’s no mystery how that would go, as Morgan Creek Ventures has already indicated it will pay the city the required fees instead of including affordable housing.
Unfortunately, we cannot portray the Dark Horse like the old man in the movie Up, staying put in a special place, trying to save it while developers crush everything around him, because the owner does not own the building. However, it’s within the city of Boulder’s power to preserve something special, that has been a vital community center for 50 years, and—if Williams Village is to be redeveloped, which obviously it should—build a tasteful, uplifting, and small set of combined commercial/residential buildings around the Dark Horse while leaving it intact, as-is.
I’d like to be able to show my daughter not to fear change but to be a part of it, and make sure it serves her community. I urge people who care about the Dark Horse to attend City of Boulder meetings to speak up publicity about saving it, and also send emails to city council — as many as possible. Lastly, I urge City Council and the Planning Board to let people who care about the Dark Horse, and don’t want six five-story buildings aimed at making some very wealthy people even more wealthy rather than improving the community, can do to either stop the development or have a real voice in it.
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.”
There’s a whole world in the sound of Colorado Springs hip-hop duo The Reminders. Not unlike The Clash’s outlook in the early 1980s, the husband-wife team of Big Samir and Aja Black take inspiration from the music and culture encountered in their travels around the globe, adding it dash by dash to their bubbling musical cauldron here on the Front Range.
The couple’s international bent isn’t just from their travels, though. Black — a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist — was born in Queens, New York, and after her father enlisted in the military, grew up everywhere from Portugal to England. Samir was born in Brussels, Belgium, and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His stepfather was eventually stationed in Colorado, which he learned to call home. As fate would have it, Black’s father was stationed here the same exact summer.
“She globed her whole childhood [and] got acclimated to all these different spaces,” Samir says. “So we had this mutual feeling when we got here, like we’ve been all around the world and … here we are.”
With a career-long embrace of unlikely instruments like the theremin, sousaphone and bouzouki, Colorado folk outfit DeVotchKa has never been the sort of rock band that fits neatly into a single box. Boulder Philharmonic Executive Director Sara Parkinson says that’s part of what makes their upcoming musical collaboration such an exciting partnership.
“We’re trying to get new people into the hall and appeal to a broader audience,” says Parkinson, who will conduct the orchestra during the upcoming May 6 concert and has performed with members of DeVotchKa in various chamber settings. “We like to amplify local voices and local talent, and putting [DeVotchKa] on the stage for the first time at Macky Auditorium is another special part of this collaboration. It’s about time, right?”
Andy Thorn has always walked a fine line between tradition and experimentation. Even as a kid in bluegrass-obsessed North Carolina, watching banjo greats chop it up at traditional showcases like Doc Watson’s legendary MerleFest, the future Leftover Salmon musician knew he was a little different.
“My banjo playing is always gonna go back to the roots, but I’m fairly progressive,” Thorn says. “Even back then, people in North Carolina thought I played too much ‘hoolyhoo.’ This great banjo player said, ‘Man, you like that hoolyhoo.’”
Fort Collins native Stelth Ulvang captured lightning in a bottle when he co-founded the now-legendary Colorado band Dovekins in 2009. Merging sea shanties with the quirkiness of Paul Simon’s Graceland and the energy of early Arcade Fire shows, the quintet soon carved a name for itself on the Front Range and beyond.
It’s hard to hold on to lightning, though, and by 2012 Dovekins was defunct and Ulvang was a full-time member of a fledgling indie-folk band called The Lumineers. He moved from bass to piano, and accordion, and now joyfully describes himself as not only The Lumineers’ pianist but also its “hype man.”
“Look, NWA has members that are known very well for their lyrics and members that are known for just a good fucking voice,” Ulvang says. “It’s good to be a hype man and I think I’m starting to feel more pride about that being a talent as opposed to an insecurity … which has taken 10 years.”
Although neither of them are Centennial State natives, there’s not a much more Colorado moment than seeing Nathaniel Rateliff – the most famous musician to burst out of Denver in decades – sing the line “I’m as honest as a Denver man can be” on stage with Bob Weir in the Mile High City.
Phish Still Loves Dicks Vermont Jamband Strikes Colorado Again by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly 9/6/2022
In its decade-plus of annual (save for 2020) performances at the 20,000-capacity Dick’s Sporting Goods Park outside Denver, the Vermont-jamrock band Phish has provided a lot of unique memories, from spelling out “Fuck Your Face” with a setlist and repeating “We love Dick’s” during a vocal improvisation (2012) to weathering a scourge of plague-infected prairie dogs (2019).
With lightning striking the area repeatedly, a two-hour delay last Friday night delivered the one thing only fans could deliver—a rain-soaked streaker.
Other mayhem ensued due to the severe weather—from bathrooms becoming anything-goes parties to the venue allowing essentially anyone in, whether or not they possessed a ticket. The crowd that stuck around (to my eyes, nearly everyone) was rewarded, and not just with a rollicking version of “No Man In No Man’s Land,” which includes the lyric, “You’re happy that we’re here / exposed to all the elements.”
Peaches Teaches 22 Years Later, the Canadian Icon’s Debut Albums Is As Pertinent As Ever by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly 8/11/2022
When the iconic, multi-talented Peaches (born Merrill Nisker) answered our recent Zoom call, she was lounging in a sunny Los Angeles backyard, playing with stretches of her flowing hair. Between legs of her first tour since the pandemic began, the famously sex-positive Canadian musician and performance artist—who has also produced and acted in various films and shows—expressed elation, and relief, about getting back on the road.
“I really hated not doing it,” she says. “But what was I going to do? I wasn’t interested in, like, performing on Zoom. It’s been super exciting. People are super excited to go to shows, so they have renewed energy and also sort of an appreciation that we didn’t have before in that way.”
Adam Perry 