Stopover Virus

Written by Jackie Day & The Go All-Nighters Friday, 17 July 2009 23:16

Ladies & Gents: If You'll Look Out Your Window

by Jackie Day

Author's Note: Kids don't ever think while writing. And most certainly don't think about what other people might think of what you write. That's the way of dead men.

I've been in the India for the past few weeks, and all but dead to the electronic world, yet leave it to the horde of musical promotion agencies to continue flooding my inbox with formally sterile e-mails meant to give me the tinglies about a band I've never heard of (but like, totally should have!). These e-mails tend to stack up in vicious waves, and the only thing I now hope to find in them is the occasional headlining news that's less about music and more about Colorado music events.

Lo and behold two messages rear their head: The first an announcement for a press conference hosted by AEG Live to discuss the new headlining acts for Colorado's second annual Mile High Music Fest (a meeting that I wouldn't have been able to attend anyway due to travel), and the second a press release blurting out the primary bulk of the festival's announced artists.

I happened to be on the beat covering the first Mile High Music Fest last year, held at the grounds of Dick Sporting Goods Park out in the boonies of Commerce City. Though it's to be expected for an inaugural concert, and for any of you who went, you'd agree that it was a pretty serious billing all things considered. Heavyweight mainline acts like Tom Petty, DMB, and John Mayer anchored an enjoyable smattering of true indies including Spoon, Andrew Bird, and underground hoppers The Roots and Lupe Fiasco, which stood in a strangely mellow contrast to corporate pop vehicles in the likes of Jason Mraz, and Colbie Calliat. If you care to look at the whole list, a ready-to-order Wikipedia entry has the barebones details, but overall the lineup wasn't much different than just a Diet Bonnaroo or Coachella-Lite.

Now I'm staring at the big-ass blue two-page ad in one of our local publications, and I couldn't be more underwhelmed. In a world that's dealing with enough crap already, globalized economies on their knees, world governments on their knees, and not enough beautiful women on their knees, I now have to deal with the reality that this year's lineup for the Mile High Music Fest, in only its second year of existence, bites serious dick('s sporting goods park).

I'm so annoyed at them moment that I just now had to get up and go take the needle off New Morning; probably the least bothersome Dylan album in the discog. What the hell am I supposed to think about a festival that premiered with some decent muscle, but which now champions Tool, Widespread Panic, and The Fray as its headliners? How the hell did AEG Live and the MHMF go from hero to tranny-zero? And who in Cthulhu's name let Set Forth (now renamed as the equally gag-worthy “The Northern Way”) onto the concert billing? Honestly I can only theorize, but I believed it's a problem that Denver's been plagued with ever since the health of its music scene came under the microscope – now inflamed by the current finances of the nation.

Regardless of the fact that Denver has grown as a “music scene” (and what a trite, overly used phrase that is) it's still infantile, in both its social composition, and its industrial level. Colorado people, especially old hippies who used to sideman for nobody 70s alt-country phenoms, and the people who think those old hippies are the very johnson of the creator, like to claim that Colorado has always been an amazing haven for music – which is really bullshit. Any town of Denver's size in the States can dig up enough old fossils to make a case that they've always had a decent museum (man what a piss-poor analogy).

So we produced a couple corporate pop-rock vehicles (et al The Fray), those eccentrics in Devotchka, and a few quirky indie & hip-hop ensembles – who gives a junk? Denver still isn't a Nashville, or an LA, an Austin, a New York, and or even an Athens, GA. Lets be brutally honest: If you have to make the reference “Denver music scene”, instead of just say Denver and have it be automatically synonymous with having healthy music/ensemble production, then we're still just the coughing leper cursed with the stopover virus. Perhaps a leper on the vaccine waiting list, but a leper just the same.

People see a couple bands from Denver on TV, or in major concert tours, and suddenly think “Oh we finally made it!” Many business minded folk immediately threw out cash and investment into the gasping Denver music industry hoping, to catch sail in the coming winds. Said winds however have been less the gales of impending success, and more the doldrums of stagnant development. The equally stagnant economic perils we all now face haven't been helping either. More than a few music venue owners in Denver have been fighting the financial drought, and getting people into shows has never been more difficult than in this day and age, where the digital revolution has by way of its natural evolution, made music more visible.

Indeed, if the current line-up of the Mile High Music Festival is indicative of any one thing, it's that the issues the global economy is dealing with are not to be joked at. Festival producers are working to put this show on with cash that had more value back the first time around, and musicians (and their agents/labels) are reacting to the current financial crisis in the only way they know how: By demanding more money. Obviously this creates a mild bit more friction in the business relationship than there was back in '08. Proof even came into the pudding after it was heard through the industry grape vine that the motley bazaar of different local caterers present at last year's MHMF won't necessarily be making an encore performance. Several Colorado newsources have reported that AEG Live has excluded a gracious plenty of local food and drink merchants in lieu of contracting out to a large California-based one-stop-shop catering firm. Indeed it doesn't really get more depressing than when local businesses are shut out of a local event for streamlining and costcutting peruposes – wracking pains of only bigger problems with Denver's music industry.

When it comes to that industry's involvement, die-hards will champion the banal milieu of independent record labels in Colorado (again what every town of Denver's size has), but Denver does not have the industry presence to make any kind of viable comparison to say, Nashville. There the players and the pocket-liners work and play hand-in-hand, with industry people just as much involved in the local communities, perhaps inspiring (if not directly fostering) development of social growth within the musician demographic. Not that I'm trying to paint this as a rosy afternoon walk on banks o' the Thames - the majority of the music industry is as cutthroat and ruthless as anyone could expect – but the fact is that Denver does not have this kind of social dynamic between musicians and industry. Major record labels have little presence here, and their involvement mostly only occurs in skimming the surface, hoping to catch the occasional ping.

Another catalyst of the stopover virus (albeit one that's a bit skeptical and paranoid considering there aren't really any crunched numbers), is the fact that, as far as major cities in the central United States go, Denver just so happens to be a nice little place to stop for gas inbetween a long stretch of American plainage to the east, and the high country to the west. It leads one to think that Denver's encounters with any touring band are, at the root, merely a positional result – not a cultural one – or industrial one. It's a scary thought: The idea that all the best things Denver encounters when it comes to traveling entertainment is coincidental due to our location.

Still, the future is only speculative worry at this point, and the world will still keep turning even if MHMF isn't spinning at it's center. People will still come unprepared for the extreme heat and drink themselves into dehydration and unconsciousness, and people will (hopefully) find a way to enjoy themselves in the inherent beautiful chaos of outdoor music. As for Denver's musical future – screw it. If it happens it happens, and if it don't - it don't. I mean, we'll still always have torrents right?

Besides, if it all ends happily in sprinkles and rainbows blowing out our buttcheeks, what would I have to bitch about?

Here's to life and mediocrity.