After playing a gig in Park City, Utah, earlier this week, Australian reggae outfit The Beautiful Girls drove southeast into Colorado, where it starts an eight-show, 10-day Colorado swing tonight at Grand Junction’s Mesa Theatre & Club.
The Beautiful Girls will play Denver and Boulder, of course – Fort Collins and Colorado Springs too – but the band’s anticipated Yellow Snow Tour is dominated by its “snow-circuit” dates at mountain resorts – places that keep tourism numbers strong with the guarantee to visitors that, yes, Colorado is a wintry good time.
“It’s that time of year, isn’t it?” singer Mat McHugh said while driving down a southern Idaho interstate earlier this week. “Everyone’s in a snow town to have a good time. You’re there skiing and snowboarding, (so) you’re the kind of person who really lives – and that spirit transfers to going out and hearing live music and having fun. It’s all the same state of mind.”
The snow circuit – which stretches into Utah and Wyoming and has helped propel bands such as Galactic and String Cheese Incident to larger stages and more intense fame – is a great tool for any band to spread its music.
Though Denver is at least 400 miles in any direction from the next natural stopping point for any touring band, getting to play multiple, concentrated dates in crowded ski towns makes for shorter drives, thus increasing any band’s quality of life. It also makes for a good-times tour that puts a band’s music into the hands of a diverse and hyper-transient public that will take its CDs and memories back to Texas and Delaware, Florida and Oregon.
“I can’t think of any equivalent in any country,” said McHugh, who has toured Europe, Japan, Australia and North America. “You’re playing almost every night, and then you meet someone who knows someone who can hook you up, and the next thing you know you’re all skiing the next morning before packing up and leaving town.”
The cluster of Colorado mountain towns is packed with tourists who are just asking to be entertained, and the folks at clubs such as Levelz (Steamboat), the Belly Up (Aspen), Sherpa & Yeti’s (Breckenridge), 8150 (Vail) and many others are willing to do the entertaining. The shows don’t pay any more than a big-city date, but the number of quick mountain stops available definitely bolsters any band’s bottom line.
Hot psychobilly outfit the Reverend Horton Heat made a hearty Colorado swing a couple weeks ago that included two nights at 8150, and the Cowboy Junkies also traversed the mountainous route last week. Sublime tribute act Badfish played all the resort towns two weeks ago with tremendous success, and even indie rock bands get in on the action: New York quirk rockers Enon play Telluride’s Sheridan Opera House on March 24, the day before they take on the Bluebird Theater in Denver.
What’s foolproof about so many of these shows is the willing audience. Conversations overheard in line at Levelz and Sherpa & Yeti’s during the last two winters: “I don’t know who’s playing tonight, but does it matter?” Like movie trailers, many of these shows are dealing with a captive audience paying to be entertained regardless of the content.
“It’s like a college gig or a festival,” said Mike Maietta, who manages Badfish and is the owner of the New York-based Creative Entertainment Group. “When you play these towns, you’re playing for people from all over the world. It’s good because you’re exposing the music to people who live everywhere.”
The snow circuit is especially enticing in March because of the influx of students celebrating their spring breaks with expendable income and ferocious appetites for a good time. Alex Andreas is the president of Boom Boom Room Presents, a promotions company out of San Francisco, and he’s bringing the new Bay Area supergroup Fully Loaded to the mountains of Colorado for a spring break coming-out party March 15-19.
“Colorado is quickly becoming a fast transitional spot for any touring band heading out east or down to New Orleans,” said Andreas, whose Fully Loaded is made up of musicians who also play with Soulive, Maktub, Greyboy Allstars, Garaj Mahal and The Fugees. “A lot of the bands coming through Colorado – Galactic or Karl Denson – seem to love going out there, for the winter tours especially.”
The snow circuit has its downsides. It’s definitely a seasonal phenomenon, best rocked in the wintertime when the roads are at their most treacherous. And the bookers aren’t nearly as discerning as they are in the city centers, so the quality of the bands can vary.
This is all made possible by the lack of “radius clauses” at clubs in snow-circuit towns. Those are contract terms that under normal circumstances limit a touring band from playing multiple dates within a certain distance of a scheduled club stop. Normally The Beautiful Girls would be allowed to only play one or two Colorado dates. Without radius clauses, they get to play eight.
“That’s one of the best things about this tour,” said McHugh. “It’s obviously a drag getting into a car and driving for 10 hours every day.”
The snow circuit simply has that good-times reputation among fans and bands alike.
“It’s a holiday for everybody involved,” said Andreas. “It’s not just a band swinging through on a weekend. It’s got a holiday feel to it, and people shake their tailfeathers on the slopes during the day, and they’ll certainly do that on the dance floor at night.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
