After a major setback in location, the Mile High Music and Arts Festival will go on in July, but at the complex of soccer fields that surround Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City instead of City Park.
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers will be one of the festival’s headliners, and Steve Winwood — on tour this summer with Petty — will also play the two-day event, which could draw up to 50,000 people per day on July 19-20.
In late December, Denver Zoo president Craig Piper told promoter AEG Live and city officials that he could not support the festival in City Park because of possible impact on the animals. At that point, AEG Live turned to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, sources told The Denver Post on Monday. The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the new plan or acts at this time.
The park’s owner is longtime AEG Live collaborator Stan Kroenke, owner of the Colorado Avalanche, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Rapids and the Pepsi Center. He built Dick’s Sporting Goods Park for the Rapids.
AEG Live will announce in the next month that the festival will take place in the fields surrounding the Commerce City stadium — taking over the 24 full-size, fully lit grassy fields to the south and east of the facility. The promoter is not planning to use the stadium. AEG Live will likely go forward with its original plan of two free-standing main stages and three smaller stages, allowing for 50 acts to perform over two days and nights.
The first major concert held in the stadium, Kenny Chesney in mid-2007, had mixed marks. The sold-out show was a crowd-pleaser, but many fans asked for refunds because of poor acoustics.
When the plan still called for holding the festival at City Park, AEG Live chief Chuck Morris said he expected it would bring $1 million in tax revenue to Denver within the first three years. Asked about the loss of the event to Commerce City, Mayor John Hickenlooper said he was just pleased that the show will go on.
“The important thing is really that the festival is successful whether it’s held in Denver or outside of Denver,” Hickenlooper said.
Morris, who came up with the idea for the festival, would not confirm the news, but he did say: “If in fact the festival will be at the soccer complex next to the stadium, that’s great because it’s an amazingly beautiful area with lots of grass — not unlike Coachella and its polo fields. It’s very pretty over there, as it faces the city and the mountains.”
Morris has previously compared his festival to Austin City Limits, a festival that takes place every year at a park in central Austin, Texas. A Coachella comparison would make sense for this new location because it would be a little farther from the city center (11 miles northeast of downtown Denver) in privately managed fields.
Coachella’s annual music festival, also owned by AEG Live, takes place 130 miles east of Los Angeles.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Morris said, “it will be an amazing music festival for the people of Colorado.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
