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 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 turned to Dick’s Sporting Good Park, sources told The Denver Post today. 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 partner Stan Kroenke, owner of the Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Rapids and the Pepsi Center. He built Dick’s Sporting Goods Park and the surrounding grassy infrastructure for the Rapids.
AEG Live will announce in the next month that the festival will take place in the field complex surrounding the park — taking over the 24 full-size, fully lit grassy fields to the south and east of the stadium, said to be the largest soccer field complex in the United States.
The promoter is not planning to use the stadium itself for music. AEG will likely go forward with its original plan of two freestanding main stages and three smaller ancillary stages, allowing for 50 acts to perform over two days and nights.
The first major concert held inside the stadium, Kenny Chesney in mid-2007, was met with mixed marks. The sold-out show was a crowd-pleaser overall, but many fans complained and asked for refunds because of poor acoustics.
AEG Live chief Chuck Morris — the idea man behind the Mile High Music and Arts 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, which takes over the centrally located Zilker Park with its festival every year in central 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 in the lush Empire Polo Fields in Indio, Calif.
“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
