It’s official. Colorado has music-festival fever.
Everywhere you turn, there’s music in the air. The latest entry into the state’s already striking lineup of music festivals is also one of the biggest. The Mile High Music Festival will dominate the outer fields at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City on Saturday and Sunday. More than 40,000 fans are expected each day to worship at the altars of Tom Petty, Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer.
Programming a nuanced music festival is like baking a pie from scratch. It takes skill, finesse, patience and a love of what you’re doing. Promoter Chuck Morris and his team at AEG Live Rocky Mountains bring considerable concert-industry experience into the Mile High Music Festival, but every festival has its troubles.
Here are the ups and downs going into this weekend’s inaugural event.
The ups:
Local support
As Coloradans, we’ve long known of the immense talent residing here. It took other states a while to catch on, but now it’s hardly unusual to see Colorado artists on national television shows or hear their music on radio stations on both coasts.
The Mile High Fest was smart to incorporate local talent — from Flobots to Rose Hill Drive, the Photo Atlas to the Railbenders, Meese to Born in the Flood. This is not local-band filler. These bands deserve these stages. So get there early to catch them.Mass appeal
This may not be the most innovative festival lineup, but you can’t deny its populist draw. People love Matthews, who sold out four nights at Red Rocks in late 2005. Petty is a perennial favorite — how else did he headline two nights at the Pepsi Center in 2006 after selling out Red Rocks three times the previous summer?
Sharing the love
Most major music festivals are well aware of the toll they take on the environment, calling for major greening initiatives from Coachella in California to All Points West in New Jersey. It doesn’t look like the Mile High Music Festival will go to the extent of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in terms of promoting sustainability, recycling and truly going green, but it’s making an effort.
The VIP area is solar-powered, and the fest offers closer parking for carpools of four or more. Recycling will also be available throughout the festival grounds. But some of the other “Green Event” inclusions are curious, including “Hybrid Taxi Service,” “Bicycle parking” and “Public Transportation RTD access” — three things that are available almost anywhere in the metro area.
The downs:
Location
It’s a shame things didn’t work out with City Park, the initial location for the Mile High Music Festival before the Denver Zoo protested the music’s potential impact on the animals.
Instead of rocking a centrally located festival, music fans will make the trek to Commerce City — a 10-mile hike from the state Capitol. That’s not an imposing distance, but as pretty as the lawns surrounding the new soccer stadium are, they don’t rival the natural, decades-old beauty of Denver’s City Park.
No camping
What do many of the great American music festivals — Bonnaroo, Telluride, Coachella — have in common? Mammoth camping areas.
Sure, camping can’t work with just any venue. But when you cut the camping element of a festival, you automatically change the vibe and aesthetic. You get fewer people traveling for the music because the price — based on a per-night hotel rate — goes up significantly.
With its legendary beauty, Denver of all places should have a large-scale, camping-oriented music festival.
Parking
The stat sheet says Dick’s Sporting Goods Park has nearly 5,000 parking spaces. How does that work when you have 40,000-plus people coming in and out each day — not to mention the swelling infrastructure of tour buses, trucks and the like?
AEG Live hired parking/traffic flow experts months ago to fix this issue before it becomes a problem. Now they’re offering “close in” parking to any carpoolers with four or more in the car — otherwise the majority of the parking is at Northfield mall, nearly 2 miles away.
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
Mile High Music Fest: Our blogs and photo essays
Denver Post pop music critic Ricardo Baca’s thoughts on Day 1
Denver Post pop music critic John Wenzel’s thoughts on Day 2
Denver Post theater critic (and former music reporter) John Moore’s fear-and-loathing look at the fest as a whole. . In addition, he’s posted separate slide shows from both days at the fest, plus short video samples from Andrew Bird and Colbie Caillat.
And in the coming days, check out
often for many more blogs and photo essays from the festival to come, by a variety of Denver Post contributors. Bookmark it: That’s where you’ll find our thoughts on as many as 15 live shows per week in the area.
