Occasionally, I’ll go to a night of music that leaves me completely befuddled. So it was Friday night at , in an evening headlined by the .
Three bands were on the bill. About the only thing these three shared was that they were trios (is this the power of three in action?). Musically however, they were quite disparate. Additionally, a 20-minute dance/traditional singing Native American presentation before the Butler Trio’s set added to the strangeness.
Butler himself shredded his set, displaying virtuoso dexterity on his guitar and the banjo. Butler and cohorts kicked off the evening with “Used to Get High,” with Butler making his acoustic guitar sounding like a heavy metal electric at one point.
Butler crafts some of the bounciest, most engrossing songs. “I’d Do Anything” beautifully melded a searing chorus with a quieter verse. Butler cranked up the distortion on the chorus, while bassist Byron Luiters laid down a sweet groove.
Before the always popular “Better Than,” Butler, smiling, threw down a brief hoedown on the banjo. On “Take Me,” Butler switched to electric, delving into dark, almost Middle-Eastern trance grooves, while on “Treat Yo Mama,” he switched to lap slide.
During “Losing You,” which Butler played solo, his wife Danielle Caruana joined him onstage, taking a photo from the stage to send to Butler’s parents in Australia. The two created moving vocal harmonies together.
The highlight of Butler’s set was the long instrumental “Ocean,” which he dedicated as a prayer from the stage for “peace, love and unity,” saying he wanted to use the amphitheater as a “launching ramp” for the prayer. The tune started with two-hand tapping technique before moving into some delicate finger picking and launching into an awe-inspiring display of fierce chord strums mixed with aggressive, percussive playing.
Butler came back for a three song-encore that included “One Way Road,” from the band’s latest CD, “April Uprising.”
First up on the evening was , a Boston-based band that somehow blends reggae with grunge and alternative sounds into a coherent whole. The band crushed their set, clearly having fun, and musically fit in well with the John Butler Trio. Lead singer Chicoree Stokes gave a shout out to a longtime friend from the stage, pointing him out in the crowd, and talking about how they had been in Alaska for a show the day before. Much of the material was taken from the band’s latest release, “Let It Go,” including a fiery “Mansin Humanity.” I ran into Stokes outside Red Rocks after the show, and he was still stoked from having played the venue.
The middle act on the bill was , who really seemed out of place with their instrumental jazz-funk that sometimes seems like the “Spinal Tap mach II” scene in the classic mockumentary. When they did find an interesting riff, as on the last song, they drove it into the ground for two minutes.
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Candace Horgan is a Denver freelance writer/photographer and regular contributor to Reverb. When not writing and shooting, she plays guitar and violin in Denver band the defCATS.
is a Denver photographer and a regular contributor to Reverb.
