When The Underground Music Showcase announced it was ending its tenure as one of Colorado’s most beloved music festivals after 25 years, it felt like a massive hit to the local music community. Seeing it end while tickets costs for big national acts went through the roof felt like the little guy was getting squeezed out.
Yes, UMS is back now, relocating to the RiNo district and doing just fine. But its departure from Broadway created enough of a panic in the Colorado music scene that local musicians did what they always do: start their own music festival.
“At the time, most of us believed this long-standing tradition was coming to an end,” said Gillian Pasley, one of the lead organizers of Blucifer’s First Rodeo, a four-day music festival stepping into UMS’s old spot on South Broadway at the end of July. “People were bummed and musicians started texting amongst themselves, thinking, you know ‘we could just do this ourselves.’”
For Pasley and fellow lead organizer Mike Young, there was a unique challenge in filling the space UMS left behind on South Broadway, but also a natural fit. After 25 years, the local businesses were used to a large music event each summer, so Pasley and Young found their idea for a festival of their own was met with open arms.
Prior to Blucifer’s First Rodeo, Pasley and Young put together Last Minute Last Waltz at Hi-Dive in Denver, an event paying tribute to the iconic Martin Scorsese documentary “The Last Waltz,” with performances from over 40 musicians from 25 local bands. That success planted the seed for Blucifer’s First Rodeo as they began looking for their next challenge. Then UMS announced it was ending.
Along with some friends they began brainstorming ideas for a festival and, in a stoke of branding genius, channeled the nickname for Mustang, the 32-foot-tall red-eyed blue horse that greets visitors at Denver International Airport.
“We just think it’s a cool name and we’re not trying to make fun of the horse,” Young said. “We think it’s really amazing and we respect how cool and weird it is. We want Denver to be more like the horse.”
What started as a simple idea among friends has since turned into a four-day event featuring more than 200 local bands.
Pasley and Young are focused on community building, dedicating all revenue after expenses directly to the artists involved. That DIY ethos has generated a tremendous amount of community support.
“Just meeting a lot of people and the amount of, ‘hell yeah let’s go’ that we’ve encountered really speaks to what we were feeling last summer,” Young said. “So many of us feel this frustration with the larger music industry and the larger ways that culture and capitalism intersect right now.”
Once the festival was taking shape, UMS announced it would be returning, relocating to the RiNO district in downtown Denver and again taking place at the end of July. From an outside perspective, it can look like two local festivals competing for the same audience, but reality is more nuanced than that.
“I think there’s sometimes a competing festival narrative that gets pushed,” Pasley said. “I think, as far as I know, we’re doing things on a slightly different scale.” That’s an understatement. The Blucifer team has capped tickets at 1,600, while UMS typically aims to sell 10,000.
“If Austin and New Orleans can handle multiple festivals on one day why can’t Denver?” Young said.
