“My thinking was, ‘Yeah, get me off this bus,’” Andy Whilden said. He decided to leave touring as a musician for a job at The Matthews House, a place for underserved youth.
Starting the Uplift: FoCo festival two years ago gave Whilden more personal satisfaction than he expected. The benefit festival will feature acts that are acoustically driven. “They can play any genre,” Whilden said of the house band, though the 2021 installment will also deliver something different, and, well, a little less tenured.
After leaving his job as the lead talent buyer managing Lost Lake, Larimer Lounge and Globe Hall in Denver, Tony Mason saw a new position booking for the famed Gas Monkey in Dallas turn into a depressing slog of cancelling shows remotely from Denver during the pandemic.
Now, Mason will put his contacts to use to work for an expanded BandWagon enterprise which will offer a full-on, regional concert promotions and event production entity from Colorado Springs to Casper, Wyoming.
When Ben Mozer was 14, he took a trip to Spain with his family. Across from their hotel, a theater was playing the newly released hit Pulp Fiction, which he and his brother had been unable to see in the U.S. due to its R rating. But what stuck with him after the movie was over wasn’t Samuel L. Jackson’s iconic monologue. What stuck with him was the theater.
Earlier this winter, Mozer’s Fort Collins movie theater the Lyric was one of the only venues in Northern Colorado that was still producing live music.
And Mozer isn’t the only one finding a creative way to amplify local sounds. This winter, Dan Mladenik has tapped local talent for the Mishawaka-produced Live on the Lanes series at Chipper’s Lanes, converting a bowling alley into a cosmic live music experience.
The rap duo Ces Cru have been Strange Music mainstays for 12 years. But over the past few months, there’s been a noticeable change within the group. Ubiquitous has embarked on his own solo tour while Godemis is seemingly laying low. During Tech N9ne’s 2017 Independent Grind Tour, there was some type of incident on the bus that resulted in Godemis leaving the tour.
