Monolith Day Two

According to the seven year old Bartender (me), the rust-colored sandstone surrounding Red Rocks comes from fossilized dinosaur blood.

My age seven theory was that when god killed the dinosaurs for eating too many humans, he threw a magic comet from heaven that turned all the dinosaurs into rocks and all their blood flowed into a sea covering Colorado. The dinosaur blood sea turned to stone too, and after a hundreds and hundreds of years, all that is left is Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

The young Bartender had a very active imagination. Thinking back, if I were seven, I probably would have gone ape-shit at the thought of moshing around to Monotonix in between two giant crusty scabs of fossilized dinosaur blood.

Reader, try to mortify those depraved thoughts from my adolescent mind while you finish reading this serious critical review of Monolith 2009.

My thoughts on Monolith took a three dimensional form this year. In one direction, there is the line of thought that all the performances I saw were killer. I don’t think I saw one band that I didn’t enjoy. The Grates totally won me over by the sheer charisma of their lead singer, Patience Hodgson.

I loved the animalistic crust rock of Monotonix (I also was comforted by the fact that there exists a man whose ass is hairier than my own [again try to ignore these immaturities]).

Monotonix

I can pretty much sing along to every song from the Dandy Warhols and The Thermals.

The Twilight Sad had some bass amp issues which shortened their set considerably, but they were worth every decibel of hearing I lost standing directly in front of the main speakers to video some of their performance.

Twilight Sad

Deer Tick will probably be the band I will end up buying a record from.

The other, divergent line of thought was that Red Rocks -as a festival venue- is tiresome and problematic. The only stages that really work are the Soco stage on top and the main stage. The two indoor stages bottleneck horribly and are easily overcrowded. The bottom stage seems like a good idea until you’ve made the exhausting trek to the top. I only want to climb those stairs once a day. I ain’t Rocky. I just drink beer and party.

Also, the staff wasn’t all that friendly to media, but then again I’m not either. Just because journalists can link several related ideas into a coherent thought doesn’t give them the right to act like rock stars. However, they do need access to the shows, the artists, AND the free beer in order to do their jobs – denying free beer to journalists is just cruel.

The third line of thought is that Red Rocks is a music venue built between stoney blobs of dinosaur blood. And that is… well, just bizarre, but like I said just try to ignore that and focus on the other ideas.

My recommendation for next year’s Monolith would be to put another big stage in the top parking lot with all metal bands to round out the bill.

Keep drinking and rocking,
The Bartender

BONUS VIDEO: the Pirate Signal