Live at Red Rocks

We had been on tour for a few days before we hit Red Rocks; just two acoustic guitars – one strung right-handedly and one strung for a lefty. The first session was quiet, slow, careful, in a dark living room in Fort Collins, Colorado. Our audience consisted of a sleeping Estonian couple and a tired brown dog. Despite the initial humbleness and faux-shyness, we continued the tour on to the road, with a bag of bananas, Earl Grey tea, swim suits, three picks, and a few songs waiting patiently in our fingers to break into the wind.

Somewhere between Fort Collins and Steamboat we stopped at a scenic overlook, our shoes crunching the gravel beneath us as he adjusted my strap. We faced out at the summer snowcaps and then out to the highway. This time the whipping wind was our audience, along with the cars racing by. Both carried the sound away from us quickly so we had little to critique. We’d added a third song to our set list, and were pretty set on a band name as we laughed and put our seatbelts back on, having swallowed enough wind and sung enough disorganized lyrics.

We sat in a wildly westernly decorated condo looking out on Steamboat with a few margaritas in us for our third performance. We had the confidence to play face to face with a captive audience who had heard us in their sleep the night before. Despite his nods and cues, I couldn’t pick up the vocals but for one song. Afterwards I vowed to memorize, but to play and to sing simultaneously is like asking me to blindfold my hands and only see with my heart. I was surprised at how well our performance was received, at how quickly my fingers could jump from string to string as I watched his.

The three solid practices were what created our confidence as we approached the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison. The Beatles performed there in 1964, so why couldn’t we? We climbed a path to find just enough privacy, with just a hint of a possibility of a passerby or two to hear our strums. I sat on a rock and he stood facing the towering dusty boulders. He shouted Old Crow Medicine Show at me, so I answered in refrain. A group of mid-twenties boys in plaid shorts and aviators walked past hollering at us. “Are you two opening for the show tonight?” “Yep, just warming up,” we answered. “See you down there!” We played Ray LaMontagne in preparation for a future show in the same venue, thinkin about firsts, thinkin about the beginning of the end, thinkin about believing in everything as we played. Ben Nichols was next, his A minors switching to E’s and then back again, and I tried my best to keep up. I smiled and showed him the calluses beginning to form on my fingertips and we switched places so the sun wouldn’t burn just one side of our faces. He added another Ray LaMontagne to the list, and got an audience of 20-30 baffled hikers, and our nerves quickly made us wrap up, our cheeks red with a perfect combination of embarrassment and excitement. Our first show at Red Rocks! And certainly not the last.