“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.” Johann Sebastian Bach
If music is akin to a religion, then Red Rocks Amphitheatre is surely its most hallowed cathedral.
Red Rocks is ancient, certainly, its soaring stone walls lifted up and dressed by seasons uncounted, its grand pillars reaching up to a magnificent vault as old as Creation. Red Rocks has known the sounds of worship for at least 5,000 years, and solemn Ute chants still echoed across its broad nave when settlers first began arriving from the East. If there anywhere exists a piece of earth so constructed by divine hands to inspire voices raised in reverent and grateful praise, it’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, still held to be sacred by 32 different Native American tribes.
Known to early gold-seekers as the “Garden of the Angels”, Red Rocks found its prophet in John Brisbane Walker, an energetic entrepreneur and tireless Centennial State booster who purchased the site in 1905 and renamed it Garden of the Titans, an apt nod to the towering demigods of Greek mythology. Walker built a temporary stage, and on May 31, 1906, engaged Pietro Satriano and his 25-piece brass band to baptize the place while listeners arrayed themselves on the rocky slope on blankets and folding chairs. Red Rocks’ first concert was quickly followed by a heavenly chorus of operatic angels including Australian soprano Nellie Melba, who raved “This is the greatest open-air amphitheatre I have ever seen.” Walker staged his first epic on Sep. 1, 2008, an audio-visual extravaganza titled “Feast of Lanterns” and featuring four military bands and brilliant eruptions of fireworks from the summits of four sheltering peaks including Mount Falcon and Mount Morrison. In 2011, after performing a solo set culminating in the religious classic “Ave Maria,” internationally acclaimed Scottish diva Mary Garden declared “Someday, 20,000 people will gather here to listen to the world’s greatest masterpieces.” Time would prove Garden about half right.
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Never in any opera house, the world over, have I found more perfect acoustic properties. Never under any roof have I sung with greater ease, or had a greater delight in singing.” Mary Garden
Busily assembling its visionary system of mountain parks, in 1927 the City of Denver persuaded Walker to part with about 800 acres centered on the amphitheatre for a very reasonable $54,133, about $750,000 in 21st Century scrip. Celebrated architect Burnham Hoyt drew up plans borrowing heavily from the classical Theater of Dionysus at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and in 1937 the roughly 200 young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps’ Mount Morrison Camp and a large crew of lads on loan from the Works Progress Administration began earning their dollar a day by removing 30,000 cubic yards of earth by hand, and by sweat and toil transforming 90,000 square feet of red Lyons sandstone, 10 boxcar-loads of cement, 10 tons of steel and 800 tons of quarried stone into a 9,525-seat Temple of Euterpe.
Red Rocks Amphitheatre was formally dedicated on June 15, 1941, with a sublime performance by soprano Helen Jepson of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and Denver introduced regular concert schedules in 1947 strongly favoring disciples of the classical creeds. But reform was coming to the church of Red Rocks, and in 1959 it landed with a splash.
“It’s an amazing location. One of the most beautiful concert venues in America…or anywhere.” Geddy Lee, of Rush
Reform’s name was Ricky Nelson, the first rock-and-roll performer to take the Red Rocks stage. A celestial host of itinerate rock preachers has since addressed the faithful from the amphitheatre’s plein-air pulpit. Nearly 2,700 paid concerts have been held at Red Rocks since 1947, the great majority of them of electrically enhanced and sound-augmented. Notable names entered on the Red Rocks rolls include Sonny & Cher, Seals & Crofts and the Blues Brothers. Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Miller and Sarah MacLachlan have all taken their turns, as have jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish, legends like Carlos Santana and Peter Gabriel, country heroes like Willie Nelson and Kenny Chesney, pop favorites like ABBA and the Carpenters, and alt-bands like Depeche Mode and Soundgarden.
Of course, any movement toward a new orthodoxy must endure its share of resistance and repression, and Red Rocks’ journey from Mozart to Metal was no different. When the audience grew over-festive during a 1962 Ray Charles concert, Denver officials threatened to ban beer and wine from the venue. When things got dicey again during a Peter, Paul and Mary show in 1964, they actually did it. In August of 1968, Aretha Franklin fell into a contract dispute just hours before curtain and refused to take the stage. A disappointed crowd swept forward and forcefully disarticulated a piano, prompting Denver to impose a one-year banishment of rock-and-roll acts.
On June 10, 1971, nearly 2,000 ticket-free fans showed up for a sold-out Jethro Tull concert. When the sound quality in the parking lot proved poor, the crowd stormed police barricades set up at the entrances. Although the band was not contractually obligated to continue under riot conditions, the band’s front man, Ian Anderson, 
exhorted the audience to wrap T-shirts around their faces and then played on as thick drifts of tear gas wafted among the ancient stones. Although Anderson’s fortitude likely prevented serious disaster, Denver responded with a total ban on rock-and-roll, a proscription that held for five years until Red Rocks’ high priest, concert promoter Barry Fey, managed to get it overturned in court.
“Red Rocks is the greatest place to play, it’s true…of all the places in the world, it’s the best!” David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills and Nash
The Beatles played Red Rocks on Aug. 26, 1964, the only stop on their U.S. tour that didn’t sell out. They wouldn’t be back, although Ringo returned 36 years later with his All-Starr Band. Jimi Hendrix’s sole visit in 1968 is notable as the only Red Rocks show for which there is no known audio or visual record. In 1958, Jerry Lewis was the first comedian to play the rocks, and 20 years later Steve Martin taped his “Wild and Crazy Guy” album there.
Speaking of tape, dozens of artists from Stevie Nicks to Robert Plant to John Tesh have turned their Red Rocks experience into video gold. Moody Blues filmed a set with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, and Rolling Stone magazine named U2’s now-iconic “War” tour show and the subsequent “Under a Blood Red Sky” concert video one of “50 Moments that Changed the Face of Rock and Roll.” The lens is often on the other figurative foot these days, as pious devout cinephiles congregate weekly for Film on the Rocks on summer week-eves.
Red Rocks’ most dedicated apostle had to be John Denver, who played 17 shows there between 1972 and 1989, and telecast several of them to a global audience. The gospel according to Red Rocks holds that John anonymously jogged the amphitheatre’s steps (380 up, 380 down) before every performance, a habit now popular with many members of Colorado’s cult of fitness.
Widespread Panic holds the record for most Red Rocks shows played, pounding out No. 51 just last summer. Guitarist Warren Haynes played the Garden of the Angels eight times in one year, performing five sets with the Grateful Dead, two with the Allman Brothers and one with Gov’t Mule. In August of 1985, Huey Lewis and the News set the record for the most consecutive performances, and Reggae on the Rocks has been spreading its message of love and leaf for 26 years and counting, which makes it the amphitheatre’s most durable concert series, if not its most enduring event. That distinction goes to the annual Easter Sunrise Service, which has been getting up with the chickens every year since 1947.
Red Rocks Amphitheatre’s conversion to rock-and-roll is complete, and the ranks of the faithful keep growing. Every year since 2010 the venue has broken its own record for most shows in a year, from 73 in 2010 to 155 last year, and it’s becoming common to witness as many as 20 supplicants in contention for a single day on the schedule.
And as the good news of Morrison’s miraculous minster of music continues to spread across the land, the ancient stone of that wind-chiseled chapel will resound with ever more joyful noise.
“God was having a really good day when he made this amphitheatre for us to sing in.” Emmylou Harris
