If you’re a fan of Beyoncé, Drake, Janet Jackson, Metallica, Pearl Jam, or Billy Joel, you have no choice but to leave Colorado for their current run of shows.
Why is that? Especially when Colorado is getting concerts from undisputed heavyweights such as Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Madonna, Zac Brown Band, Olivia Rodrigo, Foo Fighters and Morgan Wallen?
Fans and critics have posed the question often. U2 hasn’t played Colorado since 2015, skipping us with its last couple of tours despite previously playing here regularly. As a colleague of mine pointed out, they used to love us, having filmed “Under a Blood Red Sky” (at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 1983) and part of “Rattle & Hum” (at McNichols Sports Arena in 1987) in Colorado.
How ridiculous is it that Drake and 21 Savage, three days before their Sept. 8 show at Ball Arena, bailed “due to the distance the road crew has to travel along with the magnitude of the production,” promoters wrote, making it “logistically impossible to bring the full experience of the show to Denver … .” They promised a rescheduled show, but one would’ve thought they figured out production details before putting tickets on sale and prompting more than 10,000 people to schedule their lives around it.
Of course, waiting is part of being a fan. In 2016 and 2018, Denver wasn’t anywhere to be found on the cities announced for Beyoncé’s tours, The Denver Post’s Dylan Owens reported. And yet, her blockbuster Renaissance Tour managed to skip us again this year. At this point, she hasn’t played Denver since 2007.
As Red Rocks and other major venues put tickets on sale for 2024 concerts this month, and calendars continue to fill at all major venues, it’s worth wondering what’s behind these decisions.
The answers vary by artist, management and promoter. Fans will travel to see their favorite bands — my wife is in Las Vegas as I type this, seeing U2’s residency at the whiz-bang Sphere — and they should. We celebrate Red Rocks Amphitheatre as a global icon, and a recent report found that nearly half of all concert-goers there came from out of state last year, spending $305 million in the metro area before and after shows. We all benefit.
But when artists are banking on 18,000-seat amphitheaters in nearby markets (we have one that size in Fiddler’s Green), fans are justified in asking why Colorado got snubbed. Yes, it costs money to drive equipment to, or fly in and out of Colorado’s isolated Front Range, the biggest population center for a 560-mile radius. The next, closest big city is Phoenix.
The upside of these business decisions is that Denver more frequently secures artists who might seem outsized for our sparsely populated Rocky Mountain region. That’s thanks largely to tour routing, which is a bottom-line financial concern that forces most big artists to play Denver in order to pay for their gas-guzzling Western treks. One has to wonder if carbon-footprint concerns are the reason Radiohead hasn’t played Red Rocks since its 2003 “Hail to the Thief” show there, as singer Thom Yorke has hinted. (The band hasn’t played Denver in general since its 2012 show at the now-defunct FirstBank Center.)
But tour routing is also bringing biggies like SZA (Oct. 18), Doja Cat (Nov. 19) and Mariah Carey (Nov. 21) to Ball Arena. We’ve hardly been skipped on “last-ever” shows and reunion tours. Heritage acts, as they’re called in the industry, enjoy built-in recognition and audiences everywhere they go — see farewell concerts from Elton John, the Eagles, 50 Cent, Aerosmith, KISS, Dead and Company, Ozzy Osbourne, etc. (all at Ball Arena).
We even got two nights of Taylor Swift in July, whereas some markets only saw one. And if you miss certain rising musicians, you’ll likely see them again, provided fortune smiles upon your VIP section.
Denver is one of the biggest and best concert markets in the U.S. when it comes to ticket sales, attendance and the number of venues, promoters such as Live Nation and AEG Presents have said over the years. We’re a global epicenter for EDM and bass music. Platinum-selling acts that have come up here and call Colorado home, such as Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats and The Lumineers, are constantly doing their hometown proud with sold-out stints around the world.
We even got to see the last-ever Colorado show from The Rolling Stones to feature founding drummer Charlie Watts before his 2021 death, which packed Empower Field in August 2019. The band has been playing Colorado since 1965, Mick Jagger said from the stage, but hadn’t graced us since a 2005 visit to the Pepsi Center.
Our musical cornucopia overflows in part due to mega-promoter AEG Presents Rocky Mountains, founded and owned by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz. The company’s aggressive business practices (some local artists have called it a monopoly) and festival experiments have been overall good for music fans, even if ever-inflating ticket prices continue to keep many of us from attending any artist’s or promoter’s concerts, anywhere.
We may be oversimplifying for the sake of the bigger picture, but the disappointment is real, especially when a bottom-line decision forces us to choose between a mortgage payment and traveling out of state to see what could be, for example, Beyoncé’s last big tour.
There’s still plenty to see here, and we’re lucky in most ways. But it’s hard to consider Denver one of the best live music cities in the U.S. when some of the biggest artists in the world have been snubbing us for a decade or more.
Follow The Denver Post’s music coverage at denverpost.com/things-to-do/music for the latest concert announcements, news and interviews.
