Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
At first, it felt like just another weekend commitment.
It was an important weekend, too: It was to be the 25th — and final — installment of the Underground Music Showcase, in which more than 200 local and touring bands take over multiple venues along Denver’s South Broadway corridor for three days.
My wife approached me after the UMS lineup was announced a while back with something on her mind. “Let’s have a show in our backyard one day during the festival,” she said. Her band could play, friends could join in, and the music would end before the nearby UMS festivities began.
We spent the next few weeks solidifying the bill for what we dubbed “Jorts Fest,” sorting through the mountain of logistical tasks that needed to be conquered. It required the support of our friends and neighbors in Lincoln Park, a TikTok post and heaps of yardwork.
In the end, it all came together. The fact that we were able to do it spoke to the appetite people have for neighborhood-centric events, and of the potential to bring people together around music.
These aren’t profound realizations. Many people I’ve spoken to have said they miss the imperfect human interactions that were lost when the coronavirus pandemic started. Finding people who felt the same wasn’t difficult. My wife posted about the party on TikTok. It ended up gaining traction, and in addition to the guests we invited, a handful of fans of her band showed up.
We told our next-door neighbor about the event, and he quickly got on board, offering his yard to hold the crowd and even hosting a silent auction. A week before, I texted the landlord of the house on our other side; she loaned us chairs and a table for the occasion.
We set up a water cooler and filled a blue plastic kiddie pool with ice, seltzer and a keg of beer. Since the party was during the day, in our yard rather than a public space, and we had the cooperation of neighbors, we weren’t too concerned about noise complaints. (I later consulted the city’s noise ordinance, which limits amplified sound levels during the day to 85 weighted decibels — comparable to the level of city traffic.)
The day of the show, all we needed were the bands, the audience and a borrowed set of speakers, plus an emergency trip to the hardware store to pick up extension cords. With the summer sun beating down, we tied a canvas tarp to some tree limbs for added shade.
The music did the rest. One act brought a bag full of percussion instruments for audience members. We rattled tambourines and clattered drumsticks to the beat of his strumming banjo. And we hosted some 40 people for the fun.
That it was the final installment of the UMS added some poignancy to what otherwise felt like the start of something promising. Denver used to have a house-show culture, musicians tell me. If there was a larger network, it was before my time here. One of the last house shows I attended was years ago in Seattle, at which a man crouched over a piano and guests sat quietly on the living room floor.
What would that person, 21 at the time, have thought of the show we put on in Denver? Probably that the music was loud and captivating, the jorts funny and irreverent, and the house itself accommodating but desperately lacking food of some kind.
And that it was all worth the sunburn, even a week later.