Exhibit Page Language for KBCO, Morris and The Gov 2019.

Along with hosting events such as the December 2018 induction of Chuck Morris and 97.3 KBCO, as well as the presentation of the Barry Fey Innovation Award to Governor John Hickenlooper, the Colorado Music Hall of Fame creates exhibits of posters, music and films for our home at the Trading Post at Red Rocks.

You can learn more about the contributions of KBCO, Chuck Morris and John Hickenlooper to our state’s music heritage by clicking on the links.

The History of the Grateful Dead in the High Country

CMHOF’s VIP reception “Colorado Getaway: The History of the Grateful Dead in the High Country” was a huge success for attendees, judging by the number of smiling faces and superlatives offered.

Board member Paul Epstein was the driving force behind this event, offering his encyclopedic knowledge of the Dead and his wealth of artifacts to craft a memorable experience for Deadheads. Everyone in attendance was smitten by the timeline exhibit that will now be displayed at CMHOF’s home in the Red Rocks Amphitheatre Trading Post.

Deadheads: continue to live That Way and dress Like That!

The psychedelic era is ancient history, and LSD is so far out of fashion that it probably doesn’t even need to be illegal anymore.
But still you see them — people with shamelessly dated tastes in footwear who shop in the wrong places and dress themselves in impolitely colorful tie-dyed t-shirts overprinted with images of grinning skeletons sporting garlands of roses.

A large subclass of the Last of the Hippies are Deadheads — these stringy-haired anachronisms who make the Grateful Dead their household religion and more or less organize their lives around their devotions. Grace Slick was right about Dead concerts being where the hippies went, but it’s also true that that’s where the hippies come from these days. You might think the Love Children are as rare as clean air and condors in the hostile, Hell-in-a-bucket environs of post-Me Generation America, but there are lots of people who have continued to live That Way and Dress Like That since the days when saving the world with love seemed like a viable aim in life to many. And furthermore, thousands who were still unborn or still in diapers when the members of the Grateful Dead first started playing together nearly two decades ago are being initiated, learning the tribal arts and the laws of diet and hygiene which have been lovingly preserved and handed down since the Summer of Love.

Seen through Eighties eyes, the hippies are an odd but not wholly unenviable lot. Sure, they sport unfashionably optimistic and/or fatalistic world-views, furnish their lives in Low-Rent rather than High-Tech (except, of course, for their stereos), and work at jobs rather than professions or careers so they can unplug from employment and/or residence any time they want to hit the road with the Grateful Dead. But while mainstream America has lowered its expectations and tightened its belt, a lot of hippies aren’t sweating it: their material expectations are already pretty close to the ground — and many of them don’t wear belts.

There’s more to it than just music,

obviously, but everything about the Deadhead phenomenon stems from the music, and it eventually comes back to that: never mind the giant videos and smoke bombs, man — just play the music. Aside from surface similarities, a Grateful Dead gig has very little in common with a typical rock concert. There are guitars, keyboards, drums, amplifiers and speakers, of course, but this is definitely a case of looks like a duck, walks like a duck, barks like a dog: no flash pots, no tortured castrati front men in an leather union suit shrieking breathlessly about how “It sure is good to be back in [local reference] again! You guys are the best audience on the tour!” What the Grateful Dead do is perform different songs from show to show (their active repertoire is nearly a hundred songs strong), and play each song differently from show to show. The stately pace of a Dead concert is more like baseball than the hyperactive, aggressive tempo of football or heavy metal. It’s music that suggests rather than insists, that asks rather than declares. This isn’t the kind of band that’d be satisfied putting on a pat, pre.pared show with all its peaks and lulls in place; this isn’t the kind of audience that would appreciate such an attitude.

The Beginnings

On the Fourth of July in 1870, at a “Champagne March” to the expanse of ruddy sandstone monoliths, Judge Martin Van Buren Luther delivered a patriotic address, christening it as the Garden of the Angels. He also placed a curse on anyone attempting to change the name, but his pronouncement had no great effect. From that day forward, people called the area the Park of the Red Rocks, or, as it is now known, Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

Cosmopolitan Magazine editor and industrialist John Brisben Walker bought the 4,000 acres of land in May 1905. Walker began hyping the park, which he labeled Garden of the Titans to compete with the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs. The first recorded concert took place on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), May 30, 1906.

Civilian Conservation Corps & Red Rocks Amphitheatre

Four years into the Great Depression, funds were scarce, and something had to be done about the army of unemployed in Denver. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pet projects in pushing anti-Depression New Deal legislation. Congress authorized the CCC in 1933, shortly after FDR took office, and appropriated funds to create jobs all over the U.S. The plan was to recruit young men into an army of conservationists that would rescue the land, forest waters and build national, state, country and city parks and at the same time save the youths themselves. George Cranmer used his influence and persuasion to arrange help from the Works Progress Administration, to build access roads through the park. The CCC youths then undertook one of their largest projects—Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

By 1936, there were about 40 companies spread out across Colorado. On June 30, 1935, Company 1848 was transferred from Durango to Camp SP-13-C, Mt. Morrison to furnish manpower for the construction of the Amphitheatre in Red Rocks Park.

The “boys,” as enrollees were called, worked for $1 a day and room and board. They kept $5 a month and sent home the rest to help support their families. Day in and day out, the CCC veterans, stone masons and carpenters blew up the rocks, dug out the dirt, embedded the steel and then reshaped stone and concrete over it. They built the open-air venue—including a 1,260-square-foot stage, orchestra pit, dressing and control rooms, lighting system, a magnificent tiered seating area for more than 9,000 persons, and a huge parking lot—with little aid of steam shovels. Men worked mostly with picks and shovels. The difficulty of getting trucks and machinery up the winding and perilous roads made the work unavoidably slow. Muffled charges of dynamite and other blasting powder boomed through the valley daily.

Inductee Page

Judy Collins exhibit features:

• Dress worn by Judy Collins onstage in the early 1970s
• Blue ribbon award from American Film Festival in New York City
• Judy Collins albums in different formats: LP, 8-track, cassette and open reel
• The Judy Collins Songbook (1969), containing autobiographical writings along with the sheet music

Chris Daniels exhibit features:

• Shirt worn by Chris Daniels at the 1976 Telluride Bluegrass Festival
• NBN “R-2” guitar built in 1971
• 1982 monthly planner

Exhibit

The Colorado Music Hall of Fame honored the Astronauts, Sugarloaf, Flash Cadillac and KIMN radio at the Boulder Theater on Saturday, Sept. 8. The “Rockin’ the ‘60s” induction event featured video tributes, interviews with the inductees, celebrity speeches, and performances featuring inductees and guest members of popular Colorado bands (String Cheese Incident, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, Rose Hill Drive). The gala also included a historic array of exhibits and archival photographs.

KIMN Radio

• Photos of KIMN’s famous cinder-block studio
• A sticker, stamps, photo and membership card of Pogo Poge, the leader of popular KIMN disc jockeys, plus KIMN weekly surveys featuring Hal “Baby” Moore and JayMack
• KIMN compilations of 1960s hit songs
• Vinyl 45s and KIMN weekly surveys highlighting local acts
• KIMN’s “Dictionary of British Slang,” plus weekly surveys featuring local high schools

Family Dog was the center of Denver’s music universe…

Fresh from Chicago, 27-year-old Barry Fey moved to Denver in 1967 and began his career as one of rock music’s most prolific and successful promoters. After a trip to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury District and witnessing 100,000 young people plus multiple musicians and bands gathered for “The Summer of Love” he saw the possibilities of introducing that cultural phenomenon to Denver. Fey contacted promoter and counter-culture figure Chet Helms to discuss bringing the scene to a recently closed nightspot which became the “Family Dog” at 1601 West Evans in south Denver.

Fey was the booking agent for the 2,500-seat concert hall, which opened on Sept. 8, 1967, with a show featuring Janis Joplin with Big Brother & The Holding Company as the first headliner, plus the heavy sounds of Blue Cheer. The Family Dog prospered, hosting the cornerstones of rock for ten months—the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Van Morrison, Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa, Cream and more.

The club struggled to stay open, both financially and with mounting pressure from the Denver police, who disliked the idea of having a hippie haven in their city. Fey and his people were subjected to harassment and illegal searches. The Family Dog closed in July 1968, but for 10 short months, it was the center of Denver’s music universe!

Barry Fey exhibit features:

• Fey’s autographed Who and Rolling Stones guitars
• Fey’s U2 Under a Blood Red Sky platinum album
• The Family Dog concert schedule from 1967-1968

The exhibit also includes psychedelic posters and handbills used to promote shows at the Family Dog