I didn’t get a glimpse of the snow-covered Rocky Mountains until I was wrapping up the visit to Denver. It was rainy and cloudy for much of the 72-hour trip but the skies cleared nicely as I headed out to the airport for the return trip to NYC on Wednesday morning.
The Titus Andronicus gig at the Marquis Theatre Tuesday evening capped off the fun.
Patrick Stickles (pictured above with drummer Chris Wilson in background) is touring with a cast entirely different than the one that backed him on a memorable five-night run at Shea last summer.
Out of the this tour’s lineup are Adam Reich, Julian Veronesi, Eric Harm and Jonah Maurer. The band behind Stickles Tuesday night in Denver was Wilson on drums, RJ Gordon on bass and Liam Betson on guitar. Betson has had several stints in the band and appeared very much at ease, allowing plenty of stage space between him and Stickles so the latter had room to lunge and dart about.
I was initially caught off guard by the wholesale personnel changes but then remembered a high turnover rate has been a pattern since the band’s inception. While it’s likely that there’s an interesting story behind every addition and subtraction to the Titus Andronicus lineup, the only thing I can say for sure is that many of those who departed the band have gone on to have pretty solid measures of musical and creative success.
Stickles is of course the constant. He’s the songwriter, guitarist, singer and band leader.
When he stepped on stage Tuesday night, Stickles was on the receiving end of an electric shock from his equipment before he could even say hello. He fiddled with a few cord connections and knobs and he was ready to go. As is his custom, Stickles started the proceedings with an introduction. He stood alone on stage with his guitar and asked the audience to enjoy what was to come without doing anything that could get somebody hurt. Said Stickles: “We wanna create an environment on the dance floor that is safe and inclusive for all…Please refrain from any overtly violent behavior.”
Stickles announced that his mother was in attendance. She had flown in to surprise him, he said.
Stickles opened with a stirring version of “Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape With the Flood of Detrius.” The band came on as that number was wrapping and then segued powerfully into “Fatal Flaw” which sent the audience into a frenzy. The floor bounced. It bounced all night. Bodies were pinballing but I believe the recitation of the Stickles ground rules at the outset really does set a positive tone and nicely harnesses the excitement generated from the band’s incredible songbook. “Mr. E. Mann” sounded great despite the stripped down version relative to the way it was presented last summer.
With two fewer sound-makers compared to the previous lineup, Stickles had more work to do on guitar. He kept it strapped on throughout – whereas there were several songs during the Shea shows where he’d set it down and do vocals only. Before it was over, Stickles thanked the audience. “Denver has been a very supportive city,” he said. He reflected with Betson on their first show there in the summer of 2008 but couldn’t recall where they played that night.
There was no encore but the show ran a solid 80 minutes.
I’d estimate attendance at 200. There was definitely room for at least another hundred. The venue was nice in every respect. An adjoining pizza shop sells slices to both club-goers and those only interested in pizza. You don’t have to leave the venue to get a slice. A long bar runs along the side just off stage left.
La Sera opened. Katy Goodman (formerly of now-defunct Vivian Girls) fronts the band with husband and guitar player Todd Wisenbaker. Goodman has a friendly and positive stage presence. Several of La Sera’s songs had a country twang but there were moments of punk spirit for sure.
I stayed at the Crowne Plaza downtown. I got a lower than regular rate because the part of the hotel I was assigned to was undergoing noisy renovations by day. The location was perfect. A block off the 16th Street Mall, I had easy access to pretty much all parts of town via public transit save one brewery outing I made to an out-of-the-way neighborhood north and west.
Part of the reason I made this trip was to experience the brand new rail link connecting Denver’s airport to downtown. It’s a stunning new piece of public transit infrastructure, perhaps the most impressive new transportation endeavor I’ve ever seen since I grew to love and rely so heavily on the train and bus in the mid-90’s. It opened just a few weeks ago – April 22 – and it’s pretty incredible for its efficiency and effectiveness. Built in less than six years at a cost of $1.2 billion, the 23.5 mile journey is completed in an amazing 37 minutes. That’s a Euro-like pace. Using overhead electrics to power the brand new luggage-friendly cars, the train flies at speeds faster than what automobiles are doing on the interstate parallel to stretches of the line. It makes just six stops between the airport and downtown’s Union Station. Not only is it the clear-cut best way to get from the airport to downtown and back, the communities near those six stops in between will no doubt benefit and thrive from a new, easy ride into the city. This is exactly the kind of thing government should be spending money on if they’re looking for return on investment.
The one-way fare is nine bucks – which sounds like a lot – but your ticket becomes a day pass which encourages further use of Denver’s pretty extensive bus and light rail system. There’s a free bus that runs up and down the 16th Street mall with super high frequency so that makes for an easy connection from the A line to many of the popular high-rise hotels about 12-15 blocks south of Union Station. Why would anybody take a $60 taxi ride and risk traffic when you get a blazing quick train ride for nine bucks? Sometimes the public transit option can be a tough call when considering cost, comfort and timeliness but the train wins the day in Denver for sure. Just an escalator ride down from the terminal, you can be off the plane and on a train in five to ten minutes.
The University of Colorado is paying $1 million a year for the next five years to put its name on the new rail link. It’s formally known via signage and schedules as “The University of Colorado A line.” I guess the dough is nice to pull in, but it could be a little confusing to the outsider given the school’s lack of geographic connection to the territory covered by the new line.
The above-ground electrical lines could make it vulnerable to disruption I suppose. The train traverses a few active roadways but seemed to remain in fast mode with crossing gates down. Workers in safety vests were stationed at every crossing, perhaps because it’s such a new and frequent incursion into local vehicular traffic flow.
The ticket-checker on board the train wore a uniform emblazoned with the “Allied Barton” logo. It’s troubling that Denver’s Regional Transportation District would outsource such an important function but it’s likely trying to duck the kind of pension and health care costs that burden many city and state governments via contractual commitment to unionized transit workers.
I visited nine local breweries over the course of my three days in Denver. In each instance, I was greeted by very friendly bartenders in warm and hospitable tap room settings. In order of appearance, these are the names of the nine breweries I stopped at for at least one glass of fresh beer:
Ratio, Our Mutual Friend, Black Shirt, Crooked Stave, De Steeg, Fiction, Cerebral, Spangalang, Great Divide.
As you may know, I was your basic Old Style or Budweiser guy up until about the last year. My road trip pal Jeff D has long been a supporter of locally-brewed, hop-intensive IPA’s, double IPA’s and imperial IPA’s. When we took trips together over a several year stretch, I looked a little crooked at his enthusiasm for this type of product, this type of scene. I wrote it off as hype and had a hard time calibrating my consumption rate given the typically high alcohol count relative to the basic lager I was so used to. Little by little, my taste changed as did my consumption intake. We visited the world famous Russian River brewery in Santa Rosa, CA after Woodsist Fest a few years ago but even then I was resistant to full conversion.
I guess it was after I got back from some more positive tap room experiences with Jeff in both LA and Lexington, KY in the last 18 months that I started to dabble in the pursuit of locally made beer here in NYC. Given real estate space constraints and a slow-to-advance tap room friendly law that finally got through, NYC is a bit behind other parts of the country on beer-making. But it’s really starting to hit stride now. Visits to Finback here in Queens, Other Half in Brooklyn and Barrier in Oceanside have clinched my love of locally-made beer such that I’m now fully on board the hop-mobile.
Denver is pretty amazing for its number of small beermakers creating really good stuff. At about half of the breweries I visited, beer was actually being made while I was there. At Fiction, a young man in fly-fishing waders hauled out spent byproduct in plastic barrels. At Cerebral, I saw a guy climb into a tank in an apparent effort to clean it. In an immaculate glassed-in office in the same space, a guy surrounded by test tubes appeared to be actively involved with the science of making brew. Great Divide was my final brewery stop and that was a bigger operation than the rest. Several people were happily at work making beer while I was there and the smell was incredible. The smell of malt, perhaps. Guys and a gal scurried about and sipped beer between tasks. They wore hats and t-shirts with the names of other small breweries in town.
My favorite brewery stop among the nine was Black Shirt. Still with the body clock on East Coast time, I woke up real early Monday morning. Black Shirt had the earliest opening time: 11 AM. Just off the new A line’s 38th and Blake stop, Black Shirt offers half-off drafts on Monday’s. The tap handles look like microphones and the brewery specializes in red-hued ales. It was half-past 11 AM on Monday and I started things off there with a sixteen-ounce glass of Blood Orange Double IPA (8.0 on the Richter). It was incredible for its taste and freshness. Normally 8 bucks, it was just four because it was a Monday. The bartender was really cool. I had their Frontman IPA and then a Semitone. All super tasty. Alexis behind the bar offered tips on other favorite places to hit while in town.
The best beer I had during my time in Denver came the next morning. It was a Eureka-like panning-for-gold pure-luck kind of situation. I had again risen way too early Tuesday and wanted to get the beer-tasting started. The Falling Rock beer bar near the ballpark opened at 11 AM and I was the first one in the door. I started with the double IPA from Dry Dock, a brewer on the outskirts of town that I couldn’t reach easily. As I sat there sipping the Dock product, I noticed that the long bank of tap handles behind the bar included one that had the insignia for perhaps the most famous, most reputable beer in the world: Pliny the Elder – made by the aforementioned Russian River folks in Santa Rosa. Pliny the Elder is very difficult to get unless you get to Santa Rosa – or are in the know as it relates to their very selective distribution logistics.
The Pliny wasn’t on the Falling Rock beer list – and I found it hard to imagine that it would make it out to Denver. Perhaps the tap handle was there from a special beer event and was now defunct. Was it there for status or appearance only? As my Dad always told me when I was younger, “it doesn’t hurt to ask.” As I was taking the final sip of the Dock goodness, the bartender asked if I was ready for something else. “What’s with the Pliny handle?” I said.
“We just got a fresh keg of it, just tapped it this morning,” he said.
I asked why it wasn’t on the beer list. “It goes so fast, we don’t put it on there, so as not to disappoint people,” he said.
“I’ll take one,” I said.
And there I was with a full glass of Pliny, tasting as good as a beer could possibly taste. So fresh. So rich and bold in flavor, and tingly on the tongue.
Others walked in but nobody else seemed to know the secret I knew. The bartender didn’t push it when patrons asked what was good today. You had to see the handle I guess.
I had another and was tempted to sit there until I could have no more but that would be hoarding – and probably put me in a state that would make me dysfunctional as the day went on. I celebrated my good fortune. I texted Jeff excitedly about the discovery and left. It was a beer drinker’s moment similar to witnessing a no-hitter – or hitting a trifecta with a 50-1 shot on top.
I would be remiss not to mention Denver’s marijuana situation. The state of Colorado gives local jurisdictions the option of sanctioning marijuana outlets that sell the stuff to anybody aged 21 or over. On the same day the US re-elected President Obama to a second term in 2012, voters in that state overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment that effectively put marijuana in play as a legal recreational substance. There has been lots of fine-tuning to the rules governing regulation of the product but it essentially has produced widespread legal availability of marijuana (especially in Denver) and arguably significant tax revenue for the state.
As one moves about the city, you don’t have to look very hard to see establishments in Denver that sell weed. Many of the shops have signs with names that vary in levels of boldness or discreetness but the common trait appears to be significant visible security measures given potential vulnerability to robbery because of all the cash involved. It’s cash only to buy the stuff. The US government essentially looks the other way as Colorado carries on with sanctioned legal marijuana sales but it does not allow proprietors to legally bank – or make transactions that rely on traditional business/bank relationships.
My personal view on marijuana is that it should be legal. It should be taxed and its distribution should be controlled by the state in much the same way alcohol is. I would vote for legalization of the recreational sale of marijuana here in New York if it was up to the citizen to decide. I would say however, that if I was a state lawmaker – or a local elected leader – I would need to know more about the law’s specifics and potential community impact before I cast a vote in favor of same. I’d like to hear more from people who live in Denver about whether there are any pitfalls or problems.
I mean, I think the science suggests pretty strongly that pot is not a gateway drug to other stuff that puts people in a tailspin.
I asked several Denver residents to assess the impact of this new reality in their city and I got a lot of different answers. Mostly positive. The only guy who really expressed concern about it said the all-cash aspect of the business had skewed or tilted the real-estate market in a way that was making certain pockets of town inaccessible to more fledgling-type commerce or residential aspirations.
Politico ran a story in the last few days that said cultivation operations in Denver were being located mainly in poor neighborhoods and that those businesses somehow further doomed those places. The smell coming from a grow factory can be pungent and the Politico story had quotes from people who lived near them that said it was bothersome.
One fellow I spoke to at a tap room said he felt pride in the fact Colorado was taking a position that will pave the way for other parts of the country to follow.
New York recently enacted a state law allowing for the sale of medical marijuana but implementation of it has been a fiasco. It treats the patient/doctor liaison as a secret mission and it costs an arm and a leg for the patient to obtain certification and product.
My most memorable meal on this Denver trip came at lunch on Monday. I had the meatloaf special and a slice of banana cream pie at the Butcher Block Cafe on 38th Street. The cinder block diner in an industrial area on the rain-swept walk in between Black Shirt and Crooked Stave was a lucky discovery and really hit the spot.
As I passed through security at Denver’s airport for the return flight, I noticed a group of about fifteen new eager-looking TSA hires getting an orientation walk-through. They face what could be a challenging summer of processing long lines of travelers.
