Critic's Notebook

Suzanne Slade of Battle Pussy & Daenerys and the Targaryens shocked herself the first time she performed live.

Tech N9ne answers the phone. He’s somewhere in Canada, tripped up on time zones, with a fitness trainer named Jaws.

John Denver died twenty years ago today. Here are twenty of the weirdest stories we have written about him since.

In 1989, Mexico City’s Cafe Tacvba first formed, aiming to blend traditional Latin music with rock and hip-hop, resulting in a sound that is entirely the band’s own. That’s 28 years of bending genres and blending cultures in a way that doesn’t seem forced.

After being diagnosed with cancer, Joshua Drummer set out to create a legacy project. His one-man-band death metal act Buried Realm has just released its debut album, the Ichor Carcinoma.

Bill McKay likes to stay busy. The former choir singer and Colorado College graduate spent his formative years gigging nonstop with the blues-based Derek Trucks Band and then Colorado’s own Leftover Salmon. A glance at his current schedule reveals that he hasn’t slowed his pace much.

Alan Cogen founded Pathways to Jazz in 2014 to support Colorado’s jazz community. That first year he gave grants of up to $5,000 to five local jazz players to record albums. Since then, the organization has gone on to grant another 32 musicians money to make records.

Larry Legend never imagined becoming rapper after his successful high school football career. But that’s where he is and the future is his.

The Denver country band the Hang Rounders celebrates the release of its new album, Outta Beer, Outta Here, at Syntax Physic Opera on Friday, September 29, 2017.

Writing the bare facts about my friend Matt’s death, I’m struck by how limiting the cold tone of journalism can be: “Denver musician Gary Matthew Bellinger — who went by Matt — died Thursday, September 7, at the age of 40.

“It was around Christmas time, and there was a holiday showcase at the Cricket where lots of local punk bands would be playing a song or two each.”

The Denver Bootleg is a series chronicling the history of local music by longtime Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz.

Shane Franklin, who raps under the name SF1, has dropped a minimalist music video for his catchy pop hip-hop song “Honest” that nods back to the freewheeling chock-full-of-humor spirit of De La Soul, one part goofy and another part charming as all get out.

Two years from the day I belted out Taylor Swift songs at a concert where the singer sashayed across the stage of the 56,000-seat Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, she won a countersuit for sexual assault. It was August 14, 2017. I was in the courtroom. At the 1989 tour stop, Swift was in full pop-goddess mode, wearing a glittery crop top, her face magnified on a screen so fans like me could see her sing and strut amidst a sea of male backup dancers even from the back of the football stadium. But twenty feet from me on the eighth floor of a Denver federal courthouse, hand on her mother’s as she awaited the verdict, Swift was simply a woman in the all-too-common position of waiting for someone to take her at her word that a man had touched her body without her consent. And for a scary half-second, I was afraid that, despite a clear case argued by a high-powered legal team and backed by both witnesses and photographic evidence, the answer would be no.

The Family Dog may be the most influential rock-music venue in Denver history. Yet it’s also the most mysterious.

The legendary Broadway building where Rory’s Tavern stands was built in the early 1930s, opening not long after Prohibition ended. By the late ’40s, it was the Red Lantern Cafe, which was purchased in the early ’50s by twenty-year-old DU law student Jerry Feld, who wasn’t old enough to own a bar.

Phil Bianchi, who died on July 14 at the age of 51, helped make Sancho’s Broken Arrow, the bar he opened with his two brothers in 2000, a Cheers for Deadheads. He would give customers nicknames and make sure they knew they were welcome there.

A brief comic history of the 15th Street Tavern.

Colorado Springs-based DIY space Flux Capacitor, in partnership with Pikes Peak Library District, re-opened to the public on July 15 in the Knights of Columbus building at the Penrose Branch complex in downtown Colorado Springs.

Blondie emerged in the mid-’70s underground rock scene, hitting mainstream airwaves with its third album, 1978’s Parallel Lines.

The Insane Clown Posse blew it like a two-liter of Faygo.

A brief comic history of the Rossonian