First time at Red Rocks: Sleater-Kinney and Wilco

Sleater-Kinney fire up Red Rocks

No one warned me about the stairs or the hike up from the parking lot to the gate. 

From great distances, one sees the wedge of rocks that form Red Rocks Amphitheatre and wonders who a concert venue slots between them all. But it works. It’s narrow, and requires some steep stairs. I had to pause about halfway up, sweating profusely and searching for breath. 

I found that breath quickly. Besides, we had Wilco and Sleater-Kinney’s co-headlining tour on the Crites and Main’s last night in Colorado. A better ending to their trip would be hard to imagine. 

We grabbed seats among the stone terraces and surveyed the venue that the Beatles could not sell out in 1964. I would wager Red Rocks lacks any bad seats since its relatively narrow width and steep rise from the stage give anyone the chance to watch without obstructions.

With opener Nnamdi sidelined by injury, Sleater-Kinney waste no time burning into their set. With founding member/drummer Janet Weiss leaving the band, Sleater-Kinney has evolved into a different outfit, with guitarists/singers Carrie Brownstein and Corinne Tucker as dual frontwoman and a larger backing band. 

In their first Red Rocks performance, Sleater-Kinney delivered a show for the ages. They played through sunset and the hazy twilight, energetic and ready to throw elbows in every song, even the mid-tempo numbers. Seven of the 19 songs came from Path of Wellness, and all but a few came from the three records since they ended a decade-long hiatus in 2015. 

I had been a fan in the early Double Aughts until their hiatus after The Woods. Beyond Brownstein’s role in Portlandia, I had not paid them much mind since that initial run. Somehow I missed Sleater-Kinney’s reunion and subsequent albums, so most of this music was new to me. 

Of course they still shred. If the new material had a different vibe at times, it still fit. The songs sounded great among the rock formations, and the larger band treatment worked for this bunch.

Older fans found plenty to enjoy, as S-K sprinkled in four tracks from The Woods and the title track from One Beat. There was no Dance Song ’97 to be found, but I wasn’t expecting them to reach back that far. One of our group had not heard the band before, and found the show revelatory. It made sense – their intense set felt tailormade for new and old fans. The energy and newness of their set was by the night’s pinnacle. 

As for Wilco, they felt like they were turning into a nostalgia act before our eyes, delivering a well-played set mostly devoid of surprises. Wilco just doesn’t throw in a deep cut from an old album anymore. Every song was technically proficient and sometimes they grew a little jammy in length, but they weren't a lot of plot twists.

Of course they opened with Shot in the Arm. Of course they did. That was unquestionably the right song to usher the band back onstage. The pandemic gave the tune fresh meaning. I played that song on my car radio as I waited in line for both stages of my COVID-19 vaccine.

The pandemic cut short its tour promoting Ode to Joy (an album title Jeff Tweedy said didn’t seem proper in wake of the pandemic). Even that newish album only received a handful of songs. Since I never saw them tour on it, it would have been welcome. 

Eleven albums in, Wilco still tends to stick with fan favorites in its sets. I’ve come to a point where I don’t need to hear their staples from Summer Teeth or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot anymore. But they will play them anyway. Nels Cline’s guitar work tends to dominate songs where it’s strongest, such as Love is Everywhere (Beware) and Impossible Germany. 

The band seemed ready to resume touring, and Tweedy was quick to offer a mea culpa for disparaging Red Rocks at the expense of Denver’s Mission Ballroom. Still, it was a solid if unspectacular set. Pleasing longtime fans grows harder with time, and the “best of” can start to feel a little tedious. 

To beat the Red Rocks crowd, we cut out at 10 minutes till curfew time, hearing Ashes of American Flags as we sped down the hill back to the parking lot. California Stars would end the night shortly, a number we'd all heard before.

The exit from Red Rocks dumped us onto a country rock that ran through Morrison’s main street. We ended up back on the outer loop highway. There we could see the lights of Red Rocks ablaze among the dark bulk of its surrounding foothills.