The festival began as a poll – not unlike how the Associated Press ranks college football teams .
The year was 2001. I had just (voluntarily!) made the 90-degree right turn from Denver Post deputy sports editor to general entertainment reporter.
Working late nights and weekends in sports is a vampire existence. One of my brothers had just died. I could see my life slipping away in the purgatory of waiting out the end of West Coast baseball games.
I asked for a change, and a kindly arts editor named Ed Smith welcomed me with open arms. He didn’t tell me what to cover. He asked me what I wanted to cover – and I said local music. But I was at least seven years removed from any real connection to our local music scene. And in that world, seven years might as well be seven generations.
So I turned to 25 local music experts and asked them to help me identify those local bands most deserving of more mainstream attention. I surveyed them, as any sports writer would – like a college football poll: Totally by the numbers. List 20 bands. Twenty points for first, 19 for second and on down the line. This was purely intended as a research exercise that yielded the names of nearly 100 local bands for me to focus my coverage on. Bands like Apples in Stereo , Slim Cessna's Auto Club and Dressy Bessy . Future Grammy winners DeVotchKa came in at No. 6.
Topping that first poll was 16 Horsepower , a substantive goth-country rock band out of Littleton that addressed issues of mortality, sin and redemption with urgent and unflinching honesty.
It made sense to now write a full profile on 16HP and run it the next time the band had a local show scheduled so that readers could check them out for themselves. Years later, 16 Horsepower’s April 27, 2001, concert at the Boulder’s Fox Theatre would come to be known as the first-ever Denver Post Underground Music Showcase – now ubiquitously known as The UMS . Which is kind of funny, given that the first time anyone called it “The UMS” was not until 2006. At 24 years old, it returns this weekend as Denver's largest and longest-running rock festival.
When my editor saw my extensive research, he thought readers would be interested in seeing it. So we turned all I had learned into a special section introducing readers to Denver’s underground scene. We printed the complete poll results. We provided capsule introductions to the top 10 bands, with online audio samples. For most of these bands, it was the first time their names had ever been printed in The Denver Post. I called it simply: “The Best of the Underground 2001.”
In the following year, momentum built to turn the poll into an annual snapshot of our ever-shifting local underground scene. The lightning bolt then struck for what seemed then a Herculean task: Every year, when publishing the results of the poll, we would present a concert headlined by the winner, with other top-10 bands opening. One night. Four bands. Five bucks.
How hard could it be?
The folks who ran the Bluebird Theatre at the time were happy to hand their venue over to us, with one condition: That they provide a national act to headline the bill. The thinking then was that people would not come out to see an all-local lineup. But I thought a national headliner would defeat the purpose. Locals-only prevailed.
That first year, we drew a healthy 300 to the 500-capacity Bluebird. And by the next year, headlined by DeVotchKa, we sold out. To this day, several members of DeVotchka still kindly talk about that gig as a turning point for the band.
So many stupid memories. Like when Friends Forever, a Devo-like band known for playing sidewalk shows out of their van, agreed in 2004 to play indoors at the Gothic Theatre – and wrapped me to one of the theater’s support poles with plastic.
From the start, the money breakdown was simple: The host theater took the bar proceeds. We divided the door equally between all the bands. We incurred no expenses and took no payment. I will always remember standing outside the Bluebird handing Jeffrey Wentworth Stevens of a band called George & Caplin his cut and starting to take off in my beat-up Bronco. He chased after me, so I stopped. He said, “There’s been a mistake. We’ve never been paid this much money for a gig,” he said. I told him there was no mistake.
In too many ways to count, Denver has never been the same since Westminster-born Ricardo Baca returned to Colorado in 2003 as the Post’s pop-music editor. By then, I was the paper’s theater critic. But, with Baca’s help, I kept producing the annual music showcase purely as a labor of love.
Baca is the visionary who saw the opportunity to bring a South by Southwest (SXSW) kind of music festival to the people of Denver. In 2006, aka Year 6, Baca transformed the event into a true three-day music festival featuring 35 bands in five venues along nine blocks of South Broadway.
That was the year Baca gave it its forever name: The UMS.
In short order, The UMS was a four-day extravaganza featuring 350 mostly local bands. Baca and his booking team began carefully and mindfully integrating national bands without pulling focus from the local bands that made up the spine of the event. The year John Hickenlooper took to the mainstage and introduced Flobots as the headlining act, I just about left my body. All attributable to the vision of Baca, now the founder of Grasslands, a journalism-minded content agency focused on cannabis and other wellness products.
In 2010, Baca and I were called into Denver Post Editor Greg Moore’s office, where we were told the time had come for us to turn our baby over for adoption and focus on what we were hired to do: Write. But the paper was committed to what we had started, so they created a contract job for Kendall Smith, a key member of Baca’s organizing team, to run it.
By then, Baca was presenting a massive, volunteer-fueled effort that featured 350 bands, DJs, singer-songwriters, comedians and burlesque performers playing on 30 stages, drawing 17,000, as he called it, "of our closest friends." He even added masked Mexican Lucha libre wrestlers. It was a massive, community-wide effort. The most it ever cost was $40 for a four-day wristband.
It was very odd to have created a shell of something that now was creating actual jobs and helping South Broadway businesses like Sweet Action Ice Cream to produce record revenues. Even weirder when, in 2018, with the Denver Post now owned by a hedge fund and bleeding out, The Post sold our gift to the people of Denver as its own commodity. (We, of course, never saw a dime.)
An “experiential agency” called Two Parts bought The UMS from the Post for an undisclosed amount in 2018. Three years later, the local nonprofit Youth on Record used a fraction of a surprise $1 million grant it got from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to buy its own ownership stake. The UMS is now more manageably smaller – three days and about 175 bands, and it has adopted Youth on Record’s founding mission to advance opportunities for historically marginalized communities both in and around the UMS itself.
From the start, there has been some controversy. In my day, bands that did well in the annual poll loved the poll. Others felt like the practice of comparatively ranking artists did more harm than good. The UMS’ biggest challenge today is probably the perception that local bands no longer make up the heart of the annual lineup. Of the 24 featured bands in the 2024 UMS slate, the only Denver band is an alternative rock outfit called The Mañanas .
At its core, the UMS is still all about music discovery but it is now a fully international celebration, with an impressive array of featured acts from Australia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Chile and Ecuador. That doesn't make the UMS better or worse than it once was. Just different – perhaps necessarily so as it seeks to survive, thrive and grow into whatever it needs to be in post-COVID 2024.
I asked Erin Roberts, who in the early 2000s was a co-host of Radio 1190 ’s weekly “The Local Shakedown” with Nick Groke, for her thoughts. In those years, one of our favorite annual traditions was trekking up to the University of Colorado on the Friday before the UMS to count down that year’s top 20 local bands for 1190 listeners before you could read it in the Sunday Denver Post.
At the time, Roberts was building up her own confidence to start performing, and 2024 marks her 22nd year fronting a widely adored band called Porlolo with indie luminaries Joe Richmond, Jake Miller, Roger Green and Anna Morsett of The Still Tide . You won’t find Porlolo at this year’s UMS, but you will find Roberts because she works for Mighty Fine Productions , a company that handles the sound on many of the UMS’ outdoor stages.
Roberts thinks something has been lost as the festival has moved away from its founding principle of localism.
“At the beginning, the UMS was entirely focused on localism, and localism builds community,” she said. “We have an amazingly rich local music scene with all sorts of genres. Instead of de-emphasizing our local bands, we should be making them the mainstage bands. We are not going to build our local music scene if we are not going to allow local bands to grow up and into larger venues.”
She said partnering with the UMS in its earliest days made for some of her greatest musical memories.
“At that time, there was so much joy and excitement around Colorado-based music, and The UMS was one of the foundational reasons this scene grew in such a cohesive way,” she said. “Back then, there was just so much attention given to the personality and the sound and the essence of the local bands that were involved in the festival. That is so important because the attention that these bands get in the newspaper and on the radio really elevates Colorado music as a whole, and it legitimizes Colorado-based music to a much larger audience.”
And helps to move what might be underground to the above-ground.
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