Why does the music sound so good at Colorado’s Red Rocks amphitheater?

Red Rocks hasn’t always had it easy. Sixty years ago in 1964, The Beatles arrived for what would be Red Rocks’ first major popular music concert—famed as being one of a select few US Beatles dates that failed to sell out. Then there was Jethro Tull’s 1971 concert, which sparked riots and a subsequent ban on rock music at Red Rocks through to 1976. Not to forget U2’s renowned 1983 show featured in the Sunday Bloody Sunday video, almost canceled due a torrential rainstorm—despite the band investing USD$250,000 in live DVD production costs.

I was 11 when I first saw that Sunday Bloody Sunday video on MTV. I remember it vividly: The rocks, the fire, and—famously—the blood-red mist. In 2004, it was listed in Rolling Stone’s 50 Moments that Changed the History of Rock and Roll list for its dramatic footage, and the springboard it gave U2 for future success.

I was brought up on an unfulfilling musical diet of Elvis Presley and Donny Osmond, so seeing live music thrashed out beneath rust-red rock formations—Lyon’s Red Random Flagstone, to be precise—blew my mind, along with hearing those boisterous riffs and thunderous drums of Nirvana for the first time.

Since then, I knew I had to get to Red Rocks.

It was concert videos like U2 at Red Rocks, Queen at Live Aid, and Nirvana at Reading Festival that gave me the live music bug. I would eventually become a concert promoter in my home city of Birmingham, England, starting small in local pubs and working my way up to book bands at 1,500-3,000 capacity venues. I knew nothing about technical specifications and PA systems, but I’d soon learn what made shows sound good—and meet those who made shows sound good, like Paul Cooper, the sound engineer for British band Bastille who have played Red Rocks.

Three hundred million years in the making, Red Rocks is cited as the world’s only ‘naturally occurring, acoustically perfect amphitheater,’ and a geological wonder. Having seen Red Rocks on most of my favorite bands’ tour posters over the years, I’d decided enough was enough when I saw two more of my favorites—Beck and Phoenix—announce a co-headline concert there. I dropped everything to go.

The canyon-like layout of Red Rocks—created by the large rock walls at either side of the stage—is great for carrying sound, since natural rock has a forgiving quality that dampens noise and gives the music a certain kind of clarity.

I’d waited 21 years to get there, but a twinned rainbow poking through jet-black clouds had other ideas. You could actually see for miles on a clear day, I was told. But from the back row of seats, the distanced Denver foothills were nothing but a haze.

“Yeah… it can rain a lot,” Red Rocks venue director Tad Bowman told me, acknowledging the sky and my desire for an emergency poncho as we headed for a backstage tour. “At 6,500-feet elevation, these shows are some of the world’s highest altitude concerts, so anything can happen.”

Red Rocks is a 9,525-capacity sloped, all-seated venue with an illustrious, and occasionally tumultuous, concert history. “When Red Rocks first opened in 1941, it was mostly classical music. There was an orchestra pit,” says Bowman before the show, pointing at a black-and-white photograph in a backstage corridor. “That was removed around 1959 when the [sound] towers were added, and rock and roll became popular.”

“There was a temporary roof [when U2 played]. And at this altitude the weather moves fast,” Bowman adds, as we moved along the wall-mounted timeline. “If you saw that [U2] show from 1983, and the famous Sunday Bloody Sunday video, that night was a challenge for us. But it still sounded great.”

A permanent roof was finally installed in 1989; a new one replaced it in 2021. U2 brought in searchlights, illuminated the cliffs, hired a mobile sound production unit and commissioned aerial footage filmed from a helicopter—no drones back then, of course. The band and several thousand staunch fans endured said elements that night.

Forty years on and it was the turn of LA singer-songwriter Beck and Versailles indie band Phoenix to battle the elements. Continuing the backstage tour in the Red Rocks operation center, whose dozens of surveillance screens, precise weather reports and event planners keep a tight ship, Bowman was confident the storm would pass in time.

“Red Rocks is on every crew and band member’s bucket list of venues,” said Cooper, Bastille’s sound engineer, on a call before the show. The band has been here before, recently supporting Duran Duran at two sold-out Red Rocks shows. It’s the US’s best-attended outdoor venue.

“There are so many sequential shows that the crew and staff know the place back to front,” he added. “Owing to the landscape, there are intricacies to it—crew rules and movements are unlike anywhere else.”

We know that sounds are effectively vibrations caused by surface motions, but does live music really sound better at higher altitudes, or among mountains and canyons? The short answer is yes.

The PA system is almost always the most important thing when dealing with outdoor events, he told me, especially where there’s variable surface differences, adding that “Temperature changes also affect sound transference in what is, for all intents and purposes, a desert area.”

The canyon-like layout of Red Rocks—created by the large rock walls at either side of the stage—is great for carrying sound, since natural rock has a forgiving quality that dampens noise and gives the music a certain kind of clarity. Turns out that sound appears clearer outdoors where there’s no ceiling to bounce off, preventing reverb.

Who knew of Colorado as a music state? As an outsider, I certainly didn’t; I only knew of its skiing and mountain town culture in destinations like Vail and Telluride. But even in these small, isolated towns in the Rockies, music becomes something special. From the Telluride Jazz Festival to the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater—where live music sounds as good in the front seats as at the top of the grassy hill—and even indoor venues like Denver’s Mission Ballroom, something about the sound of what I was hearing felt special.

That’s where the science comes in. We know that sounds are effectively vibrations caused by surface motions, but does live music really sound better at higher altitudes, or among mountains and canyons? The short answer is yes. At higher elevations, molecules in the atmosphere are further spaced apart—this means that sound particles travel slightly slower and sound is overall clearer, dependent on wind conditions.

That storm did eventually pass, and the ponchos we purchased were used to sit on, rather than wear. In truth, Red Rocks already felt familiar to me. During the rain and before Phoenix took to the stage, I pulled that U2 music video up to piece together the most recognizable parts from that misty scene, like Creation Rock to my left, and Ship Rock to my right. The flames are now replaced by modern strobe lighting and LED screens.

Then it was time for the music to return, and Phoenix to take to the stage. Beck is a fan of the band—they have a song together—and even watched them from the crowd on the row behind me. After an hour-plus set of hits, frontman Thomas Mars showed off his athleticism with a dash up the full 70 rows of seats between stage and summit during set closer—‘1901’—as he “wanted to get a better view of it all.”. I don’t blame him.

Beck then closed the evening with a headline set worthy of filling any arena—let alone one as gorgeous as this—with classic hits Loser and E-Pro stealing the show and sending the sell-out crowd home happy, if not damp. I felt blessed to have not only made it to a venue I’d longed to visit, but with two of my favorite bands sealing off a perfect evening. Well, almost.

“It could snow, it could rain, it could be freezing, but it will probably be the most memorable concert experience you’ll ever have,” one staff member said to me on entry.

She was right. And it was worth the wait.

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The writer was a guest of Colorado Tourism and local partners. For more information, visit www.colorado.com

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