Trip Report - Billy Strings in the Rain at Red Rocks

For the past few months, I've been casually throwing around the term "facemelter" to describe extraordinarily rippin' music. I can say now that I didn't really understand the term. Last Thursday, I found out what it really means to get your face melted on a rainy night at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. I didn't have a choice, when your friend Jake comes through from Oregon with Billy Strings tickets and a bag of mushrooms, there's really only one thing to do.

(^ the video behind that link was taken the night of the concert)

The weather conditions were perfect for mushroom tripping if you're curious what sailing in a hurricane feels like. Cold, windy, and rainy. Jake, Ethan, and I are longtime friends from college. Ethan was coming in from Idaho, stopping by on the way to his grandfather's 90th birthday in Ohio. We gathered at my house where they ripped me away from my computer and put a beer in my hand. Everyone was wearing outfits that gave off, "I fuck with wooks but also have a day job" energy. Before we left, we changed into our best guesses at how to stay dry.

In the Uber, Jake pointed to an amorphous green blob on a weather radar and said something along the lines of, "I don't want to jinx it, but I think things might be looking up." The rain proceeded to pound us mercilessly for the next four hours, it actually didn't stop until the next day. He jinxed it.

We stepped out of the car and zipped up our jackets, making our way to a queue. The queuing path was set into a natural trail along the outskirts of one of the massive rock outcroppings that compose the amphitheater. As we approached the entrance, we jumped between a few rocky shelters in a futile attempt to stay dry.

We shared a few pocket beers and talked about the fact that The Wiggles are actually an incredible modern psychedelic band. I took a moment to check in with myself before going on this trip. Quickly scanning my psyche, I failed to notice anything that could bring me to a dark place. All systems were a go. In retrospect, it was silly to do such a small little check considering the looney mental adventure I was about to embark on. It was like checking if your shoes are tied before doing a BASE jump. As I came to from this moment of introspection, I noticed a small stream of water running down the underside of a rock, it looked like an upside down river. We were about to be floating in it.

We rushed the urinals upon entry and filled up our water bottles with piss. JK. We actually filled them up with water from a water fountain. It would have been faster to hold them up to the sky. Ascending columns of slippery stairs, we made our way to the 60th row where we found Jake's friend, Mikey, wearing a gray poncho, standing next to five other people who were also wearing gray ponchos. He handed us each a bag of large mushrooms.

The mushrooms were thick, chunky, and almost fluffy. The blue bruises were characteristic of psylocibin mushrooms and swirled deep into their bodies. They looked gnarly and strong. Mikey warned us, "they're fucking gross," and that was on a scale of really gross mushrooms to mildly gross mushrooms. Two individual shrooms made up an eighth and if you don't know about drugs, that means these shrooms were giant. Intimidated, I looked at my comrades who were also investigating their shrooms through the small face portals in their raincoats.

Jake made the first move, diving head first into his plastic baggie with a massive chomp. Unbothered and happily munching psylocibin mushrooms, he decided to get a beer with Mikey. Ethan and I followed their lead and started eating our shrooms timidly. After two massive bites, I couldn't swallow any more without being liable to puke. I had probably taken about 2.5 grams. Jake and Mikey returned with some tall IPAs just as Billy Strings took the stage.

Billy Strings is a cool band and you should check them out if you get the chance. Imagine Jimmy Hendrix in a psychedelic bluegrass jam band; that's the gist of it. I had never heard anything like it in my life and I started to understand why people were shelling out up to $500 for these tickets. Each song is a journey, lasting 20-30 minutes. During these extended songs, you get the chance to go on deep mental adventures.

We each came up in our own little worlds. The space between the brim of my hat and the bottom of my hood insulated my senses and directed my attention forward. The wind was whipping us and we were cold - really cold. I was shivering under my clothes and my canvas pants were heavily soaked. My nose was uncontrollably running, snot mixed with the water that was already dripping down my face. It condensed into a salty brine that on my mustache. We were dancing, partially because we were feeling the music and partially for survival. Between songs, during moments of stillness, the cold pierced us and took over our thoughts. I wondered if I was going to end the night hyperthermic, this could be a dangerous situation. As I danced, I realized that Billy was literally breathing life into the crowd through his music. They were playing to keep us alive.

Mikey had tickets to the next round of shows and didn't feel compelled to fight for survival that night so he dipped after a song. Mikey is a whole person with life experiences, motivations, and desires. That night though, he was functionally a mushrooms fairy to me. Every once in a while I would look over to see Jake and Ethan swaying to the music. They'd catch a glimpse of my face and give me a bewildered smile. We all had a mutual understanding that what we were feeling transcended linguistic traditions and stopping to have a conversation was simply not an option. All we could do during these moments was laugh at the cerebral predicament we found ourselves in.

As the mushrooms set in, the nuances of the music became more apparent. I tuned in and it served as a gate through which I stepped into a mental Candyland. Everything became really intense and I caught myself thinking about uncomfortable topics. Family relationships, macroscopic movements in life, career, I realized all of these things were just a sum of the people who comprised them. I passed over every relevant person quickly, often with regrets or remorse about a way I had treated them, or the way I hadn't. From song to song, I would enter this realm and the thoughts hurt, but I never lost my grip with reality.

Occasionally, Billy would step into the rain and play a solo so artistic and beautiful that all my thoughts were replaced with a feeling of astonishment. Looking closely through the jumbotron near the stage, you could see that he was chucking water off of his strings as he played. It didn't matter that his guitar was wet, he was a master. The way he plays the guitar is violent but precise, like a racecar driver. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the feeling was indescribable.

By time set break came, it was dark and still pouring. The lights from the show created colorful rain bubbles which danced through the sky. If we remembered to look up, we could enjoy the view and marvel at the glimmering water which had traveled so far just to fall at our feet and on our faces. We looked at each other and probably said something like, "damn that was sick Billy Strings fuckin slaps I'm off my ass right now I can't even believe what's happening," or something like that. The wind had died down so we weren't so cold anymore. I knew I had to pee and set off on an adventure.

Climbing up the stairs, I realized it was dark. I was having a hard time placing my feet and it wasn't that I was high, it was really just hard to see. I looked around me and saw a lot of really drunk people in ponchos having the night of their lives. I thought, this is a recipe for disaster. The slippery stairs, the alcohol, the low light, something was bound to go wrong. On a daily basis, we choose not to think of the unthinkable and that was really apparent at that moment. Horrible things happen all the time and for the most part, we're blessed in that we don't have to concern ourselves with them. I didn't know how to feel about that.

What I saw at the top of the stairs can only be described as a human tornado. The genius designers doing the Red Rocks remodel seemed to have put all their eggs in an aesthetics basket, while ignoring the fact that they are a concert venue with thousands of people who need to take a piss at once during a set break. There weren't even any signs indicating a bathroom, just a large entrance to a circular building, no wider than a living room, where presumably you might find a place to pee. I couldn't see past the hoard of people stumbling over each other to get into this building, but it was clear that they were all entering in one side and exiting on the other. Were they just walking in a big circle in there? Was there even a bathroom? Staring into that building, the sense of doom I felt on the staircase returned.

I walked past that death trap hoping to discover another bathroom. As I walked uncertainly, I overheard a conversation between two men. One man was walking back from where I was walking towards, reporting the lack of a bathroom. The other was walking alongside me, also looking for a bathroom. He was a middle aged gentleman with a friendly beer belly. I turned to him,

"Where the fuck do we take a piss?"

He laughed, "I don't know but I do not want to go into that building, it's a fucking shit show in there."

I pointed to a nearby cliff, "Cliff?"

His smile widened, "I'll race you there!"

At the time, it was probably the funniest thing I'd ever heard and we laughed until we cried. We were two sorry souls on a mission for pissin'. Ultimately, accepting our fate, we stood in the hoard to get into the tornado shelter of doom. At that moment, a staffer came out and shut down the entrance presumably because it was giving off midnight on the Titanic vibes. Defeated, we parted ways and I started the long hike down the staircase to the bathrooms at the bottom of the venue.

At the base, I discovered one of the longest bathroom lines I'd ever seen and a suspicious looking sign pointing towards "additional bathrooms." I knew what I had to do and descended the temporary metal staircase into what seemed like an outdoor basement. The line was long but not nearly as long as the one upstairs, so I stood there to wait.

People were fucked up. I could tell because there was a little raised concrete platform about the size of a wooden pallet right outside the bathroom entrance. It was perfectly placed to trip everyone who had the misfortune of walking out of that bathroom with a swaggy, confident step. I saw four drunk people trip on their way out. The bathroom itself was a circus, I had to navigate through a maze of stumbling drunks in animated conversations just to reach the urinal. There were at least ten dudes in leather biker jackets who had clearly been chain smoking cigs in the additional restroom since the beginning of the show. It was their territory and I was just a humble guest. I laughed to myself as I unbuttoned my wet pants; fully soaked canvas.

It was clear that the hardest part of the trip was over and I made my way back to our row where I found Ethan and Jake talking jovially. I was so relieved that I had made it through the peak of the trip. I tried to explain the bathroom adventure but realized about a sentence in that it was not going to happen for two reasons: (1) I couldn't explain what happened without ranting for way too long, and (2) our communication centers were a bit strained in general. The music started again and I was grateful, wet, and ready for more.

The second set was marked by the distinct confidence and happiness you feel on the comedown of a mushrooms trip. I knew I had faced some serious concerns that night but I was happy because I took them head on. Each and every thought, every person I had pondered, passed through my head again but this time it was pure love. Nothing I had faced during the first set was different, but I knew in an elevated state of wisdom that I could deal with the inordinately large weight of life, a hefty beast.

The human condition is rife with suffering, self loathing, doubt, and fear. It's part of how I'm wired and it's probably part of how you're wired too. To overcome the tidings of a difficult mushrooms trip is to rise above these woes and squash them into menial distractions. Everything was just so clear, the frame had shifted. I never felt more human than I did dancing in that warm rain to the most beautiful music that had ever graced my ears.

When the music finally ended, I looked around. The crowd had really cleared out, it was us and a peculiar crew of wet dancing fans. I tapped Jake on the shoulder, "Look at all these soggy wooks!" He widened his eyes and looked around for a minute, it was hilarious. Jake pulled out his phone to call an Uber but I was not ready to consider logistics at that moment and he couldn't operate his phone with his wet hands anyway. We decided to hell with the Uber, let's go to the bathroom, get out of here, then figure it out.

In the bathroom, a few distinguished gentlemen were gatekeeping the hand dryer, hot air was a valuable commodity on a night like that. They shouted through the ranks of the bathroom, "Three for $20! Three for $20 hand dryer! No deals!" It was a reference to the Nitrous Mafia, a crew of people who hang out around concert venues selling nitrous balloons to eager concert goers. They were a group of people making a little joke, taking the piss out of a dire situation. I was thankful for them, because they really set the tone for the rest of the night. Ethan and Jake have the distinct capability of playing a bit for hours on end and I love them for that.

On the descent down the stairs, we saw a man holding an oar. I looked again at Jake and Ethan, "That guy had the right idea." Earlier in the night I had lambasted my friends for comparing their wet shoes to trench foot but considering how my own feet were feeling at that moment, I felt like I shouldn't have criticized them so harshly. We dumped into the street where hundreds of other people were walking down towards the parking lots. A few people had managed to park on this street but it happened to be occupied by pedestrians at the time. It seemed like a really bad place to have a car. One stumbling drunk man was waving a Toyota out of its parking spot. He seemed really on top of it except for the fact that the car almost hit a bunch of people. At least he felt important in that moment.

One guy accidentally stepped on the back of Ethan's foot and staggered in front of him. Turning around, he mumbled something and gave us all a coy smile. He walked away quickly, laughing at what he had said. None of us understood him. Ethan turned to us, "That guy's face was just so close to mine." We were wheezing, literally incapable of doing anything besides laughing. Really we hadn't stopped laughing since the concert stopped.

On the way to the Uber pickup zone, we became trapped in the taxi matrix, a parallel universe where expensive taxis become the only option for transportation. After haggling with some taxi drivers who didn't seem to know where Denver was, we decided to keep descending and find a different ride. A man with an Indian accent ushered us into his car, we were soaked.

The driver had received a masters degree in entomology, which he told us with pride. After a few moments I asked the obvious question, "Is that the study of bugs or words?" It was bugs. He went on to tell us of a horrible ecological disaster in the 19th century that significantly altered the life in present day Colorado. Ethan told us that his knees were wet, I didn't believe him because there was no way his pants weren't fully soaked through. We compared our rain protection, Jake's nylon skirt worked the best to keep the rain off his legs.

When we got back to my house, I opened two crash pads on the floor and we stripped off our wet clothes. Ethan wasn't bullshitting, his whole legs were dry with the exception of his knees. We compared mushroom baggies to see how much we had each eaten then spent the next few hours hanging out as they wore off.  Jake played the guitar, Ethan searched for more Billy Strings shows and lamented the fact that he had to wake up early to catch a flight. He found tickets at the Ford Idaho Center Arena, which is a stupid fucking name for a venue. He described the concert as the most meaningful musical experience of his life.

You can't really prepare yourself for the psychedelic experience. You can research, meditate, and read all you want. At the end of the day, you're at the mercy of the drug and even for experienced users, it rarely feels routine. I was thankful for this experience and I went to bed feeling warm and excited for the future, ready to be a beacon of positive light to the people in my life. If your friend Jake ever comes through town with some mushrooms and Billy Strings tickets, be sure to take that trip. Peace.