Monolith Festival 2007

Rob and I made the trek to Red Rocks on Saturday, opting for the day that the Flaming Lips would headline and hoping for a repeat of their epic show from last summer. $50 seemed like a fair price for a ticket, considering the lineup, and in retrospect it was worth the money. Monolith was not without its share of first year kinks, though, mainly with sound problems that plagued the main stage all day. The best stuff we saw was from acts that we stumbled upon at the smaller stages: Bob Log III, White Rabbits and Art Brut all put on great sets.

Unfortunately, Anton Newcombe of Brian Jonestown Massacre spent half an hour bitching out his band and the guy running the soundboard before making it through a complete song, and Spoon, who put on one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time last year at the Boulder Theater was way off, eerily similar to when one of your friends from sea level visits and has way too much to drink before going on to be loud and obnoxious for the rest of the evening. Maybe the bands should have had more time to acclimatize to the mile high city? The Lips were on their A-game as expected, but it would have been hard to top last year’s show–Wayne Coyne even took the time to thank everyone who had been there a year earlier for one of the best show’s in the band’s history.

Normally we’d leave comments like this to The Egotist, but no one is talking about it, at least not yet, so here goes…Even at its shakiest, the music at Monolith far outweighed the eye candy, graphically speaking. There’s no doubt that almost everyone there was reared on a healthy dose of the Jetsons, but the visuals for the festival, which seemed (I think?) to be trying to tap into that nostalgia felt at best half-baked. Sure, a festival like this needs a logo–something that can be plastered on merchandise, backstage passes and hopefully be memorable enough to stick with concert goers until next year’s festival rolls around. Unfortunately the Monolith logo (including the supporting illustrations) looks like it never made it past a first round of revisions before getting printed on everything in sight.

It really hit me when I went looking for posters (plural, because with this many bands on a bill it would only make sense to have a general festival poster as well as several commemorating individual bands’ appearances) only to find a cheap, glossy, boring poster with band names slapped around haphazardly as the only option:

There are literally hundreds of artists and designers around the country, including a few right here in Denver / Boulder, that specialize in this kind of thing. A poster series, or even one limited-edition silkscreened print would have seemed like a no-brainer.

Bonnaroo has an established look at this point, so do Sasquatch, ACL, and Bumbershoot. Granted, all of these festivals have a few years under their belt, so it’s only fair to give Monolith the chance to re-think its approach for year two, or at least go back and seriously re-work what they ran with this year.

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