Blucifer’s incredible artist-forward design – An interview with Gillian Pasley

An interview with co-organizer Gillian Pasley

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

By Blu Fernandez

You’ve probably heard by now that Blucifer’s First Rodeo is coming to town and it’s making huge waves (If you haven’t heard, where have you been??). On July 23rd – July 26, bands and fans will swarm South Broadway and beyond, and I couldn’t be more excited. Blucifer will be packed with all of your favorite local bands playing at venues, bars, and businesses across Denver. I got the chance to sit down with one of the main organizers of the event, Gilian Pasley [full disclosure, Gillian is a Wax Trax staff member, and Wax Trax is one of many Sponsors for the event], and pick her brain about putting together the fest. 

Blu: It’s early yet, but what do you think the effect of organizing this fest has been so far? 

Gillian:. The brief story of the festival, which is that, last year, all of us heard that a festival that had been going on for a really long time in the Baker neighborhood…  wasn’t gonna be happening anymore. So at that time, a bunch of artists started putting their heads together and talking about ‘what if we could just do something like this ourselves?’ We came together and put together a business plan, and presented it to several of the venues and businesses on South Broadway. And everyone just kind of said, “Hell yeah.” So from the jump, everyone was really excited. We’ve had  two main goals with the festival that have been making an impact and reflecting on the way the artists talk about it. The first goal we have is that we want to bring more folks out to live local music all year round. It’s not just a holiday that happens once a year in late July. It’s a whole thriving music scene, and if this festival could get more people involved in the scene, you know, playing more shows and going to more shows in a stronger community, that would be a huge win, and we’ve been doing that. You know, the festival [is]still about six weeks out, but we’ve already thrown, I would say 10 or so events. The second goal is to get artists more power. We see a music industry and an ecosystem that often puts the artist last. We’ve tried to create a model that puts artists at the very center of it. Our slogan is “By artists, for everybody,” and that is very explicitly true. So that’s reflected in the way that we’re paying our artists. We make the music, why wouldn’t we be at the center of what that business is all about? I can see the tide shifting a little bit as we talk to fellow musicians in Denver, as they all feel this collective ownership of this festival. It’s something that we really wanna feel like we’re all doing together, and I think a lot of people have latched onto that in a really cool way.

Are you already planning for year two of the fest? What would you do differently next year? 

We’re not explicitly planning for year two yet. I mean, year one has been such a whirlwind, you know? It’s been nonstop every single day. So we certainly have a whole list of ideas that are like, “This is for the second rodeo,” because we don’t have time to make it happen right now. One of those ideas that actually I kind of like was what my mom thought of this weekend when she was visiting. She wants to do an AARP tent for parents of band members to come and sit in a comfy chair and get a glass of champagne. Anyway, that’s an idea for the second rodeo that we’re not pulling off this year. There’s been debate about whether it’ll be called Bluecifer’s Second Rodeo or Bluecifer’s First Rodeo 2. I think all of us anticipate that there will be a second and third and hopefully however long people are willing to carry the torch rodeos. We’ll have all this awesome online infrastructure to take submissions to make it really simple to get artists into their portals and things like that. One of the things I would say about the mission of this festival right now is it’s all local, with one kind of funny exception. There’s a band from Costa Rica that was already booked at Skylark that weekend, so we wrapped them into the festival. Other than that, every band is, you know, from Denver or Colorado Springs or Fort Collins or Pueblo or Trinidad. No vision at this point to turn it into a Clásico style festival with big headliners… I talk to a lot of people in the neighborhood who know about the festival and are going. When I ask them what they’re excited about, you know, sometimes they’ll mention, one or two bands, but for the most part it’s the whole vibe and ethos of; I wanna walk around Broadway and discover new stuff and have fun with my friends. So that’s something we wanna keep. Yeah, but stay tuned for the second rodeo. Maybe we’ll drop some merch right after the first festival.

How many bands are in the festival? 

All together it’s about 250 bands, which is … really fucking insane. There’s four days of the festival. The first day is a DIY kickoff day, and that’s less centered on Broadway. That’s in five different venues around the city. Seventh Circle, Ante Up, Squirm Gallery, D3, and this secret new space near D3. So that’ll be 25 bands on that day celebrating those all ages, often sober DIY spaces that keep the scene running year-round. 

Friday and Saturday on South Broadway we have 18 or so venues, and those range from classic venues like High Dive, HQ, Bar 404, Skylark, to spaces that don’t usually have music. Bars like The Irish Rover, The L. There’s gonna be a jazz jam in Voodoo Donuts, et cetera. Then also businesses as well. So there’s gonna be music in Wax Trax. There’ll be music in Gold Mine Vintage. There’s gonna be an art market in FM with some DJs. And then on Sunday we’re taking it back to the neighborhood roots, and there’s gonna be about 17 house shows around the Baker neighborhood, and those are in backyards and on roofs in one case, on a skate ramp in another case… You can wander the neighborhood and discover something new. People with DIY passes or all access passes will have access to a map and a guide for all those house shows.

To follow up, how many requests from artists/bands did you have to play the festival and how did you decide who was going to play?

Well, so we announced back in February that we were gonna do this. We opened up an artist submission form. I wanna shout out our coworker [at Wax Trax] Nick Tassinari for being the very first person to apply. We wound up over the course of just a few weeks with about 700 submissions, artists and bands around Colorado. A lot of folks were in that form also just saying that they wanted to help in some way. I think if we’d left it open longer, it would’ve been double that. So it’s really amazing to see just how many people are making music in this city right now, a lot of whom I didn’t even know about yet, which is really cool. There was a booking team that I was a part of with three folks, and we went through every submission and really just tried to curate a mix of things. We were really trying to create different bills in different places that were themed to create a diversity of genres. With this “By artists for everybody model,” we want artists to feel collective ownership of it. We really wanted to make sure that all the bills up and down the street and around town were interesting, and also represented a diverse swath of Denver’s music scene, not just one specific genre or something.

What has been your favorite part of planning the festival? Least favorite?

My favorite part about planning the festival has definitely been the collective art project vibe of it all. I mentioned earlier in this interview, we’ve done things like my friend Kelsey helped us make a giant scroll that had the second lineup announcement on it. It was 40 feet long. We unrolled it in the high dive. I made a cardboard horse that we call the F*ckass Horse. All these little fun things that feel sort of frivolous and extra or really whimsical to me have become in a lot of ways the core of the festival, and I think what a lot of people in the community have latched onto is that we really wanna do something that is fun and welcoming and makes more people feel invited to live local music. It’s really cool how people have grabbed this concept and run with it. There’s someone putting together a compilation tape. There are folks who’ve made really cool posters for their individual shows at Bluecifer. So seeing the way that it’s decentralized and that all the artists in the community have made it their own in interesting ways has been my favorite part of it. I guess my least favorite part is probably just being  stressed all the time. I come from an event planning background. I’ve run festivals for a little while, not at this exact type and scale. Part of what satisfies my brain about running festivals but also makes me a little crazy is just the constant running of all the little details in your head and also the constant worrying that you have 1,000 balls in the air and you might drop three of them. So deciding which balls are okay to drop has been a really empowering part of this as well. It’s also been really hard to have to say no to some people, ’cause like I mentioned – 700 bands applying. 250 is a lot, but 700 would’ve been insane… Whether or not they’re able to play the first year, we wanna invite people to be involved all the time, and I’m hoping that people really get that, and it seems like a lot of them have, so that’s cool. 

People are saying Blucifer is all that and a bag of chips. What kind of sandwich and chips are you guys? 

Well, Sam up there was just eating a tuna sandwich. I haven’t had a tuna sandwich in a while, but that does sound really good. I don’t know. We’re kind of like summer-y sandwiches, you know? Maybe at one of our host locations such as Sputnik. We’re a burger from Sputnik with french fries, and the french fries are the chips. Sputnik was where we had our very first meeting with all the venues and businesses. Not to shout out my favorite restaurant on Broadway kind of randomly, but I do feel like they’re such a hub for getting food before soundcheck and the show, getting late night drinks, stuff like that. So I feel like when I think of the spirit of South Broadway, I think of squeezing into one of those booths and getting a burger and fries.

Find details and passes to Blucifer’s First Rodeo here.