2009 People of Power: Chuck Morris

Erin Shaver

After nearly 40 years, this concert promoter and talent seeker still knows what rocks the mile high city.

Pacing among the herd of sweat-soaked, fist-pumping fans at last summer's Mile High Music Festival, a ubiquitous 63-year-old man with rose-colored spectacles was already plotting his "to do" list of improvements for 2009: more beverage tents, a better VIP experience and clearer signs, just to name a few.

For Chuck Morris, local music mogul and oddball mastermind behind the inaugural festival, the drive to continually produce Denver music firsts (and then improve upon them) is impassioned and unwavering, even after four decades in the business.

"Maybe that's why I've been able to do this for 38 years "” I'm never happy," Morris tells me from his La Alma/Lincoln Park neighborhood office, where he currently serves as president and CEO of AEG Live's Rocky Mountain Region. "You can't sit on your laurels. We are focused on making it better although, for a first year, the fact that we only have to really tweak is pretty amazing. I mean, first-year festivals have been pretty disastrous at times."

By most accounts, Denver's first multi-day musical festival with mainstream, national acts was a large success, and Morris "” sometimes brilliant, often cluttered, always highly connected "” is largely to thank.

Impacting the Local Scene

It started in the 1960s when he came to CU Boulder by way of Brooklyn as a bright, 20-year-old political science graduate student. After dropping out of CU ("I was thinking about going into politics, but I loved music more"), Morris went on to manage and book bands at the Sink; open Tulagi's, one of the area's first venues to host national acts; and along with local promoting legend Barry Fey, started Ebbets Field, renovated the Fillmore and brought music back to Red Rocks in 1976. In the '90s, Morris' marathon of promotion led him to Chuck Morris Presents and then Live Nation, the world's largest concert promoter, where he remained until 2007.

The Mile High Music Festival is intricately tied to Morris' switch from Live Nation to AEG Live, the local branch of longtime friend Phil Anschutz's sports and entertainment conglomerate, Anschutz Entertainment Group "” a festival-friendly company involved in everything from Coachella to the New Orleans Jazz Fest. To understand how the offbeat Morris, who makes no bones about his liberal-leaning politics, ended up friends with a conservative Christian billionaire, one need look no further than the music. Morris also managed bands in the '80s and '90s, and among his many clients, which included Big Head Todd and the Monsters and Leo Kottke (the only musician he still manages today), was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band "” the puzzle piece that fostered his and Anschutz's two-decade friendship.

In the late '80s, Anschutz called Morris to book the Dirt Band for the opening of his western art collection at a museum in Moscow and ended up flying Morris, his then-girlfriend (now wife) Becky and the entire band to the Soviet Union for three concerts, including one in a 200-year-old opera house where more than 1,000 musically inclined Russian children received free tickets.

"They must have sent the Dirt Band music to some of these kids "˜cause about 25 kids came on stage playing violins," Morris says. "It was a breathtaking night; it really cemented a great friendship and great respect for the man."

So nearly 20 years later when AEG started a Rocky Mountain branch, Morris had to go. Leaving with him from Live Nation were his two partners and protégées, Don Strasburg and Brent Fedrizzi, as well as his longtime assistant Jan Martin, who has been with him for 28 years. Strasburg, now a lead talent buyer at AEG, describes Morris as "a second father."

"Chuck is one of the most engaging people you'll ever meet, and he really cares about people," says Strasburg. "In a business where it's willy-nilly fast and gimme gimme, Chuck is notoriously the exact opposite. His mentality is always [that] what's best for him is what's best for all of us."

AEG has kept busy since Morris' arrival; in addition to the music fest, it took over the leases of the Bluebird and the Ogden, revitalizing both theaters, and is also considering a new venue when the economy turns around or if the right deal comes along, but "it is going to have to be great or else I won't do it," Morris says.

AEG also booked more than half the music gigs at Red Rocks in 2008 "” roughly 30 shows "” which is not surprising when you consider that Morris' hands have been behind some of the venue's most celebrated memories. He famously first took U2 to Red Rocks in 1981 and helped book them there again in 1983 "” a legendary move that lives large in the U2 catalog as the bestselling "Under a Blood Red Sky" live recording. In September 2005, he and his team scrambled together a hugely successful Dave Matthews Band benefit concert, which raised $1.5 million for the Hurricane Katrina Disaster Fund.

Politics and benefits have always been close to Morris' heart; over the years, he's organized shows for Democratic politicians such as Senator Ken Salazar and Mayor John Hickenlooper. He also gushes with praise for his daughter, Brittany, the oldest of his five children, who has followed in his one-time political footsteps and is now senior vice president of CRL Associates, Denver's premier lobbying firm.

Despite years of fierce competition on the local music scene, Morris has found few enemies. In fact, most of his one-time competitors he also describes as "dear" friends "” a refreshing sentiment in a sometimes cutthroat business.

"A lot of promoters hate each other by the nature of what they do," says Doug Kauffman, owner of local concert promotion company Nobody In Particular Presents, who has been friends with Morris for 20 years. "He's never been like that, and neither have I."

Loyal to Denver

Morris has turned down numerous opportunities to take his career to Nashville or to the east or west coasts although, in 1978, he says he "was almost packed" when he was offered a job by the late Phil Walden "” the Georgia mogul who famously discovered and managed the Allman Brothers and Otis Redding but whose Capricorn Records was also riddled with stories of drug abuse, death and in-fighting.

Morris has countless such connections from the freewheeling days, and he often digresses into name-dropping the musicians he booked back in the day (oh, you know, like the time he paid the Doobie Brothers $2,500 for five nights at Tulagi's when they were on the cover of Rolling Stone). But after a couple decades of his own hard club living, Morris had to let up. He has now proudly been sober for 20 years.

"It almost killed me, to be honest, staying at clubs till 2 am with too many things to tempt you," he says. "The whole industry changed, and I had to change if I wanted to stay in it."

As the music business became more business and less music, Morris evolved with it. Both a workhorse and old-school rock enthusiast, he somehow seems just as capable surrounded by lawyers and accountants as he is by roadies and groupies. It's that kind of versatility that has led him to such a storied career, and as Kauffman points out, "Not many people today can go from promoting to the managerial world and then back to the promoting world and make it all work. Chuck has."

The Mile High Music Festival, slated again for this summer (and most likely again at Dick's Sporting Goods Park), may be one of the last pinnacles of Morris' career, but he doesn't seem content to slow down until, musically, Denver has it all.

"We have the greatest amphitheater in the world in Red Rocks. We have some great clubs and some great young bands," he says. "And I think that the festival was one of the last great things in this town that was missing. I want it to have a 10-, 20-year run, if not more."

Pausing to pull out last year's poster from under a messy pile of papers on his desk, he grins: "I'm very proud of it. As proud of anything I have ever done."

This article appears in the January 2009 issue of Denver Magazine

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