(December 1999, Ski Magazine)<\/p>\n
Late one night in September, Garton\u2019s Bar & Grill in Vail, Colorado, hosted its last band and\u00bfafter the staff cleaned up the empties, mopped up the spilled drinks, and turned off the ice machines\u00bfshut its doors for good.<\/p>\n
The closing of Garton\u2019s, with its bouncing dance floor and eclectic calendar of live music, would be just another footnote in ski-resort history if it didn\u2019t signify a chilling trend. Across Colorado, some of the best ski-town music venues are closing down, victims of a shrinking demand for the kind of revved-up nightlife that once capped the Colorado resort experience. In Steamboat, the Inferno, once the late-night mecca of Gondola Square, is closing shop. In Breckenridge, Johsha\u2019s succumbed to bulldozers earlier this year despite (or perhaps because of) its prime real estate.<\/p>\n
The closure of such honest-to-God music venues, each of which used to attract nationally known acts like Ween, Government Mule, Widespread Panic, and Toots and the Maytals, is a reflection of changing times. The ski-town locals who could once afford to work, live, and party in town are moving to less expensive areas away from ski-town centers\u00bfand taking their beer money with them. \u201cIt\u2019s gotten so expensive to live in ski towns, we\u2019ve lost the audience for good live music,\u201d says Vail musician Brad Swart. \u201cAnd you can bet the second-home owners aren\u2019t going to support places like Garton\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, locals are finding ways to open new clubs that can survive ski towns\u2019 turbulent economies. In Steamboat, one recent addition is the In-Season Cafe, a popular breakfast joint that morphs into a steamy jazz club\u00bfthe Blue Cat Cafe\u00bfat night. But don\u2019t expect to see a lot of marquee acts playing the Blue Cat any time soon. It\u2019s a good venue, but it\u2019s not big enough to cure what\u2019s ailing Colorado\u2019s nightlife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(December 1999, Ski Magazine) Late one night in September, Garton\u2019s Bar & Grill in Vail, Colorado, hosted its last band<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-towns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74,"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/74"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentaskicondo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}