If you build it, they will come. That’s what JW Roth was counting on three years ago when he set out to fulfill his dream of building a world-class live music amphitheater in Colorado Springs. Now with Sunset Amphitheater nearing its summer completion, the artists are coming. The music fans too. Along with a pair of grand opening shows by OneRepublic, summer concerts by the Beach Boys, Dierks Bentley, and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss have been announced, with more on the way for the inaugural season.
The $90 million, 8,000-seat Sunset Amphitheater will be the hometown showcase of Roth’s Notes Live company. It will be the company’s first amphitheater to open and its largest to date, but the future business plans involve similar premium music venues in 22 cities.
It’s fitting that Roth’s first music venues, Boot Barn Hall and now the Sunset Amphitheater, are in Colorado Springs. The Springs is where Roth built a successful career in the prepared foods industry. And before that, the fifth-generation Coloradan grew up in the ’70s on a ranch in Greenland, just north of the El Paso County line. “Our address was Larkspur, but really our town was Palmer Lake,” Roth says. “There wasn’t a grocery store there, so Colorado Springs was where you went.”
We recently visited Roth in his top-floor Briargate office, where the glass-lined walls provide a birds-eye view of Pikes Peak and the U.S. Air Force Academy. It’s a preview similar to the eventual views from Sunset Amphitheater. A gallery offers a different sort of preview as we pass large photos and renderings of future Notes Live venues around the country.
The hallways are lined with autographed acoustic guitars, and there are more as we step into Roth’s oversized office. Roth owns 1,500 guitars, and we admire some from the likes of OneRepublic and Taylor Swift. The window shelf is lined with first-edition vinyl records, mostly classic rock. Bob Seger, Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Van Halen, Van Morrison, the Eagles, the Grateful Dead, AD/DC and the Rolling Stones are all here, but the collection also includes Ray Charles, Willie Nelson and Michael Jackson too.
Roth is a big guy with a gregarious personality. As he takes a seat behind his desk with black-rimmed glasses, shirt collar open and salt-and-peppered hair swept back, I can’t help but think he looks more like a music producer than a business executive. It seems he’s adept at blending his passions for music and business.
Over the next hour, we talk with Roth about his career and love for music, the Sunset Amphitheater experience, its upscale restaurants and lineup of summer concerts. Here are highlights of the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
Let’s start with the music. How did you fall in love with music?
I’ve been a live music fan since I was a little kid. I can’t play anything, but I’ve loved live music. I grew up in a family that listened to a lot of country music. But I love live music, the experience of live music, the ambiance of live music. My very first date with my wife was a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in 1996.
Where was that?
It was Fiddler’s Green. But almost everything we have done, we have done around music. I’ve loved it, but I’ve been disappointed in the upkeep of live entertainment. For example, you watch what the NFL has done or some of the bigger owners in Major League Baseball. When you go to a park now, you’re going to watch a baseball game, but you’re really going there for the ambience of how you’re going to watch that game and the experience you’re going to have when you get there.
You’ve been very successful with your businesses. Give us an overview of your career and Roth Brands?
Roth Brands is a prepared foods manufacturer, and we mainly build for. grocery stores. So if you buy pulled pork or sliced chicken at any Walmart in the United. States, we make it. I think we service about every grocery store in America almost every day. But I started selling food while I was in high school for a company called Universe Foods here in Colorado Springs. It’s long gone. I was a door-to-door food sales guy — almost went broke a gajillion times. I started making some little investments in processing. Then I became a founder at Aspen Bio. Aspen Bio is an agricultural company based in Castle Rock, and we built processes for meat packing plants and dairies. That turned into a really nice business that ultimately went public with product by Merck Animal Health. I took the money that I had made there and started investing in food plants that grew from there to starting Roth Foods with my son, Mitchell Roth.
Along the way, it wasn’t always glamorous. On the front end, I had to work a bunch of different jobs just to pay the bills. The first job I had when I finally got out of school was with the Denver Police Department. I needed a job where I could work at night, so for five years I chased bad guys in District Two Denver while I built my business. I worked at night, and I was in the plants working my business during the day. I did that until I was 27, and by then I could at least pay the bills. And we grew it from there.
So how did you go from the food industry to the music industry and Notes Live?
About six years ago, I sat down with my family and our partners at Roth. I said, “You know, I’ve been here for a long time, and I’m getting to a point in my life where I can go do what I want to do. And I want to be disruptive in live music and start by building premium venues.” I’m still the controlling shareholder of Roth Brands, but my son, who is frankly better than I am, had been with the company since the beginning and had already established fantastic grocery store relationships. So Mitchell stepped up to run the business, organizing and aggregating all our partnerships, which allowed me to transition into Notes.
How did your vision for Sunset Amphitheater and other Notes Live venues evolve?
I always think about what my wife complains about because probably everybody else’s wife is complaining about it. I’ll go to a dump to see great music, but a lot of places I go have sticky tables, the parking’s not great, there are long lines to the bathroom. They’re places where you could lose a tooth. That’s the kind of place where a lot of great music is, right? But my wife is not going to go to a place where you could lose a tooth or that has sticky tables or bad lines at the bathroom. So I set out to create a venue with an ambience and experience that enhances the music.
I started by building fire pits. I think I have the largest fire pit in the United States at my house. All parties happen around the fire pit and the bandstand in my backyard. That’s where everybody goes. So in a way, I wanted to create my backyard, where people can go and enjoy the music. I built 133 fire pit suites at Sunset Amphitheater; eight people can sit around the fire in each and watch a great show. The food’s not going to be some day-old weenie on a day-old bun. It’s going to be elevated. I want you to have a great seafood and chophouse menu in the suites, just like you have at Yankee Stadium. So that’s what I set out to build. You’re going to see great artists where the ambience and the experience are high end.
How do those fire pits work? They are privately owned, not open for ticketed seating, right?
The fire pits are lifetime ownership. It’s like a condo; you buy a condo in the building. In this case, the building is the amphitheater, and the condos are the fire pits. They’re your tickets in your own space. You can use them. You can sell them. You can resell them. When I put these fire pit suites up for sale, I didn’t know if they’d sell or not. I put almost $40 million of them up for sale, and in 14 weeks every single one was sold.
Long story short, we’re in the business of public-private partnerships. All our projects include partnerships with municipalities: the City of Broken Arrow [Oklahoma], the state of Oklahoma, the City of McKinney, [Texas]. The financing comes from one-third from the companies, one-third from the fire pit suite owners and the other one-third from the municipality. Music is a uniter. People like this genre or that genre, but nobody hates music.
So tell us about the hospitality suite. It includes Roth’s Seafood & Chophouse, Brohan’s Bar and five rooftop bars?
Yes, five rooftop bars. Picture it in the outfield as a big half moon that goes around the entire thing and consists mostly of event space. It will be 35,000 square feet of solid glass events space overlooking the Front Range and the Air Force Academy and Pikes Peak. Right in the middle of that event space, there’s a New York- / Las Vegas-style seafood and chophouse. That’s two stories and has indoor-outdoor dining, a big eat-in kitchen with table-side service. There’s a big guitar-shaped bar which will be very cool. Brohan’s is upstairs with a big glass wall and a Vegas-style, high end cocktail bar. Think of the menu as burgers made with trimmings, lobster rolls, that kind of thing. There’s nothing like it here in Colorado Springs.
What kind of prices should we expect?
You’re going to be looking at $100 a person.
The restaurants will be open year round?
Yes, 365 days a year. We might close early on Christmas, but we’ll be open 365 days.
You’ve announced the grand opening shows with OneRepublic on Aug. 9-10. Tell us about the significance of that show.
OneRepublic is one of the top artists in the world. Ryan Tedder has written and produced for everybody. OneRepublic had the hit “I Ain’t Worried” on the Top Gun: Maverick soundtrack. And Ryan’s dad has worked with me in business development, starting at Roth, for 17 years. Ryan gave us the piano that he wrote his Grammy-nominated “Apologize” on. The grand opening has to be right. So we’re going to have a big show, and we’ll have some fun. Both shows sold out very quickly! We may add a third show based on the great amount of interest.
So far you’ve announced shows by OneRepublic, the Beach Boys, Dierks Bentley, and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss. How long till we see the full schedule?
The shows will be released almost once a week. The full schedule will be announced over the next three weeks. We’re going to do about half of a normal season this year because of the late opening, and we’ve booked about half of the season. I think we have about 80% or 90% of the biggest shows coming through Colorado in 2024 and 2025. It’s nice because Red Rocks is filling years in advance, so a band will get hot, but they can’t get enough dates at Red Rocks. They might play there one night, then come here.
It will be interesting to see what people think. Red Rocks is legendary, and there have been a bazillion shows there. It’s bucket list, but it’s not great. You sit on a hard piece of rock and you listen to the music that’s bouncing off stuff. It’s legendary because it’s legendary. But when people experience what we’re going to experience here — you’re looking at Pikes Peak and at the Air Force Academy in front of you, and it’s the highest end of everything. I think the bands are going to like booking at a place where there is a seafood and chophouse restaurant inside the artist compound — a full-blown chef’s kitchen in the artist compound. They tell us what they like before they get here, and our chefs create a menu for them.
So where are we going to find you on opening day — backstage, on stage, in a fire pit?
Probably in our fire pit. It’s going to be a pretty good-sized one — double the normal size. It will seat 16. It’s not as big as the fire pit at my house, but it’s a big one. We haven’t gotten approvals yet, but I want to put on the biggest fireworks show in the history of Colorado Springs after both nights when the band finishes. We’re trying to get the approvals now, but I want to shoot the biggest one ever.
Find the summer concert lineup and tickets at sunsetamphitheater.live.
Read More
Bingo Night: Is Bingo the New Trivia?
The Man Behind the Music of MeadowGrass
