Monolith Festival 2009: Day one

Monolith 2009: Day one

September 12, 2009

The first day of the annual Monolith Festival was no place for casual fans. Temperatures hovered in the high 40s for most of the the day while intermittent rain filled Red Rocks Amphitheatre with puddles and sent runoff cascading down the venue's hundreds of stone steps. But as Gregg Gillis of the mashup act Girl Talk screamed sometime after 9 p.m., most people were too fired up to care if the skies kept bringing the rain.

Gillis' set, during which dozens of fans crowded the stage for a rain-slick, 90-minute dance party, would have been the highlight of the night if Yeah Yeah Yeahs hadn't been in such rare form. Singer Karen O took the stage in a psychedelic wizard costume that distracted the crowd from the miserable conditions and kept them dancing right until the show ended around 11 p.m. Other acts ranging from pop-punkers OK Go to indie rapper Doom rounded out the day.