TRINIDAD — On a quiet Monday night in Trinidad, Suzanne Magnuson is bartending the Trinidad Lounge — nicknamed the ‘Dad Lounge — the spot she co-owns with her partner Curt Wallach. She’s dragged a TV on a stand to the back of the room and flipped on the Broncos game. A small crowd shows up to watch; most leave by halftime.
Each time the screendoor creaks open and people come and go, Magnuson raises her eyes and fills the space between the bar and the door with a first name.
“Hey, Ben.”
“Hello, Matt.”
“See you, Tom.”
She knows their drink orders and where they just wrapped up a shift.
Because that’s what it takes to make it in Trinidad, and Magnuson and Wallach are there to make it. Or, at least, to make something.
This weekend that something is the Fancy Spider Music Festival, a first-of-its-kind music festival in Trinidad, a town that has hosted its share of beloved fests and seen them all leave.
Fancy Spider — named for the annual tarantula migration across southern Colorado this time of year — features more than 50 bands over three days. Shows are distributed across 14 stages, no, nine stages. No wait, five ticketed stages and nine unofficial venues, Magnuson counted aloud. The point is everyone in the T-shaped downtown wants in on the action.
“We’re trying to see if we can get Kyle on the roof,” Olivia Quintana, owner of The Owl Den vintage shop on Main Street, told The Colorado Sun in September. The Owl Den is one of the festival’s unofficial venues, Kyle is Quintana’s boyfriend. (As of Monday Quintana was still unsure about Kyle and the band’s positioning. “It’ll be a surprise,” she said.)
There will be a barbecue at the bike shop and a jam session in the community garden. Create Trinidad, the organization behind the town’s state-certified creative district, is running a parallel art contest called the Creators’ Crawl.
Magnuson and Wallach landed a grant from the city, $10,000 from the lodging tax fund which designates 10% to support art and cultural events. The funding didn’t come close to covering their full expenses, the couple said, but it gave them the confidence to start booking bands and venues.
After that, a few fiscal sponsors jumped onboard. Create Trinidad gave them some money, so did a local Realtor named Bill Louthan. Other businesses chipped in where they could — the car dealership offered parking, the Porta Potty company kicked in free hand-washing stations.
“Those small things are big things,” Magnuson said. “It’s tough around here financially. So we tried to tailor it, like whatever they could offer nonmonetarily, we would toss them on as a sponsor.”
The wild west bar of your dreams
Magnuson and Wallach moved to Trinidad from Denver in November 2020. Both are longtime musicians and part-owners of the Hi-Dive in Denver, “a legendary bar in a sea of legendary bars” on South Broadway, Wallach said.
They’d become familiar with the town as a frequent stopover on their way to northern New Mexico where for 10 years they hosted a madcap music festival called the Honky Tonk Hodgepodge.
It started with a few bands playing at a bar officially called the Colfax Tavern but colloquially known as Cold Beer, New Mexico, thanks to its remote location miles from any town and a giant all-caps “cold beer” sign painted on the building.
“Cold Beer, New Mexico, population 1,” Magnuson said.
“Once the couple bought it it became population 2,” Wallach added.
The Hodgepodge grew from a handful of bands and a handful of friends to thousand-person crowds camping out for days to watch performers from around the country. The festival’s growth was almost entirely the result of Wallach and Magnuson’s deep ties in the music industry, something that they’ve been able to bring with them to the ’Dad Lounge.
When the pandemic hit and they wanted out of Denver, they chose Trinidad.
They moved because of the incredible architecture and the nearby state parks, because they wanted to raise their kid in a small community with so much access to nature. They moved because “the only reason you’ll wait in traffic is because people are being too nice at the stop sign,” Wallach said. And they really moved for the bar.
The Trinidad Lounge is part of the 55-building core that makes up historic downtown, laced with 19th century Western and Victorian style buildings, each one well-preserved thanks in part to a historic designation that the town sought in 1972, and in part by sheer neglect, with no one giving the buildings a second thought.
In mid-2020 Wallach and Magnuson walked into the then-shuttered Trinidad Lounge, one of the many buildings suspended in the town’s alchemy of abandonment, and found “the wood paneled, nautical-themed, Wild West bar of your dreams,” Wallach said.
“We walked in and Curt was like, we’re moving to Trinidad,” Magnuson said. “And I was like, ‘calm down.’ Then I looked around and I was like, ‘OK, we’re moving to Trinidad.'” Three months later they’d sold their house in Denver, bought a new one in Trinidad, and reopened the ’Dad Lounge.
“It is not OK to trash talk our town”
Magnuson and Wallach aren’t the first couple from Denver to post up and open shop in Trinidad, bringing with them — however unconsciously — some city sensibilities that run against the old guard.
Their pandemic-era move coincided with what Westword called a “South Broadway exodus,” as business owners on the shrinking strip of alternative venues either opened second locations or ditched Denver altogether.
Sexy Pizza owner Kayvan Khalatbari opened a new pizza joint in Trinidad’s old train depot, and Mutiny Café settled into a spot on Main Street. A few doors down from Mutiny, The Ten Penny Store, a Denver mom-and-pop vintage shop, opened in Trinidad in March 2022.
But things have changed.
The Ten Penny pulled out, but Quintana, once an employee of the Ten Penny, stayed put to open The Owl Den. Mutiny got new owners — “same Mutiny with none of the tax evasion,” one barista quipped to The Sun — and Sexy Pizza shut down.
“For somebody to come here and start something, they really have to have an internal drive, to be able to go, to not hear ‘no,’” said Joze Petrich, business development strategist for Emergent Campus, an entrepreneurship incubator in Trinidad.
“But I would add to that, they have to have a level of respect for the local culture, the local religions, the local institutions, whatever,” he said. “A lot of people who came in and missed the boat, I think it’s because they didn’t want to pay tribute to the pace, to the people, pay tribute to the unwritten rules.”
After Khalatbari shuttered Sexy Pizza, he said that he felt the town was getting in its own way.
“New Trinidad has not grown enough to support new businesses and old Trinidad is refusing to support the new businesses because of philosophical differences about change,” he told The Colorado Sun last year.
Despite an incessant conversation about potential, some new business owners feel an undercurrent of resistance to change, a sense that new businesses and faces weren’t exactly welcomed in town.
“It’s not a protest, it’s not vocal like in the public,” Christine Louden, executive director of Emergent Campus, said of the resistance. “It’s vocal in small groups that you hear at the coffee shop. It’s that subversive element which is very hard to change, because it’s not visible.”
Petrich brought up a Facebook group where people post happenings around Trinidad and frequently air their complaints from anonymous accounts.
“I think there are a few thousand people in there just to eat popcorn and watch what happens,” Petrich said of the Facebook group.
“But that’s part of what needs to change, that’s part of the community culture where it’s OK to talk bad about the city, it’s OK to talk bad about your neighbor,” Louden added. “It’s not OK. It is not OK to trash talk our town. This is not who we are.”
For Louden, success would look like “excitement” about the town, she said.
Two weeks before the festival starts there was a tangible sense of excitement up and down Main Street. Tiny stickers of a spider dressed in a tux and a top hat — the festival’s logo — were stacked on every business counter and bubblegum-pink posters advertising the festival were taped to the shop windows.
“I’m so excited for people to see what kind of magic these two people create,” Quintana, who attended the first-ever Hodgepodge, said.
“Music can bring people together, that’s such a cool thing,” she said. “We get so wrapped up in the state of the world and the stress of everything, it’s nice to have something like this just handed to you, like: Here you go, have a good time.”