djvu UM On The Rocks: Umphrey's McGee At Red Rocks

Umphrey's on the Rocks: All in Time

Umphrey's McGee never had a hometown claim on Red Rocks. Formed in a South Bend, Indiana dorm room and sharpened on the Chicago club circuit, the six-piece arrived at the legendary Colorado amphitheatre in 2005 with no regional pull at all — just an opening slot on someone else's tour. Nineteen years and thirty-four shows later, it's one of the venue's most reliable summer traditions, built one date at a time by a band with nothing to recommend it but its own playing.

Umphrey's on the Rocks traces that unlikely residency from the beginning: the band's 1997 formation as a Notre Dame cover act called Fat Tony, its transformation into a six-piece built around the songwriting partnership of Brendan Bayliss and Jake Cinninger, and its 2005 Red Rocks debut as a support act on the Big Summer Classic tour — headlined, fittingly, by fellow Colorado act The String Cheese Incident, whose own Red Rocks history fills this series' companion volume, Cheese on the Rocks.

From there, the book follows every one of the band's thirty-four confirmed Red Rocks appearances through 2024: a Galactic sit-in and a genre-mashing encore, a night of Frank Zappa songs with Zappa's own son on guitar, a three-night run that grew into same-day doubleheaders, and a full set of Led Zeppelin with John Bonham's son behind the kit. It also digs into what makes an Umphrey's McGee improvisation different from anyone else's — the band's own term for it, the "Jimmy Stewart," born at a 2001 wedding gig — and closes with the genuinely rare lineup upheaval of 2025 and 2026, when drummer Kris Myers and guitarist Jake Cinninger both departed after more than two decades apiece.

Every show gets its full setlist, placed right where its story is told — no flipping to a back-of-book appendix required.

I
nside this book:

• A researched history of the band's formation, lineup, and improvisational vocabulary, from 1997 Notre Dame through the present
• Every confirmed Red Rocks appearance, 2005–2024, with dates, openers, and guest sit-ins
• Complete setlists embedded chapter by chapter — no separate setlist section
• The stories behind the band's biggest Red Rocks nights: Dweezil Zappa's 2016 "Muffin Man," the 2019 Jason Bonham/Led Zeppelin set, and moe.'s stage-crashing cameos
• A plainly told account of the band's only lineup losses in three decades, including founding drummer Mike Mirro's death, and the 2025–2026 departures that reshaped the band into a quintet
• A complete personnel and lineup history in the back matter

For longtime fans planning next summer's trip to the Rocks, for readers of this series' companion volumes on the Grateful Dead and The String Cheese Incident, and for anyone curious how a Midwestern band with no Colorado roots built one of the venue's deepest modern résumés, Umphrey's on the Rocks is the definitive record of a band that made someone else's stage its own.