“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”               Johann Sebastian Bach

If music is akin to a religion, then Red Rocks Amphitheatre is surely its most hallowed cathedral.

Red Rocks is ancient, certainly, its soaring stone walls lifted up and dressed by seasons uncounted, its grand pillars reaching up to a magnificent vault as old as Creation. Red Rocks has known the sounds of worship for at least 5,000 years, and solemn Ute chants still echoed across its broad nave when settlers first began arriving from the East. If there anywhere exists a piece of earth so constructed by divine hands to inspire voices raised in reverent and grateful praise, it’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, still held to be sacred by 32 different Native American tribes.

Known to early gold-seekers as the “Garden of the Angels”, Red Rocks found its prophet in John Brisbane Walker, an energetic entrepreneur and tireless Centennial State booster who purchased the site in 1905 and renamed it Garden of the Titans, an apt nod to the towering demigods of Greek mythology. Walker built a temporary stage, and on May 31, 1906, engaged Pietro Satriano and his 25-piece brass band to baptize the place while listeners arrayed themselves on the rocky slope on blankets and folding chairs. Red Rocks’ first concert was quickly followed by a heavenly chorus of operatic angels including Australian soprano Nellie Melba, who raved “This is the greatest open-air amphitheatre I have ever seen.” Walker staged his first epic on Sep. 1, 2008, an audio-visual extravaganza titled “Feast of Lanterns” and featuring four military bands and brilliant eruptions of fireworks from the summits of four sheltering peaks including Mount Falcon and Mount Morrison. In 2011, after performing a solo set culminating in the religious classic “Ave Maria,” internationally acclaimed Scottish diva Mary Garden declared “Someday, 20,000 people will gather here to listen to the world’s greatest masterpieces.” Time would prove Garden about half right.

“Never in any opera house, the world over, have I found more perfect acoustic properties. Never under any roof have I sung with greater ease, or had a greater delight in singing.”   Mary Garden

Busily assembling its visionary system of mountain parks, in 1927 the City of Denver persuaded Walker to part with about 800 acres centered on the amphitheatre for a very reasonable $54,133, about $750,000 in 21^st Century scrip. Celebrated architect Burnham Hoyt drew up plans borrowing heavily from the classical Theater of Dionysus at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and in 1937 the roughly 200 young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps’ Mount Morrison Camp and a large crew of lads on loan from the Works Progress Administration began earning their dollar a day by removing 30,000 cubic yards of earth by hand, and by sweat and toil transforming 90,000 square feet of red Lyons sandstone, 10 boxcar-loads of cement, 10 tons of steel and 800 tons of quarried stone into a 9,525-seat Temple of Euterpe.

Red Rocks Amphitheatre was formally dedicated on June 15, 1941, with a sublime performance by soprano Helen Jepson of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and Denver introduced regular concert schedules in 1947 strongly favoring disciples of the classical creeds. But reform was coming to the church of Red Rocks, and in 1959 it landed with a splash.

“It’s an amazing location. One of the most beautiful concert venues in America…or anywhere.”   Geddy Lee, of Rush

Reform’s name was Ricky Nelson, the first rock-and-roll performer to take the Red Rocks stage. A celestial host of itinerate rock preachers has since addressed the faithful from the amphitheatre’s plein-air pulpit. Nearly 2,700 paid concerts have been held at Red Rocks since 1947, the great majority of them of electrically enhanced and sound-augmented. Notable names entered on the Red Rocks rolls include Sonny & Cher, Seals & Crofts and the Blues Brothers. Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Miller and Sarah MacLachlan have all taken their turns, as have jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish, legends like Carlos Santana and Peter Gabriel, country heroes like Willie Nelson and Kenny Chesney, pop favorites like ABBA and the Carpenters, and alt-bands like Depeche Mode and Soundgarden.

Of course, any movement toward a new orthodoxy must endure its share of resistance and repression, and Red Rocks’ journey from Mozart to Metal was no different. When the audience grew over-festive during a 1962 Ray Charles concert, Denver officials threatened to ban beer and wine from the venue. When things got dicey again during a Peter, Paul and Mary show in 1964, they actually did it. In August of 1968, Aretha Franklin fell into a contract dispute just hours before curtain and refused to take the stage. A disappointed crowd swept forward and forcefully disarticulated a piano, prompting Denver to impose a one-year banishment of rock-and-roll acts.

On June 10, 1971, nearly 2,000 ticket-free fans showed up for a sold-out Jethro Tull concert. When the sound quality in the parking lot proved poor, the crowd stormed police barricades set up at the entrances. Although the band was not contractually obligated to continue under riot conditions, the band’s front man, Ian Anderson, exhorted the audience to wrap T-shirts around their faces and then played on as thick drifts of tear gas wafted among the ancient stones. Although Anderson’s fortitude likely prevented serious disaster, Denver responded with a total ban on rock-and-roll, a proscription that held for five years until Red Rocks’ high priest, concert promoter Barry Fey, managed to get it overturned in court.

“Red Rocks is the greatest place to play, it’s true…of all the places in the world, it’s the best!”   David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills and Nash

The Beatles played Red Rocks on Aug. 26, 1964, the only stop on their U.S. tour that didn’t sell out. They wouldn’t be back, although Ringo returned 36 years later with his All-Starr Band. Jimi Hendrix’s sole visit in 1968 is notable as the only Red Rocks show for which there is no known audio or visual record. In 1958, Jerry Lewis was the first comedian to play the rocks, and 20 years later Steve Martin taped his “Wild and Crazy Guy” album there.

Speaking of tape, dozens of artists from Stevie Nicks to Robert Plant to John Tesh have turned their Red Rocks experience into video gold. Moody Blues filmed a set with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, and Rolling Stone magazine named U2’s now-iconic “War” tour show and the subsequent “Under a Blood Red Sky” concert video one of “50 Moments that Changed the Face of Rock and Roll.” The lens is often on the other figurative foot these days, as pious devout cinephiles congregate weekly for Film on the Rocks on summer week-eves.

Red Rocks’ most dedicated apostle had to be John Denver, who played 17 shows there between 1972 and 1989, and telecast several of them to a global audience. The gospel according to Red Rocks holds that John anonymously jogged the amphitheatre’s steps (380 up, 380 down) before every performance, a habit now popular with many members of Colorado’s cult of fitness.

Widespread Panic holds the record for most Red Rocks shows played, pounding out No. 51 just last summer. Guitarist Warren Haynes played the Garden of the Angels eight times in one year, performing five sets with the Grateful Dead, two with the Allman Brothers and one with Gov’t Mule. In August of 1985, Huey Lewis and the News set the record for the most consecutive performances, and Reggae on the Rocks has been spreading its message of love and leaf for 26 years and counting, which makes it the amphitheatre’s most durable concert series, if not its most enduring event. That distinction goes to the annual Easter Sunrise Service, which has been getting up with the chickens every year since 1947.

Red Rocks Amphitheatre’s conversion to rock-and-roll is complete, and the ranks of the faithful keep growing. Every year since 2010 the venue has broken its own record for most shows in a year, from 73 in 2010 to 155 last year, and it’s becoming common to witness as many as 20 supplicants in contention for a single day on the schedule.

And as the good news of Morrison’s miraculous minster of music continues to spread across the land, the ancient stone of that wind-chiseled chapel will resound with ever more joyful noise.

“God was having a really good day when he made this amphitheatre for us to sing in.” Emmylou Harris

With no due respect to the Marquess of Queensbury, rules are for losers.

In combat, anyway.

Okay, so we don’t condone chemical agents, or go in for biological weapons, and the nuclear option isn’t really an option, but those few boundaries are more for our own protection than the comfort of our enemies, and beyond them the battlefield is very much the Wild, Wild West. Not even the English stand by concepts like “fair play,” or worry about giving the Hun has a “sporting chance” when the gloves come off. In the practice of warfare, winning fast is the only rule that means anything. An enemy reeling in “shock and awe” is an ineffective enemy, and ineffective enemies don’t shoot straight, or hopefully at all. The ideal of modern military doctrine is to win the battle before your enemy realizes they’re in one.

That’s tough to do, which is why it’s almost never done. Still, a lot of really smart people spend a lot of their waking hours devising ways to minimize “friendly” casualties by maximizing the other kind, and by far the surest way to do that is through the command of superior technologies. The warrior with a sharp stick is at a severe disadvantage against one equipped with bow and arrow, who has little chance against one with a pistol, who won’t last long against one armed with a Browning automatic rifle, who would, theoretically, be a sitting duck for an Imperial storm trooper with a fully-charged blaster. The arms race is as old as the human race, and nobody does it better than the much-maligned American military industrial complex. And if our soldiers don’t currently carry blasters, they eventually will, sure as shootin’, because pulp science fiction’s got nothing on the shock-and-awe-inspiring tools that will be standard-issue in a conflict that’s coming soon to a hot-spot near you.

It’s a lot easier to get the drop on somebody if you know what they’re up to. Trouble is, heavily-armed hostiles tend to be jealous of their privacy. Thanks to the fertile minds at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), one day soon we’ll be able to keep any number of multi-faceted eyes on our enemies at work and at play with HI-MEMS, or Hybrid Insect Micro-Electrical-Mechanical System. It seems that electronic circuits implanted in the bodies of insects in their pupal stage can be used to direct their movements in adulthood. By attaching surveillance equipment to radio-controlled bugs, reconnaissance officers will be able to scout Indian Country at will from the safety of comfy chairs in an air-conditioned mobile command post.

The all-important element of surprise is easier to achieve if they can’t see you coming, which is one reason soldiers wear camouflage clothing. But while modern computer-designed camouflage patterns do a good job of approximating the visual characteristics of various environments, they still leave plenty to engage the searching eye. Enter quantum-camouflage, a marvelous material developed by the Canadian firm Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp. that purportedly causes light to simply bend around whatever it’s shielding. As advertized, it’s an honest-to-gosh cloak of invisibility, and military authorities on both sides of the northern border have confirmed that relatively inexpensive quantum camouflage is compact enough to be easily carried and deployed in the field, equally effective against infrared scopes, and requires no power to function.

If weapons and ammunition are critical to success on the battlefield, they’re also really, really heavy. And if the average GI is fully capable of marching long distances with 150-pound pack full of 5.56 cartridges, they’re also capable of arriving at the front with their battle-readiness understandably compromised by physical exhaustion. Lockheed Martin is helping the hard-working doughboy take a load off with the fantastical Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC), a powered mechanical exoskeleton that allows its wearer to lug hundreds of pounds for miles on end without undue discomfort or fatigue. An on-board computer fluidly adjusts for motion and load and keeps the light, indestructible titanium frame in constant sync with the wearer’s movements. If not yet ready for action, the concept’s been proven and it’s only a matter of time before the HULC goes to war.

During World War II, American soldiers fired something like 25,000 bullets for every enemy combatant killed. In Vietnam it was closer to 50,000, and in Afghanistan they’ve been expending roughly 250,000 bullets for each insurgent slain. On a purely value-per-bullet basis it would seem that wars are getting more expensive as they get smaller. Determined to get more bang for their munitions buck, DARPA has created EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance), a .50 caliber shell equipped with inbound computer guidance system. Tasting the ambient weather conditions in flight, the tiny computer manipulates small fins on the bullet’s surface to maintain its intended trajectory, and can even track and pursue moving targets on the fly. It’s a smart bullet that’s also smart business.

Nothing overwhelms an enemy like overwhelming firepower. To achieve it, you can either shoot one great-big-giant bullet, or you can get a whole lot of soldiers to shoot regular-sized bullets all at the same time, or you can deploy DREAD, a centrifugal gun that puts a new spin on centuries-old firearm technology. In appearance, DREAD looks a lot like USS Reliant in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In practice, it uses high-speed centrifugal force to shoot 120,000 bullets per second – per second – without a hint of recoil or single spark of muzzle flash. In theory, it can sweep a battlefield clean with a single pass.

The Navy is already using 30 kilowatt laser cannons to bring down incoming enemy UAVs at a cost of about a dollar per shot. Within the next five years, the Pentagon wants to field fighter jets equipped with laser cannons that can zap enemy aircraft from the skies and incinerate flammable ground targets. Work is currently underway on a 150 kilowatt LaWS (Laser Weapon System) that can burn a hole clean through a ship’s hull.

Diplomacy is great, because war is hell. And it’s an essential mark of humanity to show mercy to the vanquished. But when the shooting starts, the fastest way back to peace is dead ahead and no holds barred.