Live, Acoustic, and Legal

House Concerts Live Again

By Richard Martin, 6-12-07

Boulder’s tradition of live house concerts is alive again, if only provisionally. And judging by the comments following the Daily Camera story about yesterday’s decision by the County Commission to issue a “stay of enforcement” to allow private music events like the ones at Greg and Debbie Ching’s house to go forward, the controversy won’t die soon.

The Chings have been banned from hosting small musical gathering in the living room of their Aspen Meadows house since the summer of 2006, thanks to one irate neighbor and a land use director, Graham Billingsley, who saw fit to shut down the concerts because the Chings had been accepting voluntary donations to cover the costs of the bands. These are acoustic folk bands, mind you, and the total attendance at the Chings’ house never topped 50. Yesterday’s decision means that sanity has prevailed: “We will likely schedule a house concert in July or August to celebrate!,” Greg Ching emailed me last night.

This being America, however, some carpers are unmollified.

“People live in residential areas, and up in the mountains especially, to get away from this kind of adolescent ‘party’ behavior,” sniffed one commenter on the Camera Web site, calling him/herself “Xenu."But being considerate of one’s neighbors seems to be a distant memory in this current age of ‘me first,’ and ‘don’t tell me what to do.’”

This, as several concert-sympathizers noted, is nonsense: there’s nothing adolescent about the Chings’ gatherings (Greg is 46), the vast majority of his neighbors (who live a fair distance away, given the lot sizes and rugged terrain in Aspen Meadows) supported his right to host the gatherings (and accept contributions to defray the costs), and the only people whose rights were getting trampled were the Chings, who until last summer had been hosting the shows since 1999.

Now the commissioners will work on an adjustment to the regulations to permanently protect the intimate, lively, and quintessentially Boulderian house concerts. 

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