One Night at the
Paramount

Denver in the late 1980s was a city still finding its footing — a place where people arrived with ambition and stayed for the music. For two newcomers who packed everything and headed west in 1987, it turned out to be exactly the right city at exactly the right moment. They had settled into an apartment sitting close to a local rock station — KBPI, 106.7 FM — the station that kept Denver loud.

Close enough to the signal that the dial always came in clean. Close enough that when a call-in contest went live on air, you had a genuine shot of punching through before the lines jammed solid. They had gotten through before. But nothing that came before quite compared to the moment the DJ announced the prize: an after-show reception with Sam Kinison, backstage at the Paramount — compliments of KBPI.

The call connected. They won.

The Paramount Theatre on Glenarm Place was already a Denver landmark — an Art Deco palace built in 1930, all gold leaf and silk murals, the kind of room that made you feel the weight of every show that had ever happened inside it. On the night of this show it was packed and electric. But not everyone in that room held what Lonie and Faith held.

This was actually the second time Fey Concert Company had staged an event featuring this pairing — a confirmed hit for Denver rock fans. Berry Fey didn't do things halfway. For the after-show, his company produced personal backstage invitations on official Fey Concert Company letterhead — issued from the Englewood office on Belleview Avenue, bearing the company logo and the direct instruction to "meet Rob Buswell from Fey Concerts immediately after the show, in front of the will-call ticket window."

The letter was clear: keep it to identify yourself as a winner. You and one guest would go backstage. No more. Lonie and Faith went backstage.

Both performers signed. Kinison on the left in black ink — bold, looping, unmistakably his. Hansen on the right in vivid yellow-green marker, writing "Thanx a lot" and personally addressing it to "Lonie + Faith" — their names, in Randy Hansen's own hand, on a piece of paper that has outlasted the era it came from.