Bonfire Dub

roots · folk · americana

Bonfire Dub is a Colorado roots band led by singer and guitarist Scotty Stoughton, working between Denver and the Vail Valley and blending reggae, folk, dub, bluegrass and Americana across acoustic and electric string instrumentation. Stoughton moved to Vail at twenty-three and came up through the local scene playing hand drums before shifting to singing and guitar, first in the band Short Term Memory in 1994 and later in Sucker, which he co-founded with guitarist Rodney James Coquia. Coquia remains in Bonfire Dub on guitars and pedal and lap steel, joined by Jeff Armistead on keyboards, Trevor Noel Gagstetter on bass and Mark Levy on drums and percussion, with fiddler Bridget Law of Elephant Revival appearing part-time. The band's writing is openly topical, drawing on eastern philosophy, indigenous struggles, political injustice and environmental themes, and on Stoughton's humanitarian relief work in Central America and Haiti. Releases include the early record Search, the EP Who We Are, the 2015 album Westside, produced by Steven Vidaic, and Gypsy Roots. Stoughton's own festival history includes freestyling for a crowd of about three thousand with Mark Vann of Leftover Salmon, and performing with Sam Bush before roughly ten thousand people at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. He also founded Bonfire Entertainment, the production company behind the WinterWonderGrass festivals and the Campout for the Cause benefit, which places the band inside Colorado's acoustic-festival economy as much as its reggae one. Live sets lean on deep rhythmic grooves under storytelling lyrics, and the group frames its shows around community and audience connection.

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Where they play in Colorado