Folk song strikes a touchy chord in Aspen

Reporting from Aspen, Colo. — 

The request momentarily took Dan Sheridan aback. A table of locals at a New Year’s gig he was playing at a tavern here called for his most popular song, “Big Money,” a biting, Woody Guthrie-style lament about how millionaires are spoiling this onetime countercultural mecca.

Sheridan warily eyed the crowd. It included a couple of fellows in floor-length fur coats and cowboy boots who seemed straight out of his song. But his hesitation didn’t last long, and Sheridan strummed his guitar.

They come here from Miami

They come here from L.A.

They bring a part of the city

That never goes away

He went on to the lyrics about “women driving Hummers, men wearing fur” before he segued into his next tune, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” for a group of 4-year-olds.

He thought the gig went well. The next week, the Aspen Skiing Co. called and told Sheridan he was fired.

The company feared his “Big Money” tune would alienate tourists. But it was the locals who were outraged -- at the company, locally known as Skico.

Sheridan’s voicemail filled with calls of support. His church’s congregation broke out into applause at Sunday services. Irate letters to the editor in the two local papers called for a boycott of Skico, which owns nearby ski areas and many entertainment venues in town.

Sheridan, a soft-spoken 44-year-old, was stunned. “Usually you have to die for this many people to say nice things about you,” he said. “I just write mellow, simple folky stuff.”

The episode touched a nerve in a place that is experiencing a phenomenon so far beyond gentrification that it needs a new term.

Even in the recession, enormous mansions are erected seemingly every day on the hillsides, occupied only when their owners come to town for brief holidays. Real estate has become so expensive that the city provides subsidized housing for people who work regular jobs in town.

Griping about these changes is as much a part of the local conversation as marveling at the powder on the slopes. A columnist for one of the town’s papers once proposed that residents secretly spit in tourists’ food in restaurants.

Occasionally, the sentiments have led to tragedy, as on New Year’s Eve in 2008, when a gadfly who had complained about millionaires changing the town hid homemade bombs downtown before fatally shooting himself in the head. No one else was injured.

Sheridan is an unlikely voice of dissent. A father of two whose quiet songs celebrate small-town life, he moved to Aspen in 1988 and quickly recognized it was wealthier than where he grew up in upstate New York. But like most folks here, he was unprepared for what started happening in the late ‘90s -- the proliferation of 15,000-square-foot vacation homes and more personal jets landing at the town airport.

In 2005, he was running near a trail on what he thought was still public land by the river. A security guard in an ATV halted him and told him it was now private property.

Sheridan went home to the single-wide trailer in which he and his family live with the help of a town subsidy, and penned his song with the refrain: “Big money ruins everything.”

He has played the tune all over town, but usually to local crowds.

On New Year’s Day, he was performing in Sneaky’s, the tourist-filled bar owned by Skico. During an all-request show, he said he couldn’t turn one down.

Trophy houses, trophy wives

Trophy people leading trophy lives

To chortles, he continued:

Say goodbye to all the artists and people who can ski

Say hello to private golf clubs and elective surgery

One listener wasn’t laughing. A Skico vice president in the crowd complained to the company’s director of food and beverage services that the song could chase off tourists.

The director responded by firing Sheridan and banning him from playing other company venues.

After getting the call, Sheridan told his friend Stewart Oksenhorn, the Aspen Times arts editor, what happened. The next day the story was splashed across the newspaper’s front page.

Oksenhorn was cheered by the locals’ response. “There’s just an ingrained personality here that we don’t let ourselves get pushed around like that.”

By the next day, Skico officials were asking Sheridan to come back.

Jeff Hanle, a company spokesman who’s lived in Aspen as long as Sheridan, said he’d heard the song before and wasn’t offended. He called the firing “an overreaction,” but said he worried that people sometimes focus too much on what glitterati have done to the town.

“Everybody bears some blame in how it’s changed,” Hanle said. “Yes, it’s different now, but it’s still a great place, and people need to relax.”

Sheridan hasn’t returned to his regular gig. He’s glad he can play other Skico venues but worries about what would happen should he play Sneaky’s.

“Now everyone’s going to want to hear that song again.”

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com