“Why shouldn’t cell phones be like shoes?” he says, imagining a day when people will own several phones—work phone, car phone, play phone—that all share the same number. “In the long run, everything that matters to people should be available to them on some sort of mobile device. Today, you can’t even come close to that. And that suggests enormous opportunity.”

Ask McNamee, and he’ll say that U2 is to Moonalice as “the Federal Reserve is to a Podunk credit union.”

Ask Bono, and he says Moonalice has potential. “T Bone has taken them away from the amateur and toward the auteur,” says the rock star, who introduced McNamee to Burnett. “They’ve got a mood.”

Ask Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead’s former drummer, and he takes a different tack. “Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you can play music,” Hart says. “Roger is a good student, and someday he will be a really good musician. But Roger is about connections. That’s what Roger does. He’s electric. He’s magnetic. He has the ability to instill hope in people. He’s always trying to build something. He understands group mind.”

For the record, McNamee says he’s no billionaire—“far from it.” And while it’s true that he’s fascinated by the potential of groups—investment firms, bands—he likes it best when they see the wisdom of following his lead. “I definitely like to see my fingerprints on stuff,” he says.

What keeps him from being overbearing (though sometimes just barely) is that whatever McNamee directs himself to do—collecting children’s books or bankrolling a bunch of aging rockers, for example—he does with boundless enthusiasm. As G.E. Smith observes, “He’s obviously a pretty successful guy. He could be buying yachts and stuff for himself.” But he isn’t doing that. Yachts—like cars, or watches, or any number of toys favored by wealthy men in midlife—don’t turn him on. McNamee would rather use his money to pay a Bay Area artist named Chris Shaw to design expensively produced Moonalice posters to be distributed for free—a different poster for every gig.

Back in Denver, at the Cervantes, Chubby Wombat yanks open the backstage door and leads his bandmates into the dank, musty club. Minutes before, the house had numbered just half a dozen, give or take a few parents. Now, as his eyes grow accustomed to the darkened room, he sees not exactly a crowd, but a solid 40 people. Some have brought album covers for Pete Sears and Jack Casady to autograph. Others have brought hemp, which they freely ignite just feet from the stage.

Chubby Wombat remembers how his guitar teacher, Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, once told him that all bands begin and end in dive bars; the only question is the height of the curve in between. Now onstage, blinking under the lights, he looks out into this dive and chooses to believe that this is Moonalice’s beginning.

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