The second weekend of Copper Mountain’s three week Sunsation 2007 outdoor music festival was anything but sunny. Freezing temps and giant snowflakes welcomed revelers to two days of killer tunes and surprisingly awesome skiing. As the temps dropped and the snow poured down the partygoers just packed in closer to the stage, like campers to a campfire. The fire in this case: a sizzling line-up including Angie Stevens& The Beautiful Wreck, Papa Grows Funk, Keller Williams, and Galactic.
The bad weather slowed my morning drive up I-70 from Boulder, so I missed the Angie Stevens and Papa Grows Funk sets. I arrived at the Copper Mountain main village square, just in time to catch Keller Williams take the stage bundled up as if to climb Everest, but with no shoes of course. Keller would gradually strip down to a t-shirt as he heated things up with such crowd favorites as “Floatin’ on the Freshies”, “Boob Job”, and of course a mountain-style cover of “It’s Getting’ Hot in Here”. If you haven’t seen Keller before, catch him when he comes to your town, and be prepared to pick your jaw up of the floor after witnessing his awesome one man, beat making, funk looping, guitar picking soundfest.
The crowd barely had time to let the sweat in their hair freeze before New Orleans funksters Galactic took the stage. Their killer rhythm section consisting of Stanton Moore (Drums) and Robert Mercurio (Bass) had the crowd bouncing from the first beat, as Ben Ellman’s sax cut through the bitter cold. Galactic’s unique approach to New Orleans’ style funk combined with flying beach-balls and at least a couple bottles of sour mash whiskey floating through the crowd turned this snow-filled mountainscape into a truly “sun”sational outdoor blowout.
Later that night, as the snow continued to fall (overall the mountains would collect 9 inches of new snow over the course of the weekend) Papa Grows Funk, also hailing form New Orleans took the stage in the Bighorn Ballroom, after The Lee Boys’ loosened up the crowd with a set of their spiritual-based “sacred steel”. PGF continued the New Orleans’ Funk theme of the weekend and so it only seemed fitting that the members of Galactic join them, and then a few songs later, The Lee Boys joined the fray. All together I counted eleven musicians on the stage and even witnessed four drummers playing the same drumset at one time during this all-star funk jam finale. Needless to say, I spent the next morning skiing through knee-deep powder trying to figure where I would get the money to fly back out to Colorado for next weekend’s festivities (Spearhead, Peter Rowan, Steve Kimock, and Dark Star Orchestra)! I guess we’ll see
