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Purple Door 2007
By Tony LaFianza
www.purpledoor.com
 
 
August 17-18, 2007 was a beautiful weekend in central Pennsylvania, with wonderful weather and we were fortunate, once again, to enjoy great live music and more in a beautiful, wonderful natural setting! aaaahhhh, yeahhh!

That's Purple Door in a nut shell this year. the setting could not have been more lovely as the Purple Door Music Festival returned to Ski Roundtop again this year to showcase some of alternative Christian music's best acts.

Under new management this year, the festival still kept most of it's edginess, even if the pace did slow down a bit. Although Purple Door is related to Creation Festival and has nothing to do with Cornerstone, we usually describe Purple Door as "a day in the life of the Cornerstone Festival." As Creation Festival's younger sister, Purple Door is like a day and a half of what Creation calls it's Fringe Stage. In other words: bands that they don't want to put on their main stage but know will bring a hipper, college age, or hard rock loving crowd into the grounds. This year Purple Door Festival featured three stages, a smaller than usual art gallery, a few choice seminars (including one by our own Chris "Grandfather Rock" Macintosh discussing Christian music as honest art - well done Chris!), and lots of hill climbing. After a day and a half at this winter wonderland in the middle of summer, your legs are guaranteed to ache, because walking on big rocks and up and down steep hill sides is not as easy as skiing on them! Luckily the distances from stage to stage is not all that far so one can tough it out and thoroughly enjoy the day of rock, hardcore, college rock, and indie music that the fest provides.

This year Reliant K, a fest mainstay the past few years, closed the Friday night schedule. Before them the crowd enjoyed Anberlin, and Cool Hand Luke. Reliant K gets better with age and grows musically, but begrudgingly still has to perform the silly high school romps they wrote may moons ago. We believe it will be a good day for them when they grow tired of those songs and leave them behind as they look forward. Since Reliant K moved to Friday night this year they handed over the fest headliner spot to mewithoutYou, who closed the fest. MewithoutYou has become a premiere concert event and never disappoints. they closed the second day of this music festival with a great show full of great music, high energy, and passion. that's what they do!

As we arrived Saturday morning we hit the ground running. We were trying to catch lots of acts that day so, of course, we did not see all of every show and completely missed many other shows. But, before we go to the pictures [pictures by Tony LaFianza and Julie Edwards] let me comment on a few of the bands. Before mewithoutYou sent us home we enjoyed a full day of hard rock, metal, and hardcore at the HM stage. we caught a good set by The Wedding to begin Saturday with a rock and roll bang. Then later we saw August Burns Red, The Devil Wears Prada who engineered a couple of the biggest mosh pits ever, The Chariot, Haste the Day and Norma Jean. we usually set up our chair, and so our HQ, at the HM stage during the day for non-stop heavy heaven, and then move down to the main stage in the evening. We do check in with main stage throughout the day, though, and we did see some good bands there on Saturday. Between the odd long breaks in the action at main stage, we saw Spoken and Disciple. The evening at main stage continued with As Cities Burn, Red, speaker Eric Simmons, and a very sincere, lovely, and much needed praise set from Leeland. Family Force 5 is a great live act with blazing rock, southern crunk, and accents that completely entertain, they rocked the house! as they came to an encore and had to wrap up a fanatical, frantic, and fun show they accidentally gave mewithoutYou the only introduction they needed; "We've only got five minutes until the greatest band on the planet comes out, mewithoutYou!"

As the day progressed and between the HM stage and the main stage we did see some very good music at the gallery stage too. While the line-up for the gallery stage was not as strong as it has been in years past, we did enjoy the moving instrumental music of Unwed Sailor, the prose of Denison Witmer, the call to action of Derek Webb, but Bradley Hathaway stole the day. Hathaway is a very skinny, very quick, ingenious, and charismatic wit, wordsmith, poet, and song writer who came out with guitar in hand and proceeded to sing a few of his new songs with a small band. He was extremely comfortable and confident on stage and he held the overflowing crowd around the stage and up the hill sides in his hands for every word, and movement, and smile. Then after the songs he moved into the poetry and did less reciting of his poems than leading the crowd in a line by line back and forth. it really was a special occasion, a happening....
 
For more pictures, go to http://tonyland.vox.com/library/post/purple-door.html