Local personalities and performers share their passion with the community

Back in 2014, Curt Bear was facing a tough decision: Should he double down on his failing food truck business and buy another trailer?

He posed the question to a small group of Northern Colorado business leaders he’d formed to give each other advice, who asked him questions such as, “Do you still find it fun?” Bear’s answer was no, without saying no, and Scott Jennings, founder of Cheba Hut, picked up on his reluctance right away.

“He told me to park that (blankety-blank) trailer in my backyard and get a job,” Bear says.

It was exactly what Bear needed to hear, and he was so inspired by the advice that he instead doubled down on the group of business leaders he’d named LoCo Think Tank. He turned the group into a business, sold memberships to the discussions and asked members questions about their companies.

Since then, LoCo Think Tank has grown to more than 900 members and has not only made Bear a living but spawned Northern Colorado’s most popular podcast, “The LoCo Experience,” which won first place in the 2024 Readers’ Choice Best of NOCO contest.

Bear calls the podcast a mix of “How I Built This” from NPR and “The Joe Rogan Experience.” He interviews local business owners and, at the end, asks them to tell the craziest story they have from their lives that they’re willing to share (hence the name). In 2024, his guests included Amber Quann, CEO and head trainer at Summit Dog Training in Fort Collins; Kelly Evans, executive director of the Northern Colorado housing nonprofit Neighbor to Neighbor; and Mandy Mullen, owner of the run.Windsor race and fun run business.

“We have some coaches and politicians occasionally,” Bear says, “but even then, they usually have a business journey to share.”

Bear started “The LoCo Experience” in December 2020 as a creative outlet, one he desperately needed during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also had some “liberty-minded viewpoints” he needed to express (he was in favor of keeping small businesses open), though the podcast isn’t as controversial as Joe Rogan can be. He calls his guests entertaining and inspiring, and some of their stories bring him to tears.

The podcast doesn’t make him much money, but it does help promote LoCo Think Tank. Bear knows podcasts are a crowded market, though he’s comfortable with his own niche. He hopes to introduce a video format at the start of 2025.

“There aren’t that many local podcasts, and more than 60 percent of our listeners are Colorado based,” Bear says. “People know our guests. They’re their neighbors.”

Listen to episodes of The LoCo Experience at thelocoexperience.com

Andy Tatro devoted a good chunk of his life to singing and playing guitar with a rotating door of bandmates. He’s found a welcome amount of stability in his ThreeShots band, which has had the same lineup for a decade. And yet, it’s not the music he thought he’d be playing.

Tatro always thought of himself as a hardcore blues guy, like Stevie Ray Vaughan. He played with the Robert Wilson Blues Band, Jack Hadley and Hazel Miller, for instance. But the music he plays now is a salad of jazz, funk and soul in addition to blues.

“What we are doing now is not what I envisioned,” Tatro says, “but I think that’s a good thing.”

Instead, the four other members—Emma Sloniker on vocals, Jordan Coulter on keys, Ian Webb on drums and Tom Surace on bass—pushed and pulled and stretched him like taffy into the band’s current style. He can’t argue with the results: The band won first place in the 2024 Best of NOCO contest, and they just recorded their latest album, which had no release date as of press time.

ThreeShots plays 25 times a year at backyard parties, blues dances and big festivals, like the Greeley Blues Jam. They’ve also performed around the country: In January 2024, they played at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis.

The band has the enviable luxury of being able to play their own music instead of the steady diet of covers that please audiences but aren’t as fulfilling to perform. If they do play covers, they usually put their own spin on them, sometimes to the point where it takes the audience a minute to catch on.

“In our genre, you think of the classic bar bands and the same songs people want to hear,” Coulter says. “As we come into our own style, we feel we’ve shed the top-40 classics we used to play and never really enjoyed. We now believe we can bring 80 percent originals and feel confident enough to keep everyone’s attention.”

ThreeShots bounced around for a few years with random lineups, a problem many bands face, even the famous ones with those top-40 classics. When Coulter answered Tatro’s ad for a keyboardist, Tatro didn’t even have a band, except for a bass player, Surace. Surace introduced him to Webb, who knew Sloniker from the blues dance scene, and ThreeShots came together.

Each band member represents a different decade, and Sloniker, 29, is the youngest. She doesn’t notice an age difference among her bandmates but recognizes the special relationships she has with them.

“We are a diverse group in so many ways,” she says. “I don’t know how we would have become friends otherwise if it wasn’t for music.”

Tatro treasures those friendships. They’re a big reason he still plays in the band.

“The goal isn’t to become rich and famous,” Tatro says. “The goal is some version of sustainability doing what we love.”

Listen to and purchase ThreeShots albums at threeshotsband.com

More than once, Sue Sutton tried to get out of radio. As time passed, she became disillusioned with how corporate stations grouped together like schools of fish, acting with a hive mind and leaving no room for individuals with personality, even as she became one of the more recognizable DJs in Northern Colorado.

But when she’d consider leaving, she was reminded of when she was a student at the University of Wisconsin and one of the DJs had to leave her post. She told Sutton to fill in for her. Sutton had no idea what she was doing, but then she put on the headphones and spoke into the microphone and found it intoxicating.

“I heard myself on the air, and I said, ‘Uh, oh, now I have to do this the rest of my life,’” she says.

She did leave the industry once, in 2013, and she told herself she was done. But two weeks later, a job opened up for a morning show DJ at Pirate Radio in Fort Collins, and she couldn’t help herself. It was a scary job: Her pay would come from commissions off advertising sales, and she’d never sold before. She contacted a friend, Gailen Sprague, a fellow DJ and an expert in radio sales, who told her the timing was perfect because he was just let go from a radio job in Cheyenne. She agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to do the morning show with him.

Now, 38 years into radio broadcasting, Sutton is glad she didn’t leave for good. Pirate Radio was voted the top radio station by NOCO Style’s readers in the 2024 Best of NOCO contest. It’s Sutton’s first victory after many years of finishing second, and she’s thrilled.

Pirate Radio is a nonprofit and streams online, something Sutton never would have guessed was possible when she started out. She doesn’t know how many listeners she has, given that the station isn’t rated by Nielsen or Arbitron. And yet, it reminds her of the way stations were run when she first fell in love with radio. She interviews local businesses, charities and chambers of commerce. She talks about issues, giving anyone running for office a chance to speak, and plays music she selects from a curated library from the ’40s through the ’80s.

The industry was like that when Sutton took her first job as an overnight radio DJ in San Diego. In 1988, she moved to Greeley to be with a guy who is now her husband of 31 years, and she made a name for herself working for stations such as 92.9 The Bear, K99 and Retro 102.5.

She and Sprague were the only two DJs at Pirate Radio for many years. When Sprague became ill in 2020 and passed away, Sutton wondered if she should quit again. But Sprague had shown her how to run things. That was a rare gift in radio: People usually don’t want to help anyone get ahead of them. She will never forget it.

Sutton now calls herself the “Cruise Director” and shares the studio with Amber, the “Pirate Princess” who hosts the 10 a.m.-2 p.m. slot after Sutton’s 6-9 a.m. show. Sutton even decorated the studio in pirate regalia. She has a lot of independence.

“He leaves me alone,” she says of owner George Gray, “to do what I do best.”

After many ups and downs in radio, Sutton is glad to have found a home.

“I get a chance to meet a lot of people, and our listeners are amazing,” she says. “They love the music and that we talk to their neighbors and friends.”

Tune into Pirate Radio at 93.5 FM

When her kids were young and her family lived on a farm in Nebraska, Deb Groesser came down with a nasty bout of pneumonia. Today she calls it a gift.

She would send her kids off to school and stay in the house all day to dodge the dust, pollen and hay and allow her lungs to heal. The isolation gave her a chance to rediscover her identity.

“It was like I lived in a bubble for a year,” she says, “but that gave me time to learn how to paint.”

Groesser is now one of Northern Colorado’s most popular artists. She won best local artist in the 2024 Best of NOCO contest, an award she attributes to her studio, Blue Moose Art Gallery, and her teaching as much as her artwork.

“The gallery has touched a lot of people in the community,” she says. “I’ve been teaching classes ever since we opened, and they’re usually full.”

Groesser once avoided the outdoors, but now she embraces it. Nearly all of her inspiration comes from being outside. She loves to hike and spend time in national parks—she hopes to see all of them one day—and many times her paintings, nearly all of them depicting nature, loosely resemble a favorite spot from a trip. At the time of this writing, she had just returned from Mount Rainier National Park, where she did several hikes. She looked forward to going through her photos and starting on her next painting.

Nearly all of her work is watercolor and has been for decades. She likes how unpredictable the medium is.

“It kind of has a mind of its own,” Groesser says. “All you can really do is try to guide it along.”

Her favorite possession as a child was her 64-count box of Crayolas, but she felt that she had to hide her love of art because her father thought math and science were the only fields worth exploring. As she got older, she had a hard time containing her love, and she opened her first studio, Blue Goose, in 1991 after she moved to Chester, Calif. from Nebraska.

She then moved to Fort Collins in 2011 to be closer to her grandchildren, and the move was as good for her health as it was her heart. But in between visits, she found herself a little bored and longing for friends.

“There’s no better people than art people,” she says, “and I figured if we did a gallery, I’d have an instant community. It worked.”

That community grew even bigger when Groesser sold off parts of the gallery five years ago. Now she has more than 20 owners and features 100 or more artists in her ever-changing gallery. She also teaches dozens of students every year.

She makes about 50 paintings a year, but she says her favorite thing may be teaching.

“I love to see artists have those ‘aha’ moments,” she says. “I just feel grateful.”

See more of Deb’s art at debgroesser.com

Whether she’s acting in the latest Candlelight production or not, the stage is only one way Jalyn Webb connects with the audience.

“I spend time talking to every table,” Webb says. “We are engaged with every person who walks in the door.”

Other than the popular productions put on by Broadway-quality actors, those connections are crucial to The Candlelight’s success, says Webb, who works as the theater’s marketing director in addition to being one of the top actors in its catalog of performers.

This is no small thing. Colorado has its fair share of live theaters, but The Candlelight is one of few venues that devote nearly all of their stage time to performances. It’s also the only dinner theater left in Colorado, Webb says, and yet, the Johnstown theater, now in its 17th season, consistently plays to a full audience. Many times, they sell out.

The audience expects a chance to get to know the actors, which means the actors might bring guests their dinner as well as perform. It also means the actors wait at the door for pictures and autographs after each show.

“Where else will you go to a show and have the actor be your server and be in the lobby afterward?” Webb says.

Most of The Candlelight’s performers live in Northern Colorado, but the talent is capable of jumping into a touring production at any moment. Webb fits that bill herself: She’s acted for 36 years, taught in the University of Northern Colorado’s renowned theater program and even sang the national anthem for the Colorado Avalanche years ago. She’s played some of the most iconic roles in musical theater, including a recent stint as Louise in The Candlelight’s “Always, Patsy Cline” as well as characters in “Les Miserables” and “The Sound of Music.” She’s also played Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd,” one of her favorite performances.

The Candlelight puts on a half-dozen shows a year, giving the theater yet another chance to connect with its audience: Requests are taken so seriously that they make up the bulk of The Candlelight’s productions. Some plays are off limits due to licensing restrictions, which can be hard for the audience to understand, Webb says.

“We take out all requests for ‘Wicked’ because we can’t do that,” she says.

Webb doesn’t make a living from performing (very few can), but she loves working in sales and marketing nearly as much as being onstage. She’s done some national tours, though she prefers the community feel of local productions.

“It feels like you’re coming home every single night to a hometown crowd,” she says. “There’s nothing like doing a show you love for people who you feel are your family.”

Find tickets and show listings at The Candlelight at coloradocandlelight.com