Freaker’s Ball 2008 - Queensryche and Tesla

So October 19th was the annual Freaker’s Ball, this year with Queensryche and Tesla.  I’ve lived in Kansas City for over ten years and have never been to one.  Every year they have a pretty good lineup but they’re usually outdoors which doesn’t sound so great in October.  This year’s event was at the newly remodeled Midland Theater in downtown KC so I figured I would go.

The show started at 6:00 on a Sunday which pretty much guaranteed I would be late.  I missed about fifteen minutes of local band The Leo Project.  They reminded me a little of Staind, in a good way.  They put on a solid set - nothing bad about it but just not my thing.

Next up was Mini-Kiss.  A couple of the guys I met up with had gone to a meet-and-greet earlier with Tesla and they had heard Mini-Kiss do a sound check which surprised me because they came out and played to recorded music.   The vocals were live but you could even see that their instruments weren’t plugged in.  You know, I hate hate hate pre-recorded music like this.  Even stranger, they plugged in their instruments to do some non-Kiss songs and sounded pretty good, but they eventually went back to the recorded music.  The whole thing was odd and the novelty wore off about ten minutes into it.

When Tesla’s set started things began to get ugly.  We were on the floor near the front and the crowd started getting thicker which really wasn’t a surprise.  What was interesting was how much drama was going on during Tesla’s and Queensryche’s set.  A lot of near fights but some non-typical stuff started happening.  One woman, wearing a fishnet body suit and denim shorts, was being chased around by her husband who wanted to go home.  Every time he got near her she would duck down and crawl across the beer-soaked floor to get away from him.  He was so intent on catching up to her that he nearly got into several fights in the meantime.

Another entitlement-minded mother decided that her eight year old son needed to be at the front so she pushed her way up so he could be pressed up against the barrier.  Oh yeah, and mom’s t-shirt said “Slut” on it.  Nice.

There were another half dozen strange situations going on that I couldn’t turn away from so I admit I wasn’t paying complete attention to the concert.  The vocal mix on Tesla was low and didn’t sound that good.  Tesla’s a band where I like a lot of their songs but others I’m just lukewarm about, and they played a lot of those songs I’m not crazy about like “Hang Tough”.  I can’t stand that one.  They played a lot of songs off their new album which are pretty strong, especially “So What”.  I like it when these bands resist the urge to become an oldies act.

Queensryche sounded a lot better.  They had a stripped down stage set up that was pretty striking.  Their set was good but they were a lot better when I saw them headline another show earlier this year.  A lot of the same songs were played as the last time I saw them, including two off of Rage for Order which is always a good thing.  I haven’t seen a setlist posted anywhere but I don’t believe they played any songs off their first two albums which is surprising.

Overall a good time.  As a side note, the remodeled Midland Theater looks good, but I would still be wary of going there in the summer.  I’d like to think they would improve the air conditioning situation there but it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t.

98.9’s website has some nice pictures from the show.