Kansas City, KS
Memorial Hall
Nov 27, 1998

Kari Ziblut:

To all those out there who are seriously considering NOT going to a Journey show due to the absence of Steve Perry - DON'T DO IT! I wasn't planning on going to see them without him until I heard they were coming to Kansas City and I just couldn't stay away. Friday night's concert at Memorial Hall was fantastic. The Hall holds 3300 seats of which about 2,000 were sold. Never before have I had the opportunity to see the band "up close" - pretty different from them being in places that hold 60,000 plus. They opened the show at 8:15pm and rocked for 2 hours and followed with 2 encores for nearly another 20 minutes. While I was having too much fun to write down a play list, they played everything you would ever want to hear and played it great. Interestingly enough, they did not play anything from Trial By Fire. It was an awesome show. Steve Augeri deserves a lot of credit for working hard to fill Steve Perry's shoes and it shows. At one point in time I stepped out into the hall behind our seats and his voice is so like Perry's that it was hard to imagine it wasn't. While he didn't seem able to hit and sustain all the high notes he sure was on target with everything else. The lighting was great, the drums a little too"hot" at times and Steve A. got a little feed back from the high notes from time to time and it was somewhat difficult to catch what they were saying when just speaking into the mics but otherwise it was an incredible show. I am now looking forward to hearing what they write in the future together. One interesting note - this is the very same hall Steve Perry played a few years ago with the Strange Medicine tour. Go see them -you won't be sorry.

CoalerMJB@aol.com:

Just wanted to let you know what I thought of the Nov 27 Kansas City show. My expectations were not that high. My wife is a huge Journey fan. I'm more of a Steve Perry fan with Journey because of his one of a kind voice. We saw him in 1995 and I was totally amazed. Anyway, let me say that the new Steve does a great job filling some big shoes. He can't match the inflections in S.P.'s voice but he's got great range and his pitch was excellent. The musicianship was impressive, as expected. If there's anyone out there planning on skipping the show because S.P. won't be there, they should think again.

We had the very good fortune of meeting Steve A. and Neil in the bar at their hotel afterwards. Steve was incredibly gracious and very nice. He spent a few minutes with us even though he had friends and family there. He's very aware of his place in the whole thing and quite humble about it. I look forward to new music from Journey featuring his vocals. I'm not the biggest Journey fan in the world but I look forward to seeing them again in the future.

I only hope that S.P. gets healthy and they can do a true "reunion" tour. Thanks for providing a quality site for Journey fans.