Tesla - 8 Feb 2019

Venue – The Pageant, St. Louis
Reviewed by:  Jerry
 
Well, I’ll be honest.  I wasn’t planning on writing a review of this latest Tesla show that we went to.  After all, we already have two reviews in here.  And, you know how much Steve and I love this band.  There’s not a lot that they do wrong but there wasn’t a lot new that I expected to be able to say.  But….
 
The boys from Sacramento came out of the gates playing ‘You Won’t Take Me Alive' which turns out to be the opening track on their new album, “Shock”.  They played the title track a bit later in the show as well.  This new album was produced and co-written by Phil Collen of Def Leppard and with Tesla spending so much time on the road with those guys over the last few years I’ll admit I was fearful they’d change their sound a bit to sound like those hearing deficient cats they’ve been touring with.  But that isn’t the case.  The new stuff is most certainly Tesla and sounds great. 
 
So, new songs were expected.  But what wasn’t expected was everything else.  And, it’s exactly what you would want in a band that you’ve seen a half-dozen or so times over the recent years.  They pretty much rewrote the set list for this tour.  If you take a look at setlist.fm, they have a feature that counts every time a song was played live by a band over the years (or as many times as people enter it on the site).  The most played song and the benchmark is ‘Modern Day Cowboy’ at 751.  Here are some of the songs they played at this show and their relative numbers on this list:  ‘Changes’ (86), ‘Call It What You Want (84), ‘Caught In A Dream’ (55), ‘Solution’ (50), ‘Miles Away’ (47) ‘Need Your Lovin’’ (16), and ‘Be A Man’ (13).  They did not play ‘Hang Tough’, ‘Edison’s Medicine’, or ‘Gettin’ Better’.  While they played ‘Love Song’ and ‘Signs’, there was no acoustic set in the middle.  In fact, they closed out the show with ‘Signs’ which surprisingly worked very well in that spot. 
 
So, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Go see them.  And, see the full set, if you can.  You won’t regret it.