Rockfest 2018: less nudity, more metalcore, and Vince Neil singing like a karaoke dad

Nudity is baked into the Rockfest experience. It has always been thus. At my first Rockfest — I’m 21 now; I was in middle school then — bare breasts abounded: you saw them as you entered the grounds, you saw them by the concessions, you saw them being offered up in the front row to the performers. 

Last year, the festival, put on by 98.9 the Rock, moved from Penn Valley Park to the Kansas Speedway, in Wyandotte County. It’s not exactly the MoMA, but the atmosphere is a bit more clean and corporate than what you find at an anything-goes KCMO park like Penn Valley. Perhaps as a result, I observed less nudity this past Saturday, at the 26th annual Rockfest. There was still nudity. But it was confined to the front rows. My numerous treks back and forth between the two stages and through the concourses yielded not one boob. 

Maybe the decline in boobs correlates to the decline in attendance. According to the Star, about 30,000 fans showed up on Saturday, a noticeably lower turnout than the radio station’s usual brag about 50,000 fans. This smaller crowd was also visibly younger, a shift in demographics that could be attributed to an uptick in metalcore in this year’s lineup. Bands like Miss May I, I Prevail, Of Mice & Men, and Underoath whipped fest-goers in their teens and early twenties into a frenzy, altering the mud-caked face of Rockfest. 

Not everybody likes change. I overheard one rocker complaining that “none of the cool people that used to come” were there this year.

Rockfest offers a reliably intriguing snapshot of Kansas City’s white working class, and this year was no different. On the plus side: the AFL-CIO’s sponsorship of the main stage — and its table dedicated to campaigning against “right to work” laws — was heartening. Less wonderful were the pseudo-patriotic rants delivered by headliner Five Finger Death Punch vocalist Ivan Moody. The Las Vegas band has risen to prominence by fusing the aggression of groups like Disturbed with a twisted sense of humor akin to Limp Bizkit’s. My capacity for entertainment in the face of the ridiculous and often ignorant work of such musicians is estimable, but I decided it would be OK to call it a night and beat traffic after Moody declared, “If you don’t like [the American flag], I’ll help you pack.”

Prior to that, the Swedish metal band Ghost gave the crowd an enchantingly evil hour-long set as the sun went down. Singer Cardinal Copia dispensed charming bits of banter and, despite being endowed with only about half his range, channeled many of Freddie Mercury’s most likeable qualities. Much of the band’s early material was doom-ish in nature, but songs from its new album, Prequelle, contained riffing and themes pulled from the eighties glam metal playbook.

An icon of that glam metal sound, Vince Neil, of Motley Crüe, took the stage early in the evening. The stunts pulled by his drummer Zoltan Chaney and the powerful guitar and vocal work of guitarist Jeff Blando were admirable, but Neil himself sang like a dad at karaoke and moved on the stage like a cheerleader about to be cut from the squad. The band’s rendition of “Kickstart My Heart” did result in the most enthusiastic four minutes of bead-slinging this year, if that’s worth anything.

Stone Temple Pilots returned for the first time since the 2015 death of vocalist Scott Weiland. The band’s new vocalist, Jeff Gutt, showed impressive range and possesses a similar voice to Weiland, but lacked the grit that made his predecessor’s performances powerful. Rockfest regulars Sevendust provided the cutest moment of the day when members of the group, including vocalist and Olathe resident Lajon Witherspoon, brought out their children to play along with them.

Kansas Citians (and recent Season Of Mist signees) Hyborian, pictured above, kicked things off with a pummeling noontime set. The festival always includes one or two KC acts, but the polished, cosmic stoner metal of Hyborian seems more poised to attain widespread popularity than any other local Rockfest act of the last several years.

Watch a recap of the fest here.