Photos and review by: Alan Ralph @ARPhotoSF
For the whole month of October in 2015, KoRn embarked on their 20th Anniversary tour and performed their debut album in its entirety. The local show at Fox Theater in Oakland was the final show of that tour, on the night before Halloween, and for which the band dressed appropriately for the occasion. It doesn’t get much better than that, and this show was one of their best.
Nearly 3 years later, KoRn decided to do it again, this time for the 20 year milestone of the release of their 3rd album, Follow the Leader. For a band to not tour for the entire year (outside of 3 shows internationally) and commemorate this achievement with only 3 U.S. performances is exceptional. Having one of these shows in San Francisco is the most special part of it all.
Unfortunately, it did not get much better than October 30, 2015.
Make no mistake, the show was good. Seeing an arena level band up-close and intimately in a theater setting is worth the price of admission alone. However, for a show celebrating a multi-decade landmark of a specific album, it is again reasonable to expect to hear that album performed in its entirety. This mini-tour was pretty much advertised as such (“FTL20”).
A truly special performance to celebrate an album would have been to perform the entire thing, and not just the songs that the band liked. “There’s a couple of songs that are just dumb [laughs], that we don’t wanna play. We were really drunk when we made ’em.” (Jonathan Davis, June 13, 2018, Blabbermouth.net). Drunk or not, that is also part of the history being celebrated; otherwise, does the album turn out the same way that it did and debut at #1?
Even though a few of the songs featured special guest artists (Ice Cube, Fred Durst, Tre Hardson of The Pharcyde), it would have made this 1st of 3 performances all that more special to perhaps included a local musician or two to perform those parts, like E-40 or Robb Flynn, if Ice or Fred were not available to fly in.
The setlist of this show was not unlike their amphitheater tour last summer, except that no new songs (from The Serenity of Suffering) were played. The first 7 songs and the final song of the encore were all from Follow the Leader, while the other half of the set was hits and songs that are standards of any other regular tour set.
Overall, this show was as good as any other KoRn show (except for the Halloween one!), but it just didn’t completely live up to the expectations of being genuinely about the 20th anniversary of Follow the Leader.
Setlist:
It’s On! (*from FTL)
Freak on a Leash (*from FTL)
Got the Life (*from FTL)
Dead Bodies Everywhere (*from FTL)
B.B.K. (*from FTL)
Reclaim My Place (*from FTL)
Justin (*from FTL)
Blind
Clown
Somebody Someone
Falling Away From Me
Coming Undone
Y’All Want a Single
** Encore
4 U
Make Me Bad
Here to Stay
My Gift to You (*from FTL)
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