Wednesday was a great night to celebrate Halloween at Turner Hall Ballroom. Music filled the room all night starting with Milwaukee’s own Trapper Schoepp and the Shades opening for The Wallflowers.
The Shades started off the night wearing Star Wars costumes, which made the crowd laugh. On their last song, Schoepp sang with his Darth Vader mask on that kept falling off. The Shades have been on tour for quite a while now, leaving Milwaukee behind but this is the best I’ve seen them play. It seems like being on the road is doing great things for the band. Trapper’s energy was much higher on stage Wednesday than when I’ve seen him in the past.
The Wallflowers, the main reason people headed out to Turner, played next. Jakob Dylan stood in the center of the stage, interacting with the crowd a lot. Many people in the crowd were dressed up for Halloween. Dylan commented a man dressed as Doctor Emmett Brown. He told him, “meet me after the show! I wanna see your flux capacitor.”
It was nice to see Jakob Dylan interacting with the crowd in between songs and making commentary, but that just made up for the fact that he didn’t move too much around stage. He seemed at a standstill during most of the songs, but each song came out - just like on the records.
During the last few songs, Dylan invited Gina Romantini from the Shades up to play on stage with The Wallflowers. He even had Trapper come up during one of the songs to sing with him. I always like seeing bands invite their opening bands up to sing with them. You can tell that it’s not just record labels making the tour, but that the bands genuinely enjoyed each other’s company.
The music ended and everyone in their costumes started to filter out. A few masks remained on the floor with the beer cans, but the Shades and the Wallflowers had to continue out on their tour. Hopefully both bands will be back in town soon because it was a great way to spend Halloween, or any other night.
