Photo credit: Melissa Miller
While they’re to be expected at club-level shows, the higher up the food chain you go, the more the idea of having a local opener disappears. It’s the result of practical concerns: Most larger tours have warm-up acts attached to spare booking agents the headache of lining up openers at every single stop and to give labels another opportunity to cross promote, but every so often circumstances align to give locals a shot at punching above their weight. The fact that on Sunday night Milwaukee party boy Rio Turbo got the chance to share the stage with Big Freedia, the charismatic queen of New Orleans bounce, involved a lot of luck (and more than a little tenacity on Turbo’s part), but whatever brought this particular bill together, it made for a hell of a night.
To be fair, a big reason this particular pairing happened is the Pabst Theater Organization. Freedia, also known as Freddie Ross, is an admirably daring choice to play one of the Pabst venues, being a decidedly underground artist who’s only appeared in Milwaukee twice before, once at Stonefly and the other at PrideFest. With her new Just Be Free garnering acclaim, however, the Turner Hall Ballroom was the next logical step up, and that created the need for a local opener that Turbo stepped in to fill. Taking his set out of a small, sweaty club was a little awkward, making the homemade banner and scantily clad backup dancers look a little…cheap, but considering the cocaine-and-cut-offs aesthetic, “cheap” just kind of works. In any case, he made the most of it, clearly winning a few new fans for his jittery dance pop.
After an interlude from her DJ, Fortune, Freedia took the stage, preceded by a squad of dancers, and unleashed a dizzying barrage of chopped-up beats and overdriven vocals. Of course, the point of songs like “Gin in My System” and “Azz Everywhere” is to inspire people to shake their backsides, and while the impressively large crowd did their best to oblige, Freedia’s crew showed everyone up. They’re professionals, clearly, and they took it to another level; at one point they were literally hanging off the balcony and at another a particularly energetic twerk knocked over the entire goddamn DJ table. The sound was soon fixed though and Freedia rounded out a set so exhausting it didn’t require an encore, one that was pretty amazing in any context, but even better with some added local flavor.
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