While G. Love & Special Sauce, Frankie Valli, and Wynonna Judd—with Martina McBride and Brandi Carlile—were all dominating different venues across Tampa Bay Friday night, 180 lucky fans were in Ybor City, witnessing 90 minutes of what will surely go down as music history.
Before kicking off his first North American headlining tour at Crowbar, Jake Wesley Rogers—26 years old, and a decade past attempting success on “America’s Got Talent”—spent his week performing at a tribute concert to his fellow gay icon, the late Leslie Jordan, and being presented with the Bram Stoker Medal of Cultural Achievement by Trinity College Dublin. How else do you celebrate all that but by spending one of the most important nights in your music career at the only non-Live Nation venue on your tour itinerary?
Following an opening set from Canadian singer-songwriter Stacey Ryan—whose sound slightly resembles that of New York soul-pop band Lawrence—the lights dimmed all the way down at 9 p.m. on the dot, and Jake’s three-piece band entered from Crowbar’s stage-right dressing room.
Donning what looked like a pound of yellow tulle on each shoulder, thick yellow glasses, and white platform heels—while sporting a bleached-blonde mop-top, small golden confetti pieces on his eyelids, and a rainbow manicure—Rogers came skipping out, bowed, and bounced straight to his white stand-up electric piano, to kick off opening night with “Middle of Love.” A few songs later, Rogers—now rocking a blue crop top—began expressing his gratitude for everyone who showed up to night one of his debut headline tour.
“I don’t know why you’re here, not just in this room, but I know it’s for a very, very, very specific reason,” he began. “You’re meant to be here, and you’re meant to feel all of the love that’s humanly possible, that’s divinely possible. It’s funky.”
Seated behind his piano, topped with an orange teapot and teacup from which he sipped regularly, Rogers (who recently opened for Panic! at the Disco at Amalie Arena) then knocked out the heartbreaking “My Mistake,” with his three-piece band providing minimal instrumentation, and mainly focusing on perfecting the harmonies that would give the song’s choruses a new level of depression.
The mood was electrified immensely shortly after, though. Drummer Simon Knudtson put down his tambourine and jumped over to his drum kit; while backstage, Rogers threw a bright red gown over his crop top, and quickly took to the spoken-word intro of his guitar-based “Call It Love,” on which he would pretend to rip his hair out in frustration. Up next was a take his favorite Elton John’s favorite tune from Rogers, “Momentary.”
Rogers then sat at the piano, poured some tea from his pot, and centered a new set of banter around how hating the same types of people—if you catch his drift—make Florida and Missouri seem like “best friends sometimes.”
He then changed the subject to how he hated the time Siri told him it wasn’t going to rain when it felt like it would; that led to the creation of the still-unreleased “My Misery,” a piano-anchored song with sharp harmonies, and less of a catchy hook than what we’re used to in the songwriter’s other material, which Ybor got to hear first.
Another unreleased cut, “Hot Gospel”—a composition that instrumentally sounded like the Bowie-Elton collaboration we never got to hear—was dedicated to those “raised to believe something, and one day, they said ‘I don’t know about that.’” Rogers posed with his mic stand and raised his arms like Ziggy Stardust would, and just before another costume change, he turned around to slowly remove the red gown.
Now clad in a white tank top and pants that looked a hell of a lot like they were made out of a Twister mat, Jake performed “Jacob From the Bible” without the aid of his band, and he dedicated the song to his first boyfriend of the same name, who died a few years back.
Speaking of names, when the time came to introduce the “fine, beautiful, sexy band,” Rogers wanted to do it in a unique way: a game of Truth Or Dare. Bassist Emma Lambiase was dared to dance with the sticker-drenched, stage-left pole closest to the stage for anywhere between 15-20 seconds, while Simon Knudtson—taking a break from drumming—had to write a haiku about Jake on the spot. He managed to keep it clean and about having a good time in Tampa, but his boss took it anyway.
As for musical director and second keyboardist Mike Miller, who chose “truth?” Jake asked him if he could sleep with any guy (“Because you’re…straight-ish,” Jake reminded everyone), who it would be. Much to Crowbar’s pleasure, Miller chose Harry Styles.
Before making a “really far away” pit stop on “Pluto,”—his best-known song, still being belted out by newfound fans into the wee hours of Saturday morning—Jake finally picked up an acoustic guitar, and taught the crowd the backup vocals for another unreleased song, “Life is a Happy Accident,” which had a hook with the tempo of a sea shanty.
For an encore, Simon, Emma, and Mike moved to the crowd, and Jake sat back down at his piano, poured one last cup of tea, and nervously announced that he was about to perform “I Am,” a powerful, six-minute spoken-word piece. It was the equivalent of a recovering Methodist kid’s beautifully crafted rant about learning how to play Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on guitar, and not having strong enough fingers to play the F chord, but nonetheless feeling higher than God when wearing high heels and a dress from his mother’s closet. Oh, and the phrase “it’s all going to be OK?” Bupkis.
“For me, it was a way to say things that sometimes were hard to fit into songs,” he explained. “I’ve never really publicly performed these. In a couple safe ways I have, but I just feel really safe with you.”
When Elton John played his own first-ever headlining U.S. show at the Troubadour in 1970—igniting his own fabled career—he could never do something like that. In those days, casual usage of authentic self-expression—through clothing or a monologue—was a practice not quite yet grasped by the general public, and to this day, there are still traditionalists who don’t like the idea of queer people—closeted or not—being who they really are.
But it’s thanks to figures like both Elton and Jake that androgyny in men—and all genders, really—is now seen as more acceptably mainstream, and less satanic.
And perhaps unconditional, widespread acceptance is what resolved last Friday night’s live music dilemma for some. We love a busy town, yes, but who knows what kind of loudmouths were over at Amalie Arena seeing Wynonna Judd? And you wanna tell me that at least a few gay-hating “Christians” didn’t go see Frankie Valli lip-sync in Clearwater Friday night?
Case in point, the new, fiery piano-playing queen is on his way to stardom, and he loves you the way you are, damn it.
