Tag Archives: tesla electric company recordings

Tesla @ Nokia Theatre Times Square (9/13/2007)

Tesla have long been one of the best Rock and Roll bands going and they are a dose of the pure stuff when it comes to music. They were celebrating the release of their covers album at the Nokia Theater and we made sure to be inside as well to tell you about it. Scroll past the logo below to see our thoughts and images from the gig.

Logo - Tesla

Artist: Tesla
Venue: Nokia Theatre (New York, NY)
Opener: Poets and Pornstars
Date: 9/13/2007
Label: Tesla Electric Company Records

While the historians know that the man Nikola Tesla was a genius who brought worlds of ideas to the realm of physics and electrical engineering as well as introducing a whole score of other inventions, the rock fans know that the band bearing the same name has continually brought the world some incredibly rocking tunes. For years they have delivered the goods when it came to solid songwriting and clever guitar riffs and while they have sometimes been thought of as a Heavy Metal band based on their launching during the big hair eighties, the end result of Tesla music is much more along the lines of Blues-based Hard Rock. Their first album “Mechanical Resonance” was met with fantastic response and found them opening up for bands like Poison, David Lee Roth and Def Leppard. The momentum for the group was on a steady rise but it was not until they delivered their “Five Man Acoustical Jam” album that they became a household name. The album was unique for it’s time as it found the band not only in a live performance but they were doing their own material and covers acoustically. Such a practice was not yet as common as we find today, and this concert CD and VHS tape gave the band a blockbuster hit with their rendition of the Five Man Electrical Band’s classic “Signs”. After a couple of other albums the band took a hiatus only to return in 2002 with another live album called “Replugged” and a promising new studio effort called “Into The Now”. The band toured as expected for the release and then returned to the studio to record their covers album. This practice has really started to become both an interesting as well as an annoying trend as some bands hit the mark dead on while others miss horribly. Fortunately for the worlds Tesla fans their own attempt at this premise was a really good go at some unexpected classics. The tour soon followed and the band made their way to NYC for a show at the incredible Nokia Theatre.
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“Real To Reel” by Tesla

Artist: Tesla
Title: “Real To Reel”
Label: Tesla Electric Company Recordings
Release Date: 6/5/2007
Genre: Hard Rock
Rating: 4/5

Tesla proved to the world that they were not your run of the mill Rock and Roll group years ago when they released the blockbuster “Five Man Acoustical Jam”. Combining reworked versions of their own material and some covers it was an album that showed that these cowboys of the modern day were truly some of the most versatile players that the Hard Rock circuit had to offer. This was during a time when more attention was being paid to those who simply added an extra can of hair spray to the mix instead of refining the Rock we were all craving. Cheap gimmicks and fanfare never applied to Tesla who always stuck to their roots and gave us classics such as “Love Song”, “Coming Atcha Live” and “Paradise”. “Real To Reel” finds the bands return to delivering quality music and this time around they bring out the songs that they felt were important to their own development as a group. The release is quite similar to that which was recently issued by Jack Blades and Tommy Shaw whose own album “Influence” offered fans an idea of how they began in an acoustic manner. With “Real To Reel” Tesla is going to show the world a little of the same thing but it is full amplified and electrical this time. There are some great versions presented and while many are dead on renditions of the classics one cannot deny that the bluesy rasp of singer Jeff Keith is able to make these tracks his own just a little. The great aspect of the release is the fact that it includes covers that many of the bands fans might not have ever expected of them such as the Temptations “Ball Of Confusion” and the Guess Who’s “Hand Me Down World”. Great tunes yes indeed but I am sure that the younger fan base only had a limited if any exposure to these songs as they grew up with the band.
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