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March 21, 2021

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Live music returned to Portage County on Saturday night as Tim "Ripper" Owens along with Billy Morris and the All-Star Band played a full electric set of hard rock and heavy metal favorites to a COVID restricted "sold out" show at The Outpost.

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Former Judas Priest lead singer, Ripper Owens kicked off the show with a couple of Priest classics "Electric Eye" and "You Got Another Thing Coming."  

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Billy Morris and the All-Star Band, featuring guitarist Scott Jones, bassist Paul Lewis and drummer Denny Archer then tore into a couple of Warrant songs including the hit "Down Boys."

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This was a theme that would continue throughout the show.  Ripper would sing a couple of tunes and then Billy would take over on vocals for a couple of songs.  This trade off worked really well.

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Ripper returned to rock some classic hard rock tunes including Accept's "Balls To The Wall" and AC/DC's "Sin City."  He then broke out a song from his time in Judas Priest, "One On One"  from Demolition.  Time after time, Ripper proved that he still has one of the best voice's in metal as he can still hit and maintain the high notes.

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Billy and Ripper reminisced about playing different clubs with different bands in Cleveland back in the day.  Billy even remembered checking out Scott Jones at Filthy McNasty's in Kent when Jones was the guitarist in US Metal.  Now, here they are playing together.

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Morris made reference to Brimfield's own, John Oswald a couple of times during the night.  Of course, Oswald is better known as Jani Lane, the former lead singer of Warrant, which Morris was a member of for five years.  Billy paid tribute to Jani Lane by playing Warrant's biggest hits, "Cherry Pie" and "Heaven."

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The Moterhead classic "Ace Of Spades" got most patrons out of their seats and on their feet (with their masks on) to head bang in front of the stage.

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Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" and the Judas Priest classic "Breaking The Law" closed out the set.

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It was a great evening of hard rock and heavy metal.

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Maryland thrash band, Offensive opened the show with a three guitar attack of thrash metal.  Playing a few original tunes as well as some metal classics like Metallica's "Seek and Destroy," the band showed some potential.

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Dark Secret, a five piece metal band from Cleveland played all original tunes, much to the delight of the crowd.  For being together for just one year, the band is pretty tight and they won the audience over.

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Special thanks to Otter Entertainment and The Outpost for bringing live music back to the area.

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Review and photos by Greg Drugan

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