Chappell Roan follows big stars & infamous concerts at KC concert venue
Chappell Roan has some tough acts to follow.
When the pop icon and Missouri native brings her Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour to Kansas City on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 3 and 4, she will become the latest on an impressive list of musical acts that have performed on stages in the Liberty Memorial Tower/Penn Valley Park area, outside the National World War I Museum and Memorial. It is being called the Museum and Memorial Park for Roan’s concert
Almost all of the most famous performers who visited the venue came for one of two long-running major festivals held there in the past four decades: the Spirit Festival and Rock Fest.
Here’s a rundown:
Bob Dylan draws a crowd
Perhaps the most memorable Liberty Memorial concert was the legendary Bob Dylan, who drew 100,000-150,000 music fans on Sept. 6, 1992. Dylan played a full two-hour show as part of that year’s four-day Spirit Festival, which also featured Poco, America, Leon Russell, Joe Walsh, Taj Mahal and Albert King. Admission was $3 in advance and $5 at the gate.
Dylan also headlined, along with B.B. King, the 1997 Spirit Festival. Four years later, Huey Lewis and the News, The B-52s and local rap star Tech N9ne performed.
The Spirit Festival had begun as a free Fourth of July celebration in 1984 (when it drew an estimated 240,000 people) and evolved into a multiday music festival that usually took place on Labor Day weekend. It attracted Bo Diddley, Bonnie Raitt, James Brown, Buddy Guy, Roger Daltrey, Cheap Trick, the Beach Boys and other major acts — albeit, many past their prime.
The event, which was held at Barney Allis Plaza several times in its early years, ran through 2002.
Mud and music
Billed as largest outdoor single-day music festival in the country, Rock Fest was staged in the mid- to late 1990s at Smithville Lake, Longview Lake and Sandstone Amphitheater before settling in at Liberty Memorial/Penn Valley Park in 2004.
It focused on popular current rock bands, including Godsmack, Stone Temple Pilots, Korn, Alice in Chains, Seether and Disturbed, so the audience skewed younger than the Spirit Festival.
Compared with its predecessor, which reported few problems during its run, Rock Fest’s stay on the hills of was somewhat notorious.
A police veteran called the 2010 festival “a more violent version of Woodstock.”
That was one of several years remembered more for the mud than the music. After heavy rains, concert-goers took to sliding down the slopes southwest of the Liberty Memorial, leaving the area an unsightly mess. Residents of neighboring areas also complained about trash, noise, drinking and illegal parking, with many calling for future events to be canceled or moved.
City officials let Rock Fest continue when concert promoter AEG Live Productions agreed to make precautionary changes. AEG couldn’t control the weather, however.
Similar heavy rains produced similar muddy results in 2014 and 2015. The Star reported that three downpours turned the area near the stage into a mess in 2014, when mud-slinging left many attendees covered in goop. The next year, there was no rain on the day of Rock Fest, but one of the wettest Mays on record had left the concert grounds messy. Even though organizers dumped truckloads of mulch in the area, The Star reported that “slime-slathered revelers wrestled as music blared around them” by late afternoon.
Rock Fest, which typically drew crowds of around 50,000, survived only one more year at the Liberty Memorial before moving to Kansas Speedway in 2017. It died after two years there.
Other events
- The Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival drew thousands to the grounds of the Liberty Memorial for more than a decade before folding after 2001. Among the big names who performed were Diana Krall, The Staple Singers, Koko Taylor, Pat Metheny and David Sanborn.
- The Reggae World Music Fest and the Missouri Wine & Jazz Festival each called the area home for a couple of years, the latter in 2020 and 2021.
- The most recent major concert on the grounds was a night of hip-hop and R&B featuring Gucci Mane on Aug. 2, 2021.
This story was originally published October 2, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
