Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Vienna (Wien) / Planet Music / Austria
Concert date: 22.03.2003
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: 32,00€
Back in the old city we keep coming back to, on the perfect day: Saturday! Late in the afternoon we were the first to burst into the Planet Music foyer. Dead silence in there. Everything was neatly tidied up, the promo flyers carefully stacked, all announcing a stormy spring, especially when it comes to old rock and blues legends passing through (Big Brother And Holding Company, The Yarbirds, Paul McCartney, John Mayal).
Dougie White (ex-Rainbow) came dashing past us with a Planet Music hostess in tow. Malmsteen’s singer waved and promised he’d come straight over. Of course the talk immediately turned to Ritchie Blackmore, how Dougie sees him, and the whole situation swirling (or that used to swirl) around Rainbow. Clearly pleasantly surprised by three maniacs who care more about the roots than modern trends, he let us in on what Yngwie was up to right then: “Watching CNN!” Apparently that was in the little café inside Planet Music, and Dougie just grabbed the stuff we wanted signed and kindly offered to go to the maestro for the autographs. Yngwie is known for being unapproachable and for his diva-like meltdowns (one such tantrum, which his wife supposedly egged him into (naturally, women, who else?), landed him behind bars after he chased her around their Los Angeles apartment with a kitchen knife). Blackmore’s spirit has moved into him, and Yngwie is literally obsessed with Blackmore (more on that later), who has almost identical character traits. Meanwhile bassist Mick Cervino (ex-Blasckmore’s Night) turned up from somewhere, and once again the talk went to Ritchie. Cervino admitted out loud that the tour with Malmsteen is going fantastically, unlike his former stint with Blackmore’s Night, when Ritchie once walked up to Mick mid-show, drew a line on the stage and decided where Cervino was even allowed to move. Yngwie is a different story: he gives you total freedom on stage.
Dougie brought back our loot (the autographs): “Master sends me!” was all he said as he handed over Yngwie’s signatures. He added: “Soundcheck, pay attention, we’ll mostly be playing Deep Purple and Hendrix!”
Meanwhile the CNN news was apparently over, and an almost two-meter-tall (6’6″) guy appeared in a fur coat and a scarlet silk shirt, draped in chains from head to toe. Yngwie, already dressed in his stage gear, headed off to soundcheck, while Dougie was still bouncing around in a tracksuit.
And sure enough, during soundcheck the band burned through Hendrix (Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile), Black Sabbath (Heaven And Hell, Children Of The Sea) and Deep Purple (You Fool No One). Of course Yngwie couldn’t resist noodling through bits of his favorite classics.
Alright, let’s get to the point. At 8:15 PM the local boys, the pride of Vienna, called Codex, waddled onto the stage. The sound was ideal, more than ideal for an opening act, actually perfectly crisp. Stereo chorus effects, a compressor, an echo effect on the vocals, and not a single bit of noise to be heard. But… well, I won’t say it! The guys are good musicians and click together great. The singer was clearly still a rookie on stage, scared stiff like a rabbit. What saved him was his trained voice, despite a not exactly lived-in delivery. And what were they dishing out? Some obscure modern offshoot… hard to even pin down. A sort of inverted thrash. Solos stripped out (the guitarist was definitely top class: fast, precise picking, transitions played perfectly clean, and excellent, full-bodied riffing), simplified transitions, music built on semitone endings. So melody in the classical sense of the word was pretty hard to find. The sound was full, mostly thanks to excellent gear and PA and the tight teamwork of the drummer, bassist and guitarist on stage. The singer, with his crystal-clear trained voice, tried to bring a bit more melody into the dark sound, but came across as too faint. He needs more aggression, anger, rage. Maybe a chunk of raw horse steak would help. That’s what he was missing. And the effect? In the front row I almost nodded off. Still, the band’s approach was decent, the guys put in the effort and earned their applause every time. It’s just that the music has no real connection to metal. Generally speaking, and I’ll say a paradox here, the whole thing sounded more like hellish pop, especially in the song where the rhythm was literally copied from some 80s new romantics (Spandau Ballet) with semitone riffs laid over the top. We also got U2 (With Or Withouth You), which made me wonder what on earth U2 did for the good of humankind to deserve that.
The dying was over after an hour, but then we waited another hour, so the dying was nowhere near over. And finally Malmsteen and co. showed up on stage. In between they pumped enormous amounts of smoke onto the stage, so I nearly suffocated, and the contraption blowing out the smoke hissed like a snake.
Rise Up at 10:00 PM. The muddy buzzing and mush ended with the next track. Ship Of Fools put things in their place. Clear sound. Yngwie? Hey, the second he walked on stage he kicked five picks into the crowd. A behavior pattern like a conditioned reflex. The guy doesn’t skimp on guitar scales, and he doesn’t skimp on picks either. He absolutely buried us in them over the course of the show. The roadie showed up at least five times and paranoidly stuck fresh ones on the mic stand so the maestro could fling a good fifty or so out among the people. It’s an interesting phenomenon. This way a guitar virtuoso communicates with the audience. And those picks lie all over the stage, among the cables and footswitches. One pick he kicked so hard that it bounced off the belly of some excited fan in the front row and kept enough kinetic energy to fly right back onto the stage among the monitors. So now you’re asking whether I went to a concert to watch flying picks and calculate free fall, oblique throws, horizontal throws and similar physics stuff, or to enjoy the music of Y.J. Malmsteen? I wouldn’t even bring it up if it weren’t such a special thing. I’ve never seen a musician get such a kick out of it on stage. Arpeggio, poof, a pick into the crowd, new arpeggio, poof, another pick into the crowd… Yngwie was having a boundless blast with it.
And soon enough we got our scene: one stage, one man. The solo spot after Stronghold, where Yngwie treated himself to a stroll through the legacy of the classical masters Paganini and Albigioni. Every note finds its precisely placed, perfectly timed spot. Sharp, hellishly fast and clear as a tear. Racing, nothing but ultra-wound-up racing, flowed into the next song from the latest album, where the rest of the band (except Dougie) joined the guitar god on stage to slide through Baroque And Roll. For Dreaming from the album “The Oddyssey” Yngwie grabbed an acoustic guitar, which of course also carried the symbol of the rising horse (Ferrari’s emblem, standing for Yngwie’s band Rising Force), just like every one of his white Fender Stratocasters.
One of the highlights was undoubtedly the performance of Trilogy. The guitar machine-gunner totally came alive, and at times you honestly think Blackmore is up there on stage. The gestures, the playing… Mastery of the guitar is another story, though. They’re not even in the same league. Yngwie is Ritchie’s upgrade. At twelve, Yngwie could play all the Deep Purple solos „up and down” the neck of the guitar. And his obsession with Ritchie Blackmore is more than obvious on stage (same guitar model, playing Rainbow and Deep Purple classics, the same moves on stage). That’s a shame, sadly, because heh.., it raises the rhetorical question of whether Yngwie is expressing himself or trying to express Blackmore. The solo masterpiece flowed into the earthy Red House. Hendrix’s blues was sung by Yngwie himself, who tried to conjure that earthy feel of smoky night clubs with his voice. Then he lifted us back up on wings with a solo adventure from his album “Concerto Suite”, namely Fugue. Malmsteen convinced even the last doubting Thomas in the hall that night of who the boss is. At full tilt and tirelessly he fired off bursts of light-speed scales and staged a properly dramatic finish to his longest solo adventure in the setlist: he snapped the strings off the guitar, rode the tremolo to the max and pulled a few moves that made me honestly think he was about to smash the guitar into atoms. At one point a roadie showed up on stage. Scared stiff like a rabbit, he waited for Yngwie, kneeling on the floor, to toss the guitar backwards into his arms once the piece was over. Would he catch it? The roadie did the job successfully and vanished back where he belongs. Into the dark backstage.
Yngwie went off for a well-earned mug (two or three?) of beer while we got to enjoy a keyboard solo adventure, the bass mastery of Mick Cervino (ex-Blackmore’s Night) and the cannon fire of Patrick Johansson on drums. Then Yngwie came running back on stage and together they fired up the classic You Don’t Remember, I’ll Never Forget, where the crowd started swaying more lively again, singing along to the verses. In the middle of the song Yngwie, the improvisation expert that he is, veered off “his own way”. The band worked Deep Purple’s classic Demon’s Eye into You Don’t Remember, I’ll Never Forget, then smoothly slid back into the chorus of You Don’t Remember, I’ll Never Forget and wrapped the song up. “Some people believe in heaven, Ronnie James Dio believes in hell, and Yngwie believes in Valhalla!” That was Dougie’s introduction to the closing song (also from the latest album). How Yngwie turned his knobs I don’t know, but in the front row his riffing drowned out the whole band, because the guitar sound suddenly turned buzzy.
Encore. After an acoustic intro played on his Fender, Yngwie unleashed the classic riff. Mistreated. Ahhh, okay, I’m gonna lose it. True, Dougie might sound a bit “cold” in the higher registers compared to Mike Boals or Michael Vescera, but in Mistreated he showed all his mastery of singing technique and, with total commitment and a full measure of improvisation, brought to life another Deep Purple classic from their Mk.III lineup (Lord/Paice/Coverdale/Hughes/Blackmore), the one I personally value most. Of course Yngwie couldn’t help himself and soloed right over the riffs with bursts of micron-precise scales, seasoning the song to the extreme. “As a little snack” he also nailed Blackmore’s original solo note for note. The song ended with a long, grandiose finish through a pure blues interlude. A real tribute to the legendary band (Deep Purple), and the crowd got a chance for boundless enjoyment out of it. The band closed the concert with Rising Force. The audience came alive and, singing along to the verses, helped the artists bring their show to an end.
A Malmsteen concert is a special adventure, different from classic metal “party” gigs, and worth seeing for that alone. On top of that, his shows draw a somewhat more mature audience, in the sense that people really come to listen to the music. You couldn’t find a single frustrated little metalhead trying to grab attention with some stage dive, dousing his surroundings in beer, crashing into people or imitating helicopter blades with his thick skull. Great, at least from one concert I came out dry, and my hair wasn’t glued together with spilled beer. Yngwie and crew, see you around!
Setlist
01. Intro
02. Rise Up
03. Ship Of Fools
04. Stronghold
05. Solo (Yngwie plays Paganini)
06. Baroque And Roll
07. Dreaming
08. Razor Eater
09. In The Name Of God
10. Trilogy
11. Red House
12. Fugue
13. Solo Keyboards (incl. Toccata And Fugue)
14. Solo Bass
15. Solo Drums
16. You Don’t Remember, I’ll Never Forget (incl. Demons Eye)
17. Valhalla
—encore—
18. Intro
19. Mistreated
20. Rising Force
Photo gallery
