The Great David Coverdale Came with Whitesnake, Saw Ljubljana and Conquered Križanke (2006)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Križanke / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: July 15, 2006
Attendance: 3,200
Ticket price: 8,500.00 SIT

You can’t make this stuff up. The Whitesnake show in Feldkirchen the day before got cancelled because too few tickets were sold. Yep, that happens every now and then north of Slovenia! But every now and then, rock legends also make it south of Austria! Heh, heh, and to little ol’ Slovenia, no less! We got to the venue at 8:00 PM, okay, a bit earlier, around 7:40 (seconds don’t matter). Outside in front of Križanke, the place was boiling with people! They’d clearly woken up, dragged themselves out of their dens and, in the last week before the show, finally smashed all their hidden porcelain piggy banks and rummaged through their pockets for tickets. Uuuu! Yes, yes. The vibe was just right, a proper rock storm was brewing, something was in the air. Simply something that clearly hinted this would be an unforgettable night!

In the lobby I once again said hi to a few great friends of rock music, people I’m always honored to run into at shows and swap a word or two with! Man, things were moving so fast. I was losing my head. In a euphoria that grew by the minute. Mary Rose had already started, and we were still outside. Hey, there in the crowd is Bojan! Our Bojan, who had just “slipped” through the crush with his photo pass! “Mary Rose will be photo-documented,” I sighed with relief.

MARY ROSE: 9:00 PM – 9:30 PM
I barely made it inside, of course! It was 9:20 PM, so I caught the tail end of Mary Rose. Hats off, guys! A classic approach, rock-tense, decent, solid, definitely eye-catching and well deserved as the opener for the mighty Whitesnake. In short, the sight of probably the best Hammond kneader in Slovenia, Davor Kastelec, surrounded by fired-up guys on stage, thirsty to prove themselves, gave me nothing but good feelings that Slovenia is rising again in rock. Sadly, a set of just half an hour left enough music for a first impression, and enough of it stayed in the blood. I didn’t know Mary Rose, unfortunately, but I’d heard nothing but praise for them. Slovenians, always proverbially modest, of course save their praise for their own countrymen last. Mary Rose! Guys, there’s no turning back now! Take what’s yours, and people, finally support homegrown Slovenian quality, which loudly and clearly speaks for itself! See you in Hruševje this August!

WHITESNAKE: 10:00 PM – 11:45 PM
During the break the whole lobby, of course, reeked of beer. People were crammed around the bars, and the experience once again confirmed that Slovenians know nothing about waiting in line when they get the chance to “load up” to the foundations before a rock show: “Ain’t that right, brothers from Styria?” My head was full. Anticipation, euphoria,… Whitesnake, for crying out loud, right there in front of me! Coverdale, the great Coverdale. Okay, rein in your fanboying, kid!

Me, “Saksy” and Peter (Dr. “Prog Rock”) barely squeezed in through a labyrinth of high-flying beer guts. We literally crawled through the packed crowd and planted ourselves in front of the mixing desk, a good 20 meters or so from the stage. Hey! The hall must have held at least 3,000 people. And more were still trickling in.

Blackout! People’s hands in the air! Intro! The guys come onto the stage, with roadies lighting their way to their positions with flashlights! Explosion! The lights burst on! They’re here! That elemental riff! The Burn riff! The band is here! With the people. The crowd on its feet. The one and only charismatic Coverdale in a half-buttoned shirt! The sexist, “sexplosion” is his poetry, which after all these years the master of seductive machismo preaches so vehemently through his own hard rock prism! Is that his voice, his whole presence, his whole aura, right? Okay, okay! The guys didn’t hold back and hit straight out of the gate, so hard that Križanke spun around on its axis and plaster started falling off the walls in chunks! The whole hall went nuts. We were somewhere in the sweet spot, and to my left an old guy was going wild like a teenager, while his wife next to him just smiled sweetly. Arms were waving in the air from the first row to the last. Burn is a classic, and when you weave the Stormbringer main theme into that classic, you kill two birds with one stone. And that’s exactly what Coverdale & co. did. Coverdale didn’t hold back either, and soon outscreamed Križanke with a few insane “screams”. We’re at home with Whitesnake. Passionate, bluesy Slide It In, Love Ain’t No Stranger and Fool For Your Loving, anthem after anthem fired up the audience, and it was a pleasure to melt together with the in-the-zone Coverdale on stage and the wound-up players backing the white snake legend. Intense, at full power. Coverdale, known for always luring into his band the best the market could offer him at the time, assembled a lineup that absolutely cannot and will not disappoint. This is a sextet that’s ready, “tip top”. The guys are physically flawless and the instruments literally squealed in their hands, begging for a little mercy during the show. Reb Beach (also of Winger) and Doug Aldrich, two guitar machine-gunners, equals with different approaches but a puzzle that fits together perfectly (Black & White), then the seductive youngster – the newcomer to the lineup, bassist Uriah Duffy (his parents were prog rock fans, which is why they named his brother Yes), the patient, loyal Timothy Drury on keyboards and one of the greatest drummers in rock, Tommy Aldridge, the king of double bass drum playing, led by the boss who proves that the older he gets, the younger he becomes, David Coverdale, who was hot, truly hot, form a fortress that’s hard to conquer. When all that machinery comes together as one, all you can do is stand there gaping at the perfection. But they’re more than that! They conjure up real emotional eruptions, and it’s so contagious that there’s no way you could resist it. It swept us away completely!

Then, of course, comes a cooldown from this battle dance! Is This Love? Finally! I pulled Saksy close, a touch I’d missed so much during Whitesnake’s set at Gods Of Metal. A crazy one! The riffing is definitely much punchier than the original! People still with Coverdale on the choruses, and this repertoire couldn’t fit him any better. Whitesnake is him! Of course, what am I even babbling about! Another high-adrenaline attack with Ready And Willing, and then Doug Aldrich stepped up and opened the first solo spot. Doug! I was further back this time compared to the front row at the Dio show (Graz, 09/19/2002), but I could still watch well enough. Doug is incredibly convincing in a solo spot like this. Again. He weaves himself and his emotions into it so skillfully that the soloing comes off as spontaneous, and there’s no point wasting words on technical perfection. And if technical perfection is where masters like Petrucci, Satriani and the like get stuck and you can’t budge them from there, then Doug is the model of a guitarist who begs the guitar to come literally alive with all its sentiment. It looked like Doug wasn’t about to stop “pounding” the guitar, and yet he announced Reb Beach, who stepped up in a much more sophisticated way and mostly raced through lightning-fast tapping, while Doug had salted his soloing with a much bluesier flavor! In short, the solos may have cheated someone in the audience out of one more Whitesnake classic, but for me personally they were one of the highlights of the show. The guys are back on stage together and blend into a collective jam. It was funny watching Coverdale, “hidden” behind the monitors, who just couldn’t stand still while the guitarists soloed.

The band is back with Crying In The Rain. A musical drama, a rather uncharacteristic melody for Whitesnake, but with yet another majestic riff. Unstoppable onward. The guys leave the stage! Now the spotlights turn to the real animal behind the drums. Tommy Aldridge! A great drummer who has lived through plenty of excitement in his career, starting with Black Oak Arcansas, then in the eighties being part of probably one of the mightiest rhythm sections with Rudy Sarzo (now with Dio) in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. A man who conjured real magic on the drums. Torpedoing, playing standing up over the double pedal, it looked like the drumheads were about to be flung into the crowd. Then he tosses away his sticks in the middle of the piece! He carries on with bare hands and finishes his show high above the cymbals. Did Aldridge pick up this trick from Don Brewer (Grand Funk Railroad), since Black Oak Arcansas are fairly close to Grand Funk Railroad? Heaven knows? In short, people were gasping for breath! Whitesnake are back and “fire off” a bombastic finish to Crying In The Rain. Now the atmosphere probably hit its peak. One of Whitesnake’s finest songs, loosely speaking their Mistreated, but built on a much more classic template, the great Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City. Coverdale shone in his singing. Committed, decisive, experienced. A master of his craft, a one-of-a-kind performer, but the heart of it all was the fact that David was truly in excellent spirits that night. Whitesnake “finished off” the show with Give Me All Your Love, where David demanded of the crowd: “I wan’t you to blow the fuckin’ roof off!” That certainly didn’t happen, but it was funny, because you could see the audience was too tame for Coverdale, so he goaded the crowd a few times: “Oh c’mmon Ljubljana?! Don’t be shy!” Still, a few times during the show he thanked the audience deeply in perfectly proper standard Slovenian: “Hvala!” The ending was pretty much expected! Here I Go Again, one of the band’s biggest hits, and people were once again right there with Coverdale through this song, an excellent, intense, devilish finale. The regular set flew by incredibly fast, and I can’t remember the last time a show went by so quickly. It was one of a kind! People! This is Ljubljana! I can’t believe it!

The encore kicked off with the wound-up Take Me With You and then plunged into the very definition of a perfect rock composition, Still Of The Night. I always get chills during the second part of the song and through its dramatic closing section. It’s a song that gains atmosphere with every lap. Maybe the song that captures the very notion of Whitesnake best, since it’s the ideal puzzle of blues and classic rock under the unyielding baton of hard rock! In short, a highly atmospheric finale that only the brilliant Coverdale and his companions can pull off. In the outro Coverdale made great use of the “echo delay” effect for mighty “screams”, which he decorated with all sorts of vocal colors. Hell yes! Singing on the edge of a breath, like whispering into a woman’s soul at night, when you’re next to her, somewhere… brrrrr…..

The guys had practically said their goodbyes, yet they sat back down behind their instruments. The crowd wouldn’t let go of them! One more classic off the “1987” album, Bad Boys, echoed into the night. And then the venomous hissing of the white snake was truly over! The guys left. But not all of them. David stayed on stage alone. A beam of light shone on him. He began: “I have often told you stories,…” Wow! Soldier Of Fortune, an a cappella version! People stared for a while. As if they had too much respect for David! Then, after the chorus, David raised his hands in the air and invited the crowd to join in. With that he prepared the best possible farewell, with which he left us. Feet burning and fired up to the max! In short, a lesson and three quarters of rock sexology was behind us. “Music that make you wanna fuck!” (I’d rather not say it in Slovenian). But that’s just how it is.

Coverdale is incredibly well preserved at almost 55. His voice has faded a bit, you could feel it especially during, say, Give Me All Your Love, where David can no longer round off his verses in clean melodic lines the way he once did, or the way you can make out from the studio recordings. Still, he was destroying with extreme “screams” that hit, for the poor cochlea, frequencies of airplane proportions. Coverdale came, saw, conquered. The audience’s participation also put the dot on the “i”. In that regard the show was a perfect ten. A hot band and a hot crowd hand in hand. A maximally packed room and a maximally rowdy band. And that’s where the minus is hiding, in the rowdiness. The hall. Križanke gave out under all of Whitesnake’s volume. How was Plečnik supposed to know 100 years ago that Whitesnake would one day play here, so he’d think about extra elements in the construction. I don’t know how it sounded in the front rows, but at the mixing desk the sound was barely acceptable. In other words, at times you couldn’t clearly make out what both guitars were doing. It’s interesting, by the way, that Coverdale is always set up so that he drowns out all the electric voltage of the other musicians in the band during a Whitesnake show. So once again a few times my skull-pressure got an honest boost when the singer launched into his wailing. The man is indestructible and charged with creative energy. He took another full run-up again, and Whitesnake with him. David leaves the stage. The lights come on and We Wish You Well plays as a “taped outro”.

This was a classic rock event, and a hugely important one for Slovenia. It proved that Slovenians still care about the kind of music scene that ruled the seventies and eighties. The elemental energy of the coiled snake! Thank you for the unforgettable magic! I’d love for us to meet more often, for classic rock events like this to be a regular chance to visit right here in Slovenia too (“a pig can dream of corn, and no harm done”), so we don’t have to keep chasing around Europe by car and bus. Thanks to the star-studded lineup, the organizer’s courage and, of course, the magic of Whitesnake, for an unforgettable night!

Setlist

1. Burn (incl. Stormbringer)
2. Slide It In
3. Love Ain’t No Stranger
4. Fool For Your Loving
5. Is This Love
6. Ready and Willing
7. Blues For Mylene
8. Snake Dance
9. Crying In The Rain (incl. drum solo)
10. Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City
11. Give Me All Your Love
12. Here I Go Again
—encore 1.—
13. Take Me With You
14. Still of the Night
—encore 2.—
15. Bad Boys
16. Soldier Of Fortune
17. We Wish You Well (taped outro)

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