Venue: Peter Pan Pub / Trieste / Italy
Concert date: 03/30/2007
Attendance: 60
Ticket price: 0.00€ (free entry)
Sometimes you get pushed into this funny situation where you’ve simply got nowhere to go under the open sky! Heh, the old story of the bored concert junkie… This time I decided completely out of the blue, at the last minute, to take a trip to Trieste, so RockLine gets yet another “Italian concert report” for March 2007! The victim of the evening was Arturo Falcone and his Stargazer! This is a guy who only picked up the guitar at 18. He started out self-taught and went on to temper his skills in the bands Devil’s Claws, Halloween and Foxy Lady.
Stargazer and Falcone are a recognized and respected name in Italy. Over his career Arturo has played in Slovenia three times already (twice of those at Kamnolom in Hruševje near Postojna). On top of that, there’s interest in him abroad too, since the man has played gigs in the UK as well as in Germany. Probably one of the highlights of the guitarist’s career was playing alongside Ronnie James Dio, the legendary figure and singer of the equally legendary Rainbow and Black Sabbath. Also worth mentioning is Falcone’s stint in the US at a special guitar clinic together with Vinnie Moore, guitarist of the legendary UFO. And finally, I can hint that every Deep Purple fan surely remembers Falcone from when he opened their Trieste show, back on 06/12/1998, at the Nereo Rosso football stadium, to be exact.
Let’s stay with the Nereo Rosso stadium for a moment. The Peter Pan pub, where tonight’s Stargazer gig was announced, is right next to the stadium. You drive along the main road through Opčine straight to the intersection by the stadium, then turn, not toward the stadium but to the right, and park right away. The pub sits in a narrow one-way alley in the middle of a residential area, a few minutes’ walk uphill!
In short, the middle of nowhere. When I stepped through the pub’s door, I couldn’t believe my eyes at where Stargazer were supposed to play. The owner had pushed a few tables aside and crammed the band into a space 6 m long and a good 3 m wide, in the passage between the toilet and the main bar. You read the width right. So the drummer and bassist spent most of the gig communicating with the wall on the opposite side. Only Arturo and the singer had contact with the crowd, with a clear view of the main bar and the main room of the place.
So the first “handicap” of the gig was the location itself and the “tin of sardines” conditions inside it. The band didn’t complain much about it. They’re obviously used to this kind of situation and just take it in stride. What really dragged the band down, though, was the sound. The guys sounded garage-y, the sound wobbled all over the place during the show, and there were a few “clams,” which are maybe even forgivable considering the guys had to keep carefully watching the whole time not to knock somebody’s beer off a nearby table. In short, the sound was far from satisfactory. In that mini hole the drums took over the mix and mowed down the vocals and guitar especially, whose sound kept getting ugly-chopped and swept away throughout the show.
The band kicked off at 10:15 PM! From the very start it smelled of melodic hard rock of the pure neoclassical kind, raised on pioneers like Randy Rhoads and Yngwie J. Malmsteen. The band presented their recently released debut “Stargazer” and seasoned the gig with a bunch of covers of well-known hard rock acts, especially those famous for having a fast-fingered speed demon with dizzying solo chops in the lineup, such as Running With The Devil (Van Halen), Panama (Van Halen), Soldier Of Fortune (originally Loudness), the imposing closer Superheroes (Racer X), and the really unfortunate Mr. Crowley (Ozzy Osbourne), for which the blame goes mainly to the mismatch between the singer’s voice and the song, and his outright botching of it! On the flip side, the band really shone on Malmsteen’s instrumental Trilogy and in the renditions of I Am A Viking and, toward the end, Rising Force. Arturo also paid special tribute to his big role model Richie Blackmore with Kill The King (Rainbow), where the singer once again committed a few unforgivable offenses.
The bass and drums are top-notch. Add Falcone and you basically get the real Italian prototype of Malmsteen. The vocalist practically ruined half the show and limped along on all fronts from start to finish. He came in late on the verses, buckled in the highest keys, where he fell up to a half-tone flat, and it was obvious the guy doesn’t really have the lyrics down either, so a few times he lost the thread mid-song. The performance of Trilogy immediately underlined and hinted that Stargazer could work much better as an instrumental jam session band, something Damir Simic Shime, for example, demonstrated in Slovenia in November! Still, Falcone is light-years away from a recognizable voice of his own. The main culprit is the urge to imitate Malmsteen. What does that mean?
The playing is breathtaking! Speed and precision, absolutely. And yet this is the classic trap that a player falls into. He gets lost in a sea of notes and in following the rules laid down by music school. There’s not a speck of individuality, uniqueness, recognizability, or whatever we want to call “distinctiveness” in Falcone.
The guys hacked away for an hour and three quarters. They showed excellent tightness, which holds absolutely for the instrumental side of the band, but with a singer who had plenty of room to improve and who, in this kind of shape, would be best off parting ways with the band as soon as possible. Stargazer are a band that belongs on a bigger stage, since by playing through heavy pieces from the legacy of melodic hard rock they definitely make for a one-of-a-kind attraction. You don’t hear every day someone play a Loudness cover, let alone dare to wrestle with Malmsteen’s speed. An attraction, yes, but one for a proper concert hall and not for a dingy dive where, with one careless move from your starting position, you can knock over the drums, step on the bassist’s foot, and bump into a customer chewing on a sandwich so the bite lodges in his throat and he’s in mortal danger before you’ve fought your way to the “dumping ground” for surplus junk, in plain English the toilet.
Setlist
1. Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love
2. Too Young To Die
3. Out Of Control
4. I’ll See The Light Tonight
5. You’re No Good
6. Kill The King
7. Mr. Crowley
8. Unchain
9. Rock The Night
10. Trilogy
11. Panama
—intermission— (15 min.)
12. Soldier Of Fortune
13. 18 And Life
14. I Am A Viking
15. Crazy Night
16. One In A Bunch
17. Running With The Devil
20. Drum solo
21. Rising Force
—encore—
22. Superheroes
