Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden am Wörthersee / Austria
Concert date: 07/20/2008
Attendance: 200
Ticket price: €32.00
Rockline readers already know Sardinas well, and you could say he’s practically a local at Bluesiana on Lake Wörthersee too. He showed up there the day before the gig, in a nasty storm, at owner Gudrun’s invitation. On Monday, when we pulled up at the venue with the home crew, accompanied by Mr. Dragan Bulič, the weather hadn’t gotten much better, but Bluesiana was still almost completely full (or maybe precisely because of that). Ritchie Kotzen, who was playing the following day, was working the crowd too, along with his helpers, the most noticeable of whom was a visibly sloshed bassist. During the first half of the show he already managed to cause a minor scene, brawling with some local in front of the bar and coming out on the losing end. So the atmosphere was a bit like some backwater saloon in the Wild West, which of course didn’t bother Sardinas in the slightest. After the standard hour-long delay, he took the stage of this modest but cozy interior together with his rhythm section, and in true Sardinas style he warmed up the crowd thoroughly and proved once again that one of the most important assets of a touring musician is charisma.
Unlike Vai, on whose label (Favoured Nations) he released his last two albums, Sardinas doesn’t talk much during the show. I remember well Vai’s performance at Cvetličarna in September 2005, which Sardinas opened, and his monologues, which sadly weren’t the interior kind like in Joyce, as he tried to connect with the audience. Sardinas communicates through his presence and energy alone, helped of course by his irreplaceable Dobro and the slide on his left pinky. As is fitting for a bluesman, his technique and songwriting are fairly limited, but he makes up for it nicely with a wild instinct that draws its inspiration from Hooker’s boogie, Southern soul, Delta blues, Hendrix and Vaughan.
This time we didn’t get to see any guitar burning, since after the tragedy that hit Great White in Rhode Island a few years back, Eric has probably given up that kind of exhibitionism in smaller enclosed spaces. We also waited in vain for the acrobatic playing with a bottleneck, something Eric has long been famous for, but we were still blown away by the performance of some classics from the first two albums. Worth mentioning here are the songs I Can’t Be Satisfied and Piece of Me, along with some tracks from the latest release, “Eric Sardinas And Big Motor”, the biggest applause of which went to the cover of Tony Joe White’s As the Crow Flies.
The mood took a bit of a hit in the second half of the show from an overly drawn-out bass solo and from Sardinas’s Rivera head, which most likely died around eleven o’clock because of a blown tube and couldn’t be fixed until the very end. But Eric didn’t let it faze him. First they hooked him up to the PA, and then he went completely “unplugged” and, in his old habit, lowered the mic down to the guitar’s height and, in a half-kneeling position, sang a few of his songs in an acoustic version. The effect was perfect and the show was saved. If this had happened to anyone else, they’d probably have marched off the stage with their head hanging and waited at the side for the techs to sort out the problems. After the obligatory encore, the maestro retreated backstage and, about half an hour later, reappeared among the fans, visibly exhausted but in great spirits, for a short photo session, which our crew put to good use as well.
So Sardinas can’t really go wrong at Bluesiana. It’s a very special kind of ambience, and its small size and homey feel make it especially well suited to the blues. Think of a slightly bigger living room, where the enterprising owner has managed to lure plenty of legends from across the Atlantic over the past few years. It’s honestly sad that Ljubljana and Slovenia in general are badly short on venues like this, and that those of us who love this kind of music have to drive to Lake Wörthersee to feed our spiritual needs.
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