Venue: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden am Woerthersee / Austria
Concert date: October 3, 2008
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: 28.00€
The name La Famiglia Superstar might not mean much to music fans, but take a quick look at the guys in the band and you’ll find a lineup with some seriously enviable and exciting pedigrees. Bassist Marco Mendoza has lent his services to legends like Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy, Blue murder, Ted Nugent, Derek Sherinian and George Lynch, frontman Terry Ilous sang for hard rockers XYZ, guitarist Steve Saluto backed Jeff Berlin and Buddy Miles, and drummer Atma Anur kept the rhythm for Kotzn and Vicious Rumours. With the musicians coming from all corners of the world (Mendoza lives in California, Saluto in Italy, and Anur is currently based in Poland), it looks like this could just be a short-term project driven mostly by immediate money needs. Still, La Famiglia Superstar surprised us first with the news that they’re recording an album, and then with an excellent show.
Bluesiana wasn’t exactly packed that night, but that didn’t spoil the vibe one bit. If anything, it felt like these giants of recent history had dropped by our living room. The main attraction was of course Marco Mendoza, a broad-shouldered, dark-haired guy with strangely skinny legs, who on top of playing bass also sang a few songs and, together with the pint-sized Terry Ilous, got the crowd going. Besides his all-round virtuosity, Mendoza is also to be envied for the fact that this past summer at the Rocklahoma festival he got to play with the great George Lynch, after Lynch’s band filled the gap on the bill left by yet another failed attempt to revive Dokken. Steve Saluto, who with his look reminded us a bit of Michael Schenker, impressed with his technique and a faded Fender onto which he’d bolted a brand-new “lefty” neck, while Atma Anur fully lived up to his nickname “the Jimi Hendrix of drums”, which Neal Schon gave him years ago.
This motley crew kicked off with their own songs, and somewhere around the middle of the set they made us immensely happy with the classic Here I Go Again (Whitesnake), which sounded surprisingly melodic and fresh even without keyboards. They made up for the lack of original material with a bunch of XYZ covers like Inside Out and What Keeps Me Loving You, plus improvisations, showboating and other more or less appropriate shenanigans (see the photos) that spiced up the night even more. Among the covers, Higher Ground (originally by Stevie Wonder, and also famously done by Red Hot Chilli Peppers) is worth a mention, as is Blackbird (The Beatles), which we got as an encore after the frenzied applause at the end of the show.
La Famiglia Superstar delivered a great time and warmed up the crowd with both the music and the spicy jokes and banter, with which the band members chatted up the female part of the audience from the stage and insisted they were single, because supposedly only their wives were married. Reality in the pretty empty, intimate backstage was something else entirely. After clocking out from their “shift”, Terry played a round of bowling (besides other perks, Bluesiana offers visiting musicians that very pastime), Steve got into a conversation with one of the glam-minded “local heroes”, and the Rockline crew struck up a chat with the drummer, from whom we learned a few things that were anything but enviable about the life of a middle-aged touring musician. And the women? Nowhere to be seen.
La Famiglia SuperStar (approximate) setlist:
1. Can You Tell Me
2. Got To Believe
3. I Miss You
4. Higher Ground
5. Another Rain
6. Here I Go Again
7. Never To Late
8. Come Around
9. Inside Out
—encore—
10. What Keeps Me Loving You
11. Blackbird
Photo Gallery
