Venue: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden Am Woerthersee / Austria
Concert date: 14.10.2008
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: 33.00€
Tuesday night at Bluesiana saw the final act of Operation Delamaris, planned for 2008, which once again served up Eric Sardinas. For the last time this year, Eric took up positions on the shores of Lake Woerthersee, where he once more showed off with a bold, and of course virtuosic, delivery of hot-blooded blues rock acrobatics. Sardinas’s ego gives him no peace. Tuesday presented him as determined to claim the title of Bluesiana’s top dog, which for the concert year now winding down remains firmly in the hands of Richie Kotzen. For Sardinas, of course, that was reckoning without the host.
Just one look at Eric’s kitschily decorated dobro, comfortably and gentlemanly parked on a stand near the drums, brought back memories of about a year and a half ago and my first Sardinas gig at Bluesiana. Back then the place was bursting at the seams, which meant we had to painfully squeeze our shapely little bodies against the curves of uncouth Germanic types, a combination most Slavs aren’t exactly built for. The must-see status of an Eric Sardinas show has apparently evaporated since those days, and a trip to Bluesiana on Tuesday was clearly anything but a priority for most music nuts. By showtime barely 70 souls had turned up. The rest, apparently sated tasters of Sardinas’s cooking who used to eagerly cram in front of the Bluesiana stage, stayed home this time. The seriousness of the situation surely calls for the deep words of the great sage Tulio Furlaniča and his famous aphorism “the sardine is between your legs.” And how! After Tuesday’s visit to Bluesiana, sardines were practically crawling out of every body part, however hard to reach.
Eric Sardinas never made my list of favorite blues acts, mostly because of the garish picture his rather “baroque” take on the blues paints. Sardinas’s “problem” is that the guy often overdoes the slide arrangements, pushes them too far to the front, and overheats the songs until they’re unrecognizable. Overdone, to many even tasteless and heavy on the make-up, slide playing puts off plenty of blues enthusiasts precisely because it lacks authenticity, substance and meat. Eric’s slide infatuation can be distracting, often even annoying, and at worst downright boring, though of course it all depends on who’s listening. Sardinas’s virtuosity is beyond dispute, naturally, and any doubt about the guitarist’s playing or songwriting chops quickly falls out of even the most spiteful calculations. His playing brims with raw energy. Every second of this two-hour dance with the devil on stage, Sardinas leaves his heart and soul out there (not to mention the cigarette butts).
Moments that sum up all of the above in sound were of course not in short supply at Bluesiana. Sardinas justified his status as one of the leading blues interpreters with his trademark zeal, and most of all with a superbly executed classic, I Can’t Be Satisfied, which after all these years is still deeply indebted to Elmore James. Underpinned with pronounced boogie moves and coming across as a thrilling bridge between old and new, the interpretation once again cast Sardinas as the rightful holder of the title of great-grandchild of the blues revolution, picking up Peter Green’s words about the need to build on blues form and structure. Sardinas even allowed himself a bit of indecency here that was unusual by his standards, but always with a healthy dose of taste. Whatever the case, Bluesiana grabbed what was offered in a heartbeat, including a completely unplugged “tigress” who, somewhere around her sixteenth orgasm and some uncontrolled hair-pulling, changed colors in the blink of an eye.
Eric Sardinas’s Tuesday setlist was thoroughly aired out, full of emotional twists that lined up with the ancient blues heritage, and armed with a heap of passionately played obscure blues standards. This time Sardinas happily stripped his untamed-stallion image of its needless kitsch, dropped the flash, lowered the mic to half its original height into the active range of the acoustics, and, true to his motto of respecting tradition, paid tribute to the greatness of Robert Johnson with Come On In My Kitchen. It was a bold dive into Johnson’s infamous conversation with the devil, which most performers prefer to steer well clear of (you could literally count the covers of that song on the fingers of one hand), and it rang out to the pounding of Eric’s boots. Completely rural and raw, in other words phenomenal! Eric’s unexpected move highlighted another trait of the guitarist that had been more or less overlooked until then: his vocals. Sardinas’s voice won us over, radiating enormously powerful emotion, arrogance and determination that spare no effort reaching for the listener’s crotch.
Besides being an excellent guitarist and showman, Eric Sardinas has matured in every way as a live performer. A nice example of routine juggling of the audience’s needs and wishes was served up with the sharpness of Down To Wiskey, which got many a yodeler’s backside moving. Sardinas knows, when it’s called for, exactly which buttons to push. The old standard As The Crow Flies earned a flat-out ten thanks to a boldly inserted acoustic turn with a Gallagher-style folk touch, and to reaffirm his own musical roots Eric threw in a very satisfying Dust My Broom, which under James’s baton actually grew out of I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom by old friend Robert Johnson. Sardinas rounded off this thematically unexpectedly varied evening, which exceeded all expectations precisely thanks to that flexibility, with Roadhouse Blues.
Text: Daniel Pavlica
Photos: Mojca Perdih
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