Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Nina II. / Rijeka / Croatia
Concert date: February 17, 2009
Attendance: 130
Ticket price: 60.00 HRK
Richie Kotzen, our good old acquaintance and master of the guitar craft, has taken the old continent as his new home. His visits to concert stages over the past two years have been even more frequent than the density of bacteria per square centimeter on the counter where they prep McDonald’s hamburgers. The guy obviously has a great crew that lets him pull off these (at most) month-long tours. And it’s this latest, hottest one that brought him to Slovenia and, a day later, to Croatia. To be exact, to Rijeka, and not just anywhere, but onto the ship Nina II, moored in the main harbor. It’s a space fitted out as a club and just one of a whole host of local joints devoted to keeping the city’s nightlife properly pulsing. Really, when you come to Rijeka, you don’t have to worry about how to spend a quality evening, since nobody’s going to kick you out at 11 p.m. here, and smokers haven’t been legally banished from public places yet, either.
It’s hard to believe all of this. First, a ticket that cost a mere 60.00 HRK, so cheap a music journalist is almost embarrassed to ask for accreditation, and then the special ambience in which a guitarist of such high pedigree had announced his show. A hugely appealing situation. The club started rocking at 8 p.m., but I only got to the scene around 10. Alen Brentini, the Croatian guitar virtuoso, had just wrapped up his set, and the “impro-vised” stage, a covered ship’s stern converted into a bar, was being prepped for Richie Kotzen’s trio.
At exactly 10:30 p.m. the guitarist, with his freshened-up backing crew of Demian Arriaga (drums) and David Filice (bass),) walks onto the stage, where a room packed to the last corner greets him with a roar. Over 100 people were squeezed in like sardines in a can, and shoving your way into the front rows was impossible, such was the enthusiasm and excitement running through the crowd.
Kotzen opened his set with I’m Loosing My Mind. It’s a rock-charged number with a jerky funk twist in the riff and beat and plenty of room for improvisation (hardly a rarity in Kotzen’s style), which gave the trio a good reason to warm up, and they put it to excellent use. Next comes a gloomy but no less loud follow-up in A Love Divine, and what stood out most was the band’s sound, which, compared to what I experienced at Bluesiana four days earlier (RockLine report HERE), had changed, in that there was much, much more noise in Rijeka. At the expense of that, the bluesy feel that clings to Kotzen’s songs (a must, live too) ducked down a bit, and the sound itself lost some of its fine control. And the compensation? Way more stage acrobatics from the whole trio, dictated of course by Richie Kotzen, who zoned out so hard during the third song, Fooled Again, that the first (read: E1) string on his Fender Telecaster, model TLR-155RK, snapped during the long closing solo. During the break Richie, joking at his own expense, apologized to the crowd for the wait, saying his bad habit is that he never brings a “spare” guitar with him on tour. After unleashing a few heavy riff avalanches and retuning fully, the guys carry on with Faith. The hugely popular, melodic song had the crowd hooked in the chorus, and they joined in wonderfully. As if sensing it, Kotzen, in the solo with bassist Filice, blasted off into his own world, dropped to his knees and, in full swing, tore off a purebred, hefty power-blues solo, his signature trademark, and at the end reaped a real avalanche of ovations from the audience.
Richie was having an incredible time this go-round. He made the breaks shorter by tipping back some ruddy red wine, the excellent hospitality of Nina II’s owner, and he loved the sight of the crowd, which, unlike the serious, mature audiences at his regular concerts in the Austrian resort town of Velden on Lake Wörthersee, was overwhelmingly young and letting loose far more genuinely at the trio’s onslaught. So Richie didn’t hold back either. During So Cold he masterfully spiced up the solo by lifting the guitar behind his back. We could only dream of that kind of acrobatics four days ago at the Bluesiana show; the new top-notch solo in the phenomenal blues ballad Remember was even topped at this point by the Yardbirds cover Shapes Of Things, where Richie treated himself to a proper soloing marathon, and both of his sidemen, who until then had loyally handled only the most basic bass and drum duties for their boss, had to show off their skills too.
The low ticket price, of course, took its toll. That was a totally logical expectation. The guy drastically cut his repertoire on that account. By almost three quarters of an hour. So the show ran “only” an hour and a half in total. Then came Richie’s announcement that the band would play the last song of the night and one more after that, without the “encore routine” (the club doesn’t allow it).
We got Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower, which, for sheer immersion in the soloing, once again topped and beat the intensity of the feelings I’d brought home from Richie’s Bluesiana show. It was a joy to watch a man who can’t wait to pounce on the part of a song where he can unfold his solo, his own unique accent. The first song that should’ve belonged in the obligatory encore, but which Richie, as mentioned, skipped along with that skit, was yet another lively original called I’m Loosing You, and a feverish upgrade of it came with Mother’s Head Family Reunion, which normally should close the show.
The vibe was outstanding, which naturally showed in the crowd’s participation, and Richie was especially proud of that; his conscience was clearly nagging him, so he decided to keep the show going with the Hall & Oates cover Sarah Smiled. That very song confirmed once more Kotzen’s exceptional talent and musical genius, as it was a joy to witness the growing intensity of emotion pouring through the trio’s performance and Richie’s vocal improvisation. The song opens totally innocently, fragile, and over the course of the performance grows into an extraordinary, drawn-out, noisy closing solo section, full of letting go and spontaneity, into a completely new shape that also delivered a great element of surprise. The interplay of all the elements of the trio was extraordinary! “You know, we’d play all the time, but we have to rest now and then, so the next song will really be the last one for tonight,” was Richie’s closing address, and with danceable yet rock-charged beats he led us to the end of the evening with the Four Tops cover Reach Out, I’ll Be There. And of course Kotzen, amid all his circus, didn’t forget his Poison “buddies” (especially Ricky Rockett’s wife) and also tore through Fire & Ice.
What more is there to say after this experience of hanging out with this splendid musician? You’re simply grateful for the chance to meet him. It might sound syrupy, but given the special atmosphere, the special crowd that came to his show, and the swaying five meters above the waves of the Adriatic Sea in the middle of Rijeka’s harbor, there’s no need to stress that this was once again a totally different Kotzen show, one that will never happen again. As I said, compared to the February 13, 2009 show in the Austrian town of Velden, it was a much more cranked-up, louder rock accent, sacrificing some of the fine elements only blues can bring to life (a mandatory Kotzen ingredient), but with an incomparably bigger dose of genuine letting go, spontaneity and unbelievable commitment, which is really the most a musician can offer you. And if it’s Richie Kotzen on top of that, the cup is that much fuller!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
p.s.: an equally juicy RockLine report on the Richie Kotzen concert in Ljubljana on February 16, 2009, can be read HERE!
Setlist
1.I’m Loosing My Mind 2.A Love Divine 3.Fooled Again 4.Faith 5.So Cold 6.Fire & Ice 7.High 8.Change 9.Remember 10.Shapes Of Things 11.Doing What The Devil Says To Do 12.All Along The Watchtower 13.I’m Loosing You 14.Mother’s Head Family Reunion 15.Sarah Smiled 16.Reach Out, I’ll Be There
Photo gallery
