Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Welfenhalle / Weingarten (Ravensburg) / Germany
Concert date: June 13, 2010
Attendance: 700
Ticket price: €35.00 / €38.00
Rick Springfield’s arrival at Germany’s Weingarten Open Air festival, as part of the yearly tradition of evenings called Classic Rock Night, was one of the nicest surprises this year’s European concert calendar could possibly offer. Of course, I’m speaking here on behalf of a small handful of connoisseurs, say those ten or so Journey, Night Ranger, Survivor or Foreigner fans that Slovenia can scrape together in 2010. If Canada has Bryan Adams, then Australia gets to have Rick Springfield! And Slovenia? Let’s not even go there.
Australian rocker and heartbreaker Rick Springfield is, at 61, simply incorrigible. He’s brilliantly preserved, with a youthful look that big rockers of Rick’s vintage can only dream about these days. You’d knock a solid 20 years off his age on sight. Weingarten, really the northern part of the lovely little town of Ravensburg in southwestern Germany, just before the Swiss border crossing, was one of three lucky stops where Rick decided to play some of his famous hits for European audiences again, picked from the repertoire of his rich songwriting archive. After Sweden (Sweden Rock Festival) and Norway (Oslo), Weingarten was thus Rick Springfield’s third straight and final show of the summer.
It was the day Slovenia played its first World Cup match in South Africa. At 1:30 p.m. Bojan and I are sitting in front of a TV in a fast-food joint not much different from the kebab shops of Ljubljana. The manager and his staff give us really weird looks when we tell them we’re from Slovenia. Not only had Slovenia won, making both of us “weirdos” happy, but that day more or less redirected all of Germany’s daily events too, everything bending itself around the World Cup.
Rick Springfield is Australian, and wouldn’t you know it, on the very day of his German show, 22 pairs of legs from the German and Australian national teams were set to cross paths. So Rick’s show was announced for 6:30 p.m. sharp. Because the weather played games, the show originally planned for the open air was moved into the Welfenhalle. In front of the entrance at 5:00 p.m. things were already seriously buzzing. There weren’t many people yet, but they were fired up like crazy. Of course, the bulk of those chirping in front of the closed doors were girls, ladies and women of every age, the ones who had burned Rick’s image into their memories for all eternity back when they were teenagers.
By 5:40 the place had filled up nicely. Local band Colour Rain took the stage. They served up 35 minutes of “whining”. Bands today come up with all sorts of things to draw attention to themselves with something “different” and fresh. But they just can’t justify it. This quintet is very pretentious in its “philosophy”. And the music is too. The guitarist would belong in a glam hard rock band, the singer combined the lisp of Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) with Andrew Eldritch (Sisters Of Mercy). What reminded you of that most was the wrist-slashing wailing on stage and the Ray Ban shades. Musically, a pretty uninteresting band. The English delivery of the verses was slurred and unintelligible. The sound is riff-driven, but with a stronger alternative streak borrowed from eighties post-punk, from the days when the first wave of “goth” was elbowing its way into rock music. The sound was dreadful, but it’s funny how Germans instantly adopt any band as long as it’s local. A few loud cheers greeted a band that, musically, uncovers absolutely no revolution.
Rick Springfield kept us waiting until 6:50 p.m.! With his backing quintet he burst onto the stage with a high-voltage rush of momentum that really reflected the musician’s big debt to European audiences, who had to wait a full twenty years for him to show up on the old continent again. Springfield is a one-of-a-kind entertainer. He had a good 700 people on their feet in the blink of an eye. Rick still has a superbly preserved voice today! That voice comes with a chameleon-like knack for adapting to whatever moods he wants to bring to life through his stage sermon. Strapped, as always, into the guitar that has faithfully stuck with him throughout his career, he ran around the stage in tune with the music and made sure the whole time that the crowd was firmly behind him. With I’ve Done Everything For You the vibe in the hall jumped up another notch. The women went wild for Rick, knowing every line of the choruses. Rick dashes off the stage after Affair Of The Heart, picks up a bouquet of white roses and climbs back up. At the end of that same song he whacks the guitar with the bouquet a few times, knocking most of the petals off the blooms, and it feels like he’s fired a salvo of confetti into the crowd. The band strings hit after hit and we’re already in the phenomenal Living In Oz. A short breather follows and Rick announces a new song from the latest album “Venus In Overdrive” (2008), What’s Victoria’s Secret! With it, especially in the catchy chorus, he proves he’s kept every trademark that graces all his classic albums of the golden eighties, the ones that cemented his name in the mausoleum of the most successful rock acts. He played as many as four songs from the new album and they melted perfectly into the rest of the set, made up of the musician’s best-known hits. Among the new tracks, the atmospherically standout I’ll Miss That Someday was especially pleasing, once more confirming the successful integration of modern alternative elements into the classic rock template of the recognizable Rick Springfield school.
The hit Celebrate Youth, which you’d be hard-pressed to say anyone on the planet doesn’t know, is cut by the band with a thick, beefed-up, massive rock riff, and live the song gets a whole new mood and expressive quality compared to the studio original. Rick takes a few new moments for himself. He grabs a Fender Stratocaster and rips out a bluesy solo. Rick is, in fact, an excellent all-round guitarist, but since he’s the designated entertainer and lead vocalist on stage, an extra guitarist in the lineup covers all the more demanding parts. Still, this spot, where Rick pulled off a fierce, mouthwatering blues solo, led into a cover of the Cream classic Crossroads, with which the band, on top of a bag of strong favorites it can shake out of its sleeve for as long as it likes, definitely surprised everyone there.
A steep ride follows, charged with high voltage, toward the atmospheric peak of the show. When the band fired off Don’t Talk to Strangers , the most fired-up girls in front of the stage raised a banner: “Rick please play Don’t Talk To Strangers!” Wish granted, but it’s clear we’re racing toward the end of the set. Hit after hit. Of course there’s no skipping the obligatory smash Love Somebody, and when the band launches into Human Touch, Rick has had enough. First he takes two microphones in his hands and tests his first victim on the chorus lines. The poor security guard, in a Cro-Magnon-meets-Schwarzenegger accent, barely manages to squeeze out a stuttering sequence: “We a-ll ne-ed…,” Rick, in his “torture of an innocent victim”, sees there’s no luck here, so he decides to jump into the photo pit and climb the barrier all the way up to the front row. From there he holds out the mic to the wild girls and all the women reliving their teenage curiosity and mischief. Of course, they showed off their infallibility. Rick then (and this was no longer hard to predict) vaulted the barrier and mingled with the crowd. What follows is comedy and a real feast for the eyes, as two security guards with generously padded bellies of genuine Bavarian origin chase after him. The fully immersed musician suddenly stands at the opposite end of the hall, right behind the mixing desk, and the whole hall is shouting along with him “We All Need A Human Touch!” Magic! Then comes another test of the security team’s psychophysical capabilities, as they’re forced to haul themselves over the barrier guarding the mixing desk and back into the floor area, hunting down the incorrigible “peace disturber” Springfield. He’s finally back on stage, things settle back to “normal”, and with fanatical backing from the crowd Springfield wraps up his energetic set with Jessie’s Girl. After a good hour he vanishes backstage.
Three minutes go by and a “topless” Rick is already shamelessly flexing the muscles of a 60-year-old while entertaining the crowd with a cover of Chip Taylor’s Wild Thing. But not for long. There’s also Kristina from the album “Succes Doesn’t Spoiled Me Yet” (1982), as the band and Rick wave the audience off for the final goodbye. An hour and ten minutes of show. Not much. But that move by Rick after 20 years hinted that this was a scouting mission, feeling out how much desirability and popularity the musician still has on European soil. Judging by what we saw, there’s no reason to doubt his popularity at all. Springfield also made sure the whole concert was filmed by cameras, and the icing on the cake came from the “bunnies” of Rick’s German fan club, who generated by far the most euphoria over the potency of their ideal stage stallion.
The moment Springfield said goodbye, a curtain was drawn, like in a theater. A giant projection screen instantly took over the stage, because everything was already set up for watching the soccer match between Australia and Germany. Even though Rick is Australian, the event didn’t exactly derail him during his Weingarten set.
Outside it had been pouring for quite a while, and it was good that the organizer had spotted the grinning weight of the black clouds, which were dumping rain as if it were Judgment Day, and moved the show into the hall. However, that decision also dragged along a few consequences that weren’t necessarily welcome. The sound was “prepared in a hurry”, there was a need for quick improvisation and for adapting the show to the conditions of a hall. Without proper extra tuning with the monitors that would have firmed up and deepened the sound. So throughout the set we heard muffled guitars, and the keyboards, an important building block of Springfield’s music, never really came through. The multi-part backing vocal harmonies didn’t fully ignite either. Even so, through this picture of inadequate sound distribution you could still sense the musicians’ extraordinary tightness on stage. Including the vocal harmonies. A perfect lesson in how it’s done. Springfield proved he’s superbly preserved in terms of vocal character and that his form, in terms of high confidence and the vehemence with which he conquers a popular stage, hasn’t slipped despite the burden of the sixth decade he’s shouldered. Let’s just hope the musician comes back for a standalone European tour this fall. And above all, for a longer setlist. In Weingarten he left us at least half an hour of playing too soon.
Photos: Bojan Horvat
Setlist
1. Mr PC 2. I’ve Done Everything For You 3. Affair of the Heart 4. Living in Oz 5. What’s Victoria’s Secret 6. Celebrate Youth 7. Venus in Overdrive 8. I’ll Miss That Someday 9. Love Is Alright Tonite 10. Crossroads (Cream cover) 11. Don’t Talk to Strangers 12. Love Somebody 13. Human Touch 14. Jessie’s Girl —encore— 15. Wild Thing 16. Kristina
Photo Gallery
