Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Schwabenhalle / Augsburg / Germany
Concert date: 22.06.2011
Attendance: 3000
Ticket price: €58.00
Well, the time has finally come to celebrate for everyone who “lived” the hits of the eighties. Back then, in the years of innocence, big hopes and carefree growing up, you were soundtracked by splendid production and infectious melodies that burrowed under your skin “from the first listen”. This was the music of bands whose success was helped along by the loyal frequencies of radio waves on certain loyal radio stations. Yep. Once upon a time, when there was no MTV yet, or at the start, when MTV wasn’t a strong enough medium yet, that’s what lit the fuse. But when “video killed the radio star” (if anyone still remembers The Buggles hit “Video Killed The Radio Star”), the golden age of AOR kind of tolled its last bell too. What the hell is AOR, anyway? Adult Oriented Rock: rock music that isn’t too noisy, but rather very “easygoing and soft”, while building on absolute melodic and sonic perfection. AOR is marked by big arena-anthem melodies, bombastic production with sharply accentuated contrasts between the individual building blocks of the sound, and a lead vocal seasoned with multifaceted vocal harmonies. It’s hard to say AOR came out of the classic hard n’ heavy rock of bands rooted in the blues tradition. Rather from the finest representatives of progressive rock and jazz rock fusion. Simply put, AOR demands refinement, patience, absolute perfectionism. A big dose of studio flexibility and breadth.
The pioneers, in fact the founding fathers of the AOR genre, are Journey, who hail from San Francisco. Not that they were the first. Simply put: certain ideas that were revolutionary for their time kept popping up on this planet with various releases around the turn of the seventies into the eighties (one of them, for example, being the self-titled studio debut by Boston), and Journey wove them together most sensibly and optimally into a concise legacy of compact melodic and sonic perfection, something nobody has topped since.
And so it happened that fortune smiled on AOR fans too. The touring package of Journey, Foreigner, Kansas and Night Ranger is a dream combination and demands your attendance by itself, provided you put polished, compact melody first, the prototype of which is the eternal musical magic of The Beatles’ punchline.
Night Ranger were the first to tap the keg at the AOR celebration in Augsburg. The band is hugely successful and respected in the USA. That’s why it still lives mostly off its home market in the USA and the Japanese market today. The three original members, Kelly Keagy (vocals, drums), Jack Blades (bass, vocals) and Brad Gillis (guitar, backing vocals), aren’t giving up! Joined in 2008 by guitarist Joel Hoekstra and now by freshly recruited keyboardist Eric Levy, who round out Night Ranger in 2011. The guys had a good half hour at their disposal and squeezed a sort of garland of the best moments from the start of their career into it. Interestingly, the band actually played only hits from the first two albums.
The band burst out as if they hadn’t seen a stage in at least twenty years. Touch Of Madness from the album “Midnight Madness”! Before us comes alive a band that hasn’t played actively in Europe since 1985. Guess who they toured with back then? Foreigner. And it’s the same this time. Night Ranger before Foreigner. In Europe. A long time. Huge enthusiasm was boiling over on stage. Blades writhed around the mic like a wild teenager twisting from a testosterone overload, and both guitarists, Brad Gillis and Joel Hoekstra, were goofing around with their guitars in every imaginable position, so it was almost strange how they could still play all the parts of the songs accurately enough. The more-than-idyllic guitar partnership clearly delivered a full measure of great soloing. If Touch Of Madness went to Jack Blades on lead vocals, right after it we got the answer to why Keagy’s drums stand at the far right front, right at the edge of the stage. Sing Me Away, a classic from the debut “Dawn Patrol” (1982), went to his vocals, and a wave of enthusiasm was set off by the hall, nicely filled by this point with some 2500 people who hadn’t forgotten the chorus of this Night Ranger hit. Kelly Keagy has lost some punch in his voice, which showed toward the end too, when the band played the biggest hit of their career, the half-ballad, punchy, anthemic Sister Christian. But never mind. The guys supported his main line excellently with backing vocal harmonies. Keyboardist Eric Levy even deliberately took on the stage look of former Night Ranger keyboardist Alan Fitzgerald. Levy’s masquerade was so slick that it easily fooled plenty of Night Ranger connoisseurs and fans in the hall that evening.
Growing Up In California. Yep. The title says it all, Night Ranger are simply typical Americans, down to the sunburned red necks. But the song is no ranch lemonade, it plows on wound-up. In it the band unfolds a guitar ornament of double harmonies and the obligatory melodic AOR chorus. Considering it’s a brand new song from the album “Somewhere In California”, which came out literally the day before the band’s gig in Augsburg, the album could be very interesting for all fans of classic Night Ranger and their eighties output. In Don’t Tell Me You Love Me the guys didn’t forget to slip in the lead phrases of The Eagles classic Hotel California and Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water, which has long been the standard way the band performs this classic live. Still, it made you think that Night Ranger could have played another classic or two with shorter banter from Blades and without “stretching out” Don’t Tell Me You Love Me. That would have been especially desirable and welcome for all the true fans who didn’t (and don’t) get to hear a single song from the otherwise excellent “Seven Wishes”, “Big Life” and/or “Man In Motion”. The mandatory hits Sister Chiristian and the closing white-hot cannonade (You Can Still) Rock in America were there, where Night Ranger fired off every last round. For the occasion both guitarists picked up guitars covered in the colors of the American flag, so it smelled all over the place of the vast cowboy ground of the Wild West. Since Keagy is placed at the right edge of the stage, the guys set up most of the monitors behind their backs and so filled the apparent emptiness of the stage. An excellent performance that, let’s hope, promises a return of the band to European stages as soon as possible.
Next up were the American prog rock pioneers Kansas. Their musical contribution is outstanding on the rock atlas, and the classic albums of the seventies carry great weight in the history of rock music. They influenced a whole series of bands of the younger generation, especially those that helped shape later progressive metal. With Dream Theater themselves at the forefront. Sadly, the Rockline crew had to skip Kansas this time. Because of a scheduled interview with Journey that overlapped with the Kansas set. Let’s hope the legends show up in Europe again sometime. Kansas played the following songs in Augsburg: Magnum Opus (Howling At The Moon), Point of Know Return, Hold On, Dust In The Wind, Miracles Out Of Nowhere, Portrait (He Knew), Fight Fire With Fire, Carry On Wayward Son
At nine in the evening Foreigner take the stage. For Foreigner in 2011 the same goes as for Journey. They are reborn. Their album “Can’t Slow Down” is the very definition of songwriting brilliance, one that few bands today can match. Foreigner have been regulars on concert stages again since 2007. They’re incredibly tight. The lineup recently changed again. Drummer Mark Schulman returned to the team, having already played with Foreigner between 1992 and 1995 and between 2000 and 2002. It evidently turned out that Jason Sutton wasn’t the right solution for Foreigner after Brian Tichy left, so Mick Jones apparently looked around again for drummers who had worked with Billy Idol in the past.
Foreigner are an outstanding attraction on stage. Thanks above all to the unsurpassable singing of Kelly Hansen. Hansen, who looks like a kind of triplet brother of Steve Lee (ex-Gotthard, R.I.P.) and Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), is a real upgrade on Lou Gramm. Yeah, it’s hard to believe the fake can be better than the original. But sometimes that happens too. If only it happened more often with those bands that patch their lineups together and left their golden years back in the eighties.
The stage grew for Foreigner. The monitors were hidden behind projection screens, and to the left and right of the drums, all the way to the keyboards, there were extra raised platforms on stage that let the band members move around even more actively during the show and so fan the real concert embers even further. There were no slip-ups to be heard during Foreigner’s set. In Milan, the day before the Augsburg gig, the band played the song Dirty White Boy. That was cut from the set list for Augsburg, and Waiting For A Girl Like You went back in, which is otherwise a fixture of all the German shows on the current tour with Journey.
Foreigner also played with Journey in the United Kingdom and Ireland in the first half of June this year. There they had 40 minutes. For the part of the tour covering the old continent, though, Journey and Foreigner agreed that both bands would play for the same length of time. Journey thus shortened their repertoire by half an hour, while Foreigner gained a new half hour. That’s a very logical move, given how much more settled the classic Foreigner evergreens are in the ears of the European part of the audience.
Starrider is a special kind of gem that shines in the Foreigner catalog, and this time too it wasn’t missing from the set list. Mick Jones himself sang it. A dreamy adventure under a veil of prog rock, which actually opens a window onto the very roots and beginnings of the band’s career, it’s tailor-made for Mick’s voice. Otherwise, though, please don’t wish for Mick Jones to sing anything else in Foreigner. His voice is very thin, and it seems kind of funny coming from a gentleman dressed in his Sunday best, who has been through a lot in his long career, in a vest that even our late “musical visionary” Henrik Burkat – Henček would have envied (thanks to Helena for the tip). The versatile Tom Gimbel helps out on flute in the intro, and then in the chorus pretty much the whole lineup joins in on the lead vocal duties.
The special charm and attraction of every Foreigner concert is the sax solo in the song Urgent. This is a song that wakes even the iciest heart. It’s bursting with erotic charge, and this song always brings out Foreigner’s absolute pedigree, that of a band few can top on stage. With the performance of this classic they firmly threw down the gauntlet to Journey, and the AOR legends had a truly tough job ahead of them, taking over the stage next. This otherwise flawless set, full of true perfection in combining full melodiousness and punchy rock power, could be improved in the future by Foreigner with a few new shuffles in the established repertoire, thereby livening up their already perfect stage shows even more. Foreigner remain an outstanding stage attraction, worth catching at every opportunity and soaking up the timeless classic evergreens that topped the charts in the golden eighties.
Journey started their set at exactly a quarter to eleven in the evening. The band released a new studio album called “Eclipse” at the end of May (other sources give the official release as 03.06.20011). The album title itself is connected in an interesting way to something else. When the band started its tour of the old continent, the date was 15.06.2011. And on that day there was a real lunar eclipse. Journey had a stage designed similarly to Foreigner’s before them. A wide projection screen and an intense play of spotlight gradients. You couldn’t spot the monitors anywhere on stage. Arnel Pineda is in great spirits from the first second and handles all of Perry’s vocal lines with vehemence and great confidence.
Journey concerts are known for sounding brilliant in terms of an optimal sound picture. This time too, everything in the Schwabenhalle hall was just right. Pineda dominated with his vocals. Schon’s heavily accentuated “sustain” effect was excellently incorporated into an equal sonic partnership with Cain’s keyboards, while the active rhythm partnership of Valory and Castronovo was bursting with detailed oiling and brilliantly calibrated tuning. Castronovo is a bomber. An incredibly explosive, almost unpredictable drummer, who literally saves the transitions by slapping around the tom-toms. Around the fortress of drums there are sheets of plexiglass that hold in the sound and give the drummer extra control over what’s happening on stage. Castronovo sang Keep On Runnin’. Pineda jumped backstage in the meantime to cool down his white-hot vocal cords, and Deen did his job brilliantly while drumming. Castronovo has an innate “slightly cracked” timbre, with a similar natural intonation to someone like Mathew Gordon Sumner a.k.a. Sting, with an added pinch of smokiness in the color. The intonated registers are tailor-made for a lead vocal in Journey. Excellent work from this fantastic musician. In the first part of the German tour Castronovo sang lead on the song Mother Father, which in both Milan and Augsburg was replaced in the repertoire by the aforementioned Keep On Runnin’. After the excellent set-list spice-up of Ask The Lonely, Jonathan Cain introduced the band’s new album (he also threw in the members’ excitement about the new release, saying: “…and we are very excited about that…”) and announced the performance of the first single from this record, City Of Hope. The song started with a short opening solo spot from Neal Schon. The melody Schon carved out is an abridged summary of the instrumentals included on both of the latest studio albums. A viciously wound-up “sustain” effect and deft steering through the heavy-handed control of the “pull off” string-bending. If the new song calmed the atmosphere down a bit, the hall woke up radically again when Journey cut loose with Stone In Love. Next comes the excellent new song Edge Of Time, where Schon tears loose again in the outro in a wild soloing cannonade. Schon proved once more that he’s one of those guitarists who are their own musical chapter, their own musical world, a blank sheet of paper. There are few such one-of-a-kind oddballs, so multilayered and at the same time refined, unpredictable and witty, as Neal is. Steve Lukather (Toto) is of course right there alongside. After Edge Of Time, Journey take their concert toward the peak.
The first such peak was the romantic pairing of Lights and Open Arms, where the crowd got properly sentimental. The surprises, in terms of spicing up the set list, this time were Keep On Running and Ask The Lonely, and also the song Escape. Wheel In The Sky, during which the whole hall was up in the air, didn’t include the stretched-out jam we got two years ago at the band’s show in Balingen, Germany, at the Bang Your Head!!! festival there. But it sounded more wound-up again, since here Jonathain Cain also underlines the riffing with a Fender Telecaster guitar. Faithfully is another indispensable ballad choice for Journey, where Cain gets a few moments for an opening solo improvisation, similar to before Open Arms. The guys didn’t skip the superb album “Raised On Radio” either and chopped out Be Good To Yourself, while Don’t Stop Believin’ announced that we were nearing the end of our time with Journey.
The band soon returns for an encore with Any Way You Want It , and the hall is flooded by a snowstorm of confetti that sees off the end of a great celebration for all AOR nostalgics. Brilliant. No technical hiccups, excellent sound where you can hear every last fart, excellent singing from Arnel Pineda, who proved once more that Journey stand completely confident without Steve Perry on the rock scene in 2011, and also that they have been born again. After such excellent releases as “Revelation” (2008) and then the far more adventurous, exploratory and at the same time seriously rocking and wound-up album “Eclipse”, something we haven’t seen since the release of “Frontiers” from 1983, it’s clear the legends have found new life force, creative charge and existential purpose. Of course the main engine is precisely Arnel Pineda, who freshened up the band with his vocals and inspired its stage and studio essence and presence. During the concert it was hugely interesting to watch Ross Valory, who showed an exceptional (for him!) amount of stage activity, since he marched around the stage the whole time, to the left and all the way back to the drums. Ross was clowning around the whole time and entertaining the front rows in the hall with a colorful selection of goofy faces.
In closing, it’s worth mentioning that the Journey concert, which otherwise sounded excellent and lived up to the band’s pedigree of stage, sonic and performing perfection, didn’t leave as strong an impression as the Foreigner concert before Journey. What are the possible reasons for this phenomenon, which isn’t even surprising? First of all, the hit evergreens, of which Foreigner have more in Europe than Journey. In 2011 Foreigner have far more stage kinetics than Journey. With Journey, a single person runs around the stage. That’s the “little rubber racer and unlimited gymnast” Arnel Pineda, while with Foreigner there are three seriously slick stage show-men. Gimbel, Pilson and Hansen. Kelly Hansen’s communication with the audience is also simply a lot more endearing, closer and homier, which means that Foreigner, in the final tally, are consequently a more approachable and down-to-earth stage act toward the crowd than Journey.
However I turn it over: this combination of four bands on the tour called “Rock The Nation” is an outstanding idea that brought together in the halls of Germany a true guard of all the fans of the classic sounds of eighties radio stations and of the legacy of bands that strove for melodic and sonic rock refinement. Let me also mention that after the concert people just would not leave the merch stands, and even during the concert itself the siege of those stands went on nonstop. Let’s hope this wasn’t a lone swallow and that in the future we’ll witness more such band pairings for similar concert epics. Seeing American bands like REO Speedwagon, Styx, Kansas and Night Ranger on European stages in 2011 is, after all, about as likely as meeting extraterrestrial intelligence or hitting the jackpot on the lottery.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
JOURNEY:
1.Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)
2.Ask the Lonely
3.City of Hope
4.Stone in Love Play
5.Keep on Runnin’
6.Edge of the Moment
7.Lights 8.Open Arms
9.Wheel in the Sky
10.Escape
11.Be Good to Yourself
12.Faithfully
13.Don’t Stop Believin’
—encore—
14.Any Way You Want It
FOREIGNER:
1.Double Vision
2.Head Games
3.Cold as Ice
4. Waiting For A Girl Like You
5.Can’t Slow Down
6.That Was Yesterday
7.Starrider
8.Feels Like the First Time
9.Urgent
10.I Want to Know What Love Is
11.Hot Blooded
12.Juke Box Hero
NIGHT RANGER:
1.Touch of Madness
2.Sing Me Away
3. Growing up in California
4.When You Close Your Eyes
5.Don’t Tell Me You Love Me
6.Sister Christian
7.(You Can Still) Rock in America
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