Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Laško / Jagoče (Zlatorog stage) / Slovenia
Concert date: July 17, 2014
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: €20.00
This year’s Pivo in cvetje festival in Laško is something of a breakthrough. In past seasons, inviting acts like Gov’t Mule already hinted that it might finally be starting to open up to the bigger names of the international rock scene, and this year, with the likes of The Winery Dogs, Triggerfinger, George Clinton and Steve Stevens Band on the bill, it’s really starting to look like a festival that’s growing into its own charisma and character. When I stepped up in front of the Zlatorog stage, the sheer perfection of it blew me away, right up there with the most prestigious festival stages in Western Europe. The organizer really thought of every last detail. Superb stage lighting, even a wireless camera whooshing back and forth through the air during the show, a proper tent for the sound engineers,… Straight out of the playbook of the biggest European festivals. In short: let’s hope this becomes the norm and that the festival gradually turns into one of the most important and recognizable ones in Central Europe, drawing plenty of foreign visitors in the future. One swallow doesn’t make a spring, so we’ll wait and see what the near future brings.
Anyway. This year’s Pivo in cvetje is actually the first one RockLine has covered with a team on the ground. Our one-man team showed up at the venue very late. Sometimes an unpredictable chain of circumstances just keeps things from going the way you planned. It’s a good half past nine in the evening and the Belgian alternative rockers Triggerfinger step onto the stage in Jagoče. The band, active since 1998, has four studio albums under its belt. The latest, »By the Absence of the Sun«, came out in mid-April this year. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the energy payoff of a »trio« in rock music is the »fatal« one. Actually the most effective. Optimal. Chemistry mixed in a triangle, in three sectors. Three units of one musical body. No matter the musical direction. From Motörhead to Rush, Grand Funk Railroad, The Police, all the way to The Winery Dogs and, of course, Triggerfinger.
Triggerfinger got an hour of stage time. In it they played 11 songs, and there wasn’t a hero in the crowd who’d dare claim after the show that they weren’t thrilled with what they’d just heard. The sound was crushing. Insanely loud. The PA was a racket. Triggerfinger are a band that builds on a massive wall of sound. The phrases are simple, tight, cut to the axiomatic rule of »less is more«, without a whiff of complication. Because of that, their stoner-flavored songs often bring Queens of the Stone Age to mind, especially once the dapper Ruben Block, who looks like a cheeky rascal, joins in on vocals. The band is by no means unknown. In the past they’ve opened for The Rolinig Stones, and they’re also known for their opening act at the final of the Vitali Klitchko vs. Tony Thompson heavyweight title fight (Bern, Switzerland, July 2012). Triggerfinger are »contagious«. Actually, Ruben alone is contagious. The man is an exceptional frontman. Charismatic, and he measures out exactly the right words at exactly the right moments to keep the crowd alert and on their toes the whole time. Bassist Paul Van Bruystege, a two-meter-tall eating giant armed with as many as four bass guitars, two of them Rickenbackers, is a seriously rough player, because the musical nature of the band demands it. His lines are often loaded with chord playing, and he keeps ruthlessly tearing and digging into the bass with a pick, like you’re watching Lemmy Kilmister (Motörhead). Ruben, on the other side, doesn’t owe Paul a thing. He too reaches for guitars that produce a fat, slightly out-of-tune but feverishly roaring sound, where the stage mics play an important role too, adding extra howling noises that creep into the background of the overall blaring drone of the whole sound picture. Ruben also uses a semi-acoustic »f-hole« guitar, but mostly sticks to trusty Telecaster beauties. Drummer Mario Goossens moved into the spotlight during his solo spot, where Ruben and Paul each lit up the mighty drummer from their own side with beams of spotlight during his solo. No snapped strings, no broken drum heads, no other forms of bleeding ears in the crowd. In their lucid, almost bizarre profession of stylistic minimalism, Triggerfinger are deafening, no two ways about it. Under their riffs they lay disco-like, danceable rhythms, creating an anthemic feel and a flirty groove that gets the listener swaying and joining in instantly. The guys know how to throw fragments of surf and rock ‘n’ roll into the stoner sound. In the closing part of the show the band once again underlined its lucid streak by »putting« drummer Mario into an electronic rhythm pattern, which turned him into a cup percussionist as the band played a sarcastic version of the hit I Follow Rivers by Swedish indie rocker Lykke Li . Triggerfinger proved to be a superb spice for the festival day on the Zlatorog stage and definitely delivered a full-blooded warm-up for the first stars of the night and main headliners, The Winery Dogs.
The supergroup is made up of three exceptional musicians, and when you need to characterize their creative résumés, you struggle to find the right superlatives: drummer Mike Portnoy (ex-Dream Theater, Transatlantic), bassist Billy Sheehan (Mr. Big, Niacin, ex-David Le Roth, ex-Steve Vai, ex-Talas,…) and guitarist/vocalist Richie Kotzen (solo, ex-Poison, ex-Mr. Big). No need to add that, one way or another, these guys are career-linked to a whole constellation of kindred musicians whose talents tower far above the average of the rest of the musicians in our galaxy. In 2013 they released their debut studio album. What’s incredible about The Winery Dogs is that all three musicians, coming from different musical backgrounds, form such a superb fusion, a unique musical jigsaw puzzle. Each musician brings an equal share to this vivid mosaic. Kotzen as the typical representative of blues and soul, then the incorrigible jazz-rock fusionist Billy Sheehan, and one of the best progressive drummers in the world, Mike Portnoy, for whom it somehow just doesn’t compute why the little word »ex« has had to be stuck in front of his Dream Theater membership for more than two years now.
The Winery Dogs are the perfect blend of the best these three musicians deliver as individuals. When they launch into the vocal parts, where Kotzen’s distinctive, mildly black-sounding soul voice naturally takes the central role, the dynamic rhythm line turns seriously funky, loaded with a fat groove produced by the solidly rattling sound of Sheehan’s bass and Kotzen’s Telecaster (in recent years Kotzen has given up playing with a pick altogether), and the parts thoroughly steeped in melody can (suddenly) turn into jam sections at any moment, where each of the three delivers the best that their well-honed sense for a free-spirited excursion into the proving ground of top-level solo theater can create in that moment, where the force, power and tightness of the improvisations literally take the concertgoer’s breath away. The experience of watching Dream Theater leaves a similar effect, which means we can already say that The Winery Dogs are right now surely one of the most powerful and attractive rock »heavyweights«, or supergroups, on the planet, delivering top-notch shows.
And that’s how it was in Laško too. People were fascinated, shocked, seduced by the one-of-a-kind charm of this fantastic band’s stage presence. The trio was in great spirits. That was down to the huge stage and a nice turnout of an engaged crowd, which, especially in the front rows, radiated great devotion to the trio, since they knew the material from the debut album »The Winery Dogs« inside out – RockLine review HERE. Kotzen bewitched with his passionate vocal commitment, packed with the sparkle of genuine emotion, and a special detour came with his performance of his solo number Doin’ What the Devil Says to Do, accompanied only by an acoustic folk guitar. The character of the band’s own songs gained a new dimension of quality thanks to the unpredictable picking of solo lines and the throwing in of punchy transitional ornaments, that is, an added sense of spontaneity, which makes the band especially appealing. Sheehan gives the impression of a 25-year-old in the prime of his »stallionhood«, even though he turned 60 this year. The towering guru of the bass kept running to the far left edge of the stage during his bravura playing, then back toward the center to Portnoy’s drum fortress, where he and Mike traded a whole constellation of punchy clown grimaces throughout the show, a reflection of the great onstage working chemistry between the two musicians. Portnoy was a completely different Portnoy on stage than the one we saw this March in Munich at the Transatlantic show – RockLine report HERE. There, Portnoy was an indifferent »grumbler« and basically didn’t give the crowd a single smile. Before the show he ignored fans unless you’d bought the V.I.P. package to meet the band backstage, and his comments between songs were curt and unsuccessfully sarcastic. Portnoy on stage in Laško, though, showed up as a totally different person. Cheerful, approachable! Up for any kind of silliness. Smiling the whole time. He kept seeking eye contact with the crowd, pointing at individuals in the audience with his sticks, climbing over the drums, and at the end of the show, in the closing »fade out«, when his buddy Sheehan began hurling his famous turquoise Yamaha bass high into the air, he grabbed the hi-hat stand and flung it high into the air too. Then he climbed up onto the drums and literally scattered the toms and cymbals all around, so the set looked like a bomb had hit it by the end.
Compositionally, the songs on the album »The Winery Dogs« are all of equal quality, and it’s hard to pick favorites. Nevertheless, for the tail end of the show, when the band wanted to bring the performance to a big atmospheric finale, they picked I’m No Angel, The Dying and Desire, which have especially biting melodic catchiness in the choruses, spurring the crowd to respond with full participation even at one in the morning. The band also surprised in the obligatory encore with a cover of Talas’ Shy Boy. Here Sheehan took over lead vocals, just like on the original, and the band delivered one last ultra-fast shrapnel burst into the concert mosaic, closing the show with yet another theatrical peak. The crowd greeted the band ecstatically, and the band showed great accessibility toward fans of their music, with closing gestures of heartfelt farewells to the audience too. The Winery Dogs are a band worth every sin to see. Especially for a ticket that cost a measly €12.00 in presale and €20.00 on the day of the show. Anyone who missed the chance to see The Winery Dogs live in Laško will have a hard time forgiving themselves.
It was great to see that, besides a strong contingent of friends from Austria and Croatia, the crowd that day also included a whole bunch of folks from the Laško-Celje-Sevnica region, who don’t regularly follow rock spectacles (unless giants like The Rolling Stones, U2, Bon Jovi or AC/DC are playing nearby) and so treated themselves to a concert experience with a super-rock lineup like nothing they’d ever seen in their lives.
Setlist
TRIGGERFINGER:
1. Game
2. Short Term Memory Love
3. By Absence of the Sun
4. And There She Was Lying in Wait
5. On My Knees
6. My Baby’s Got a Gun
7. Perfect Match
8. Let It Ride
9. All This Dancin’ Around (incl. Mario Goossens drum solo)
10. I Follow Rivers (original Lykke Li)
11. Is It
THE WINERY DOGS:
1. Elevate
2. Criminal
3. We Are One
4. One More Time
5. Time Machine
6. Damaged
7. Six Feet Deeper
8. Hey Joe (original The Leaves)
9. The Other Side
10. Bass Solo
11. You Saved Me
12. Not Hopeless
13. Doin’ What the Devil Says to Do (Richie Kotzen solo)
14. I’m No Angel
15. The Dying
16. Desire
—encore—
17. Love Is Alive (original Gary Wright)
18. Regret
19. Shy Boy (original Talas)
Photo Gallery
