Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Udine / Castello di Udine / Italy
Concert date: 07.07.2016
Attendance: 1000
Steve Vai, one of those hard-to-top guitar aces and, for many, elusive guitar »deities«, wrapped up his last European tour in June 2013, performing his music with a 45-piece Romanian orchestra and also appearing at the Poiiteama Rossetti theater in Trieste. Meanwhile, memories of his last visit to the Slovenian capital in November 2012 are still ringing vividly, a night that made it four shows in Slovenia for Steve Vai over his career, counting the Tivoli gig with G3 in July 2004.
With rock’n’roll times looking gloomier for us Slovenes with every passing day, we’re forced to head abroad for concerts by the bigger names, and the biggest ones. Luckily, sometimes not all that far, like this time, when the famous guitar wizard stopped right at the castle in Udine. The idyllic castle park grounds, a sprawling lawn laid out in front of the fortress itself, hosted an imposing stage, with some 1500 seats set up in front of it. Steve Vai, backed by his band of bassist Phillip Bynoe, drummer Jeremy Colson and Vai’s eternal »guitar henchman«, no less brilliant a musician, Dave Weiner, took the stage at exactly half past nine in the evening. Right on the official schedule, in other words. The man used the new tour to mark the 25th anniversary of his cult classic »Passion And Warfare« (1990). Vai didn’t sit idle in this respect either, seeing the jubilee off with a new official release called “Modern Primitive” (2016), which is a double. The first disc holds tracks written during the »Passion And Warfare« sessions that stayed locked away in Vai’s »archives« until this year, while the second disc holds a remastered version of the studio album »Passion And Warfare« (1990), the record that put Vai among the elite of the world’s most successful and most respected musicians and, most importantly, among the elite of the most special and unusual musical artists of all time in the rock era.
In the first part of the show Vai played a handful of classics from past studio albums, opening with the fun Bad Horsie (»Alien Love Secrets«, 1995). A nice warm-up built on a fat guitar riff played in the rhythm of a lazy horse gallop, shod with guitar ornaments that wittily imitate horse whinnying, instantly set an extremely lively and cheerful mood at the venue, and it didn’t let up for a second. Right to the end of the show. In short. The opening number alone showed off Vai’s sense of humor and his famous knack for flipping every life situation onto its funny side. The ballad Tender Surrender replaced the originally announced Whispering A Prayer, which was also the most significant substitution on the current tour’s otherwise fixed setlist.
Most of the crowd was waiting for the night’s peak. A live performance of the entire »Passion And Warfare« album. Before kicking this off, Vai took some time to skillfully justify his intentions, saying the time had finally ripened to take it on here and now, with the right backing band, one that can play such a demanding album live, an album Vai has always held in enormous reverence. The show was also decorated with a projection screen showing some nostalgic moments from the time of the album’s release, so we hopped back to the second half of the eighties and the early nineties, including the opening video where Vai performs the opener Liberty alongside Brian May. Later came clips with greetings from Joe Satriani and John Petrucci, staged as if it were a live feed (something similar is used at his own shows by Vai’s inseparable buddy Devin Townsend), and of course it was all spun through that famous American humor that has always been a must in rock entertainment across the whole planet. Vai and the crew stretched a few songs into extended outro jams, where the indestructibly wild Jeremy Colson on drums and the masterful Bynoe, who stunned with his feel for slapping the bass guitar, really got to spread their wings.
In his usual manner, Vai enchanted with his exceptional charisma, which goes hand in hand with his elusive and unique virtuosity and his authorial art culture. He pulled all sorts of moves that aren’t part of the standard guitar-playing routine, punctuated his solos with amusing bursts of countless facial grimaces, and masterfully articulated all those gymnastic twists with his extremely long, nimble fingers. The lean 55-year-old comes across as exceptional in every respect. Charming, astonishing. As said. One of a kind. During the »Passion And Warfare« run-through he once again took on the epic For the Love of God, with a breathtaking extended outro jam that seemed to have no end, along with an excellent video projection that in a single breath lays out humanity, man made in God’s image, his beauty and all the horrors that, sadly, have become taken for granted over the years of »grasping hunger for domination«. A heart-wrenching portrait of our condition.
The third part, the closing stretch of the show, opened with a track Steve Vai wrote with Frank Zappa, the man he cut his teeth with in the first half of the eighties, and the screen once again rolled archive footage of the then twenty-one-year-old Vai next to the unforgettable genius Zappa. As has been the custom at Steve Vai shows for a few years now, he calls two volunteers from the audience up on stage, tells each of them to come up with a motif in their head, which the band memorizes as a whole and then builds a brand-new instrumental out of those very motifs. It’s an extremely fun number that lets Vai and the gang loosen up on stage, but after a few years it can feel a bit worn out too, since many fans of Vai’s music would rather see him fill this part of the set with an extra original song.
The regular part of the show flew by. Vai came back on stage for the obligatory encore and »modestly« asked the crowd: »Can we play one more song?« The band then struck up the sorely missed Firegarden Suite, or rather its central moment called Taurus Bulba, closing another top-notch show that clocked in at two hours and twenty minutes overall.
Setlist
1. Bad Horsie
2. The Crying Machine
3. Gravity Storm
4. Tender Surrender
—“Passion And Warfare” (1990) full album—
5. Liberty
6. Erotic Nightmares
7. The Animal (virtual duel with Joe Satriani)
8. Answers
9. The Riddle
10. Ballerina 12/24
11. For the Love of God
12. The Audience Is Listening (virtual duel with John Petrucci)
13. I Would Love To
14. Blue Powder
15. Greasy Kid’s Stuff
16. Alien Water Kiss
17. Sisters
18. Love Secrets
—————————
19. Stevie’s Spanking (orig. Frank Zappa)
20. Build me a song
21. Racing the World
—encore—
22. Fire Garden Suite IV – Taurus Bulba
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