Location: Velden Am Wörthersee / Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Austria
Date: Thursday, 04/13/2017
It doesn’t happen all that often that a band from the days when glam metal was riding its commercial peak stops by somewhere near us. Ladies and gentlemen, this time the culprits behind that original sin are the Americans Enuff Z’Nuff!! The band is still led by one of its founding members, bassist and, for some years now, lead vocalist Chip Z’Nuff. To make the show even more tempting, Enuff Z’Nuff also brought along Venrez on the tour, fellow American hard rockers made up of equally seasoned guys, just with a considerably shorter track record.
All I missed that night was a bigger crowd. With Austria already deep in the ceremony of the Easter holidays, that may have kept some people home. What was especially surprising, though, was the lack of any real influx of Italian fans of good glam rock and metal. Let’s be honest: after the show in Velden, Enuff Z’Nuff head off to the last three concerts of their European run, all booked in northern Italy.
Venrez were first on stage. The band is led by the fifty-six-year-old Venrez (“Ven” to his friends), real name Steven Berez. Keeping him company is co-founder and former bassist of Juliette Lewis and the Licks, Jason Womack, who plays guitar in Venrez, and the two of them are the main driving force pushing Venrez forward. The rhythm section is (Italian mountain folk, as they say) bassist Nico D’Arnese and drummer Charles Ruggiero. In a three-quarter-hour set the band presented material from their three studio albums, “Sell The Lie”, “American Illusion” and the current “Children Of The Drones”, and more than satisfied the handful of hard rock devotees who turned up at the club that night. “Ven” is a superb frontman, just the right amount of cocky and just the right amount of dapper, and his banter with the crowd is infectious. As (you’d expect from a guy) he aimed most of his attention at the women in the audience, who luckily were standing right up front. The band served up an excellent, infectious mix of classic hard rock aesthetics, laced with a basic blend of rock’n’roll and dirty punk rock attitude, all piled into a one-of-a-kind cumulus that hit with energy instantly. The key piece on the scale is Steven’s voice, which sits in the mid and lower registers, so it doesn’t add much to the melodic punch, but instead leans toward alternative rock. No surprise there, since over the years the band has shared stages with acts who like to dip into the punk rock legacy in their own vocabulary: Alice Cooper, Slash, Buckcherry, Fuel, Hardcore Superstar, Richie Ramone and others. A superb, sharp and seriously committed warm-up for Enuff Z’Nuff.
Chip Z’Nuff opened by greeting the crowd with a warm address, praising pretty much everything about Austria, led by the girls, the scenery, the drinks and the food, while adding that the only thing that bugs them a little is that they can never get their hands on the “real stuff”. As a deliberate provocation, it fired up the room incredibly well. Chip Z’Nuff is rock’n’roll from head to toe. In an outfit that alone keeps alive the eighties glam rock legacy the band came out of, he walked on stage dressed so that I first mistakenly thought Robin Zander (Cheap Trick) was with us. Well, Enuff Z’Nuff’s music does flirt plenty with that famous Cheap Trick essence, which Chip Z’Nuff loudly pointed out during one of the breaks. The man is an incredible bassist. He does it all with his fingers, no pick, and often reaches for complex melodies in the transitions and intros. At the same time he sings extremely appealingly and adds that much-needed “naughty” and “goofy” element to the band’s fierceness, which gives the feeling of a group that can’t be tamed. Somewhere in the middle of the set the band cut loose with an excellent version of Bowie’s classic The Jean Genie, and otherwise, in a set that was far too short, clocking in at barely an hour of playing (encore included), they played the biggest hits of their career, with the focus on four tracks from their self-titled debut studio album released in 1989. Those were the expected ones: Fly High Michele, New Thing, Kiss the Clown and In the Groove. Two songs from the album “Strength” (1991) joined them, The World is a Gutter and Heaven Or Hell, and just like that more than half the show was already gone. Enuff Z’Nuff wrapped up the night with the brand-new Dog On A Bone. That’s a track Enuff Z’Nuff created with the current lineup.
Chip Z’Nuff has some incredible names in his lineup. Drummer Danel B. Hill, for instance, is the son of ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill. Guitarist Tory Stoffregen (who also has his own band, New Black Sabbath) put on an incredible, even jaw-dropping show on his black Fender Telecaster. Especially interesting is rhythm guitarist Tony Fenell, from Birmingham in England, who in the mid-nineties spent two years playing and singing with Ultravox, during Midge Ure’s absence. In short, the new Enuff Z’Nuff crew, led by the unbelievably charismatic Chip, who’s been through the wringer and then some, can boast an outstanding musical background, plenty of miles on the clock, and therefore a great deal of musical character.
Short but sweet, and the performance was downright phantom-level and brilliant. Full throttle and no brakes! The execution was top-notch and as such it counts as one of the most convincing hard rock shows ever at Bluesiana. The hunger was something else in every moment of the dynamic whirl on stage. Enuff Z’Nuff were very loud that night, and their phrases and the famous choruses of their biggest hits were flaking plaster off the walls of Bluesiana and trying to knock the windows off their hinges. The band came back for an encore and played the brand-new Dog On A Bone. This excellent song appeared on the album “Clowns Lounge” (2016), a sort of compilation CD that mostly holds archival and previously unreleased material from the band. Still, that single Dog On A Bone, with its incredibly catchy chorus, confirms that the new-era Enuff Z’Nuff is a quartet armed with the real know-how for building a riff and a composition that ignites irreversibly in rock ‘n’roll.
An outstanding, unforgettable night, explosive stage theater with no holding back! After the show, the RockLine crew also decided to make an exception and linger at Bluesiana for a chat with absolutely everyone from both bands. We heard plenty of stories from the golden days of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip and its excessive nights. Let’s hope Enuff Z’Nuff come back to Velden very soon. Shows like theirs are something you can only wish for.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
