Location: Udine / Castello di Udine / Italy
Date: Thursday, July 7, 2016
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 playing, among other places, Trieste’s Poiiteama Rossetti theater. Memories of his last visit to the Slovenian capital in November 2012 still ring vividly, though. Counting the Tivoli show with G3 in July 2004, Steve Vai has played there four times in total over his career.
Since rock’n’roll times keep getting bleaker for us Slovenes with every passing day, we’re forced to head abroad every time we want to catch the bigger acts, all the way up to the biggest. Luckily, it’s sometimes not that far, like this time, when the famous guitar wizard stopped off at Udine castle. The idyllic castle park, a sprawling lawn laid out in front of the fortress itself, hosted an imposing stage, with some 1,500 seats set up in front of it. Steve Vai and his backing band, bassist Phillip Bynoe, drummer Jeremy Colson and Vai’s eternal “guitar manservant” (though no less excellent a musician) Dave Weiner, took the stage at exactly 9:30 p.m. As officially announced, that is. The man used the new tour to mark the 25th anniversary of his cult classic “Passion And Warfare” (1990). Vai didn’t sit idle on that front either, seeing the anniversary off with a new official release called “Modern Primitive” (2016), a double. The first disc holds tracks written during the recording of “Passion And Warfare” that stayed locked away in Vai’s “archives” until this year, while the second has the remastered version of the studio album “Passion And Warfare” (1990), which 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 few classics from past studio albums, opening with the cheeky 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 humorously imitate horse neighing, instantly set an extremely lively, cheerful mood in the venue that didn’t let up for a moment. Right until the end of the show. In short: the opening number alone showcased Vai’s sense of humor and his famous knack for flipping every life situation to the funny side of the coin. The ballad Tender Surrender replaced the originally announced Whispering A Prayer, which was also the most significant substitution on the otherwise fixed setlist of the current tour.
Most of the crowd was waiting for the night’s peak: a live performance of the entire “Passion And Warfare” album. Before kicking it off, Vai took some time to deftly justify his intent, saying the time had finally ripened to tackle it here and now, with the right backing crew able to play such a demanding album live, an album Vai has always held in tremendous awe. The show was also adorned with a projection screen showing some nostalgic moments from the time of the album’s release, so we hopped back to the late eighties and early nineties, including the opening video where Vai performs the opening Liberty alongside Brian May. Later came clips with greetings from Joe Satriani and John Petrucci, directed as if it were a live feed (Vai’s inseparable colleague Devin Townsend uses something similar in his shows), and of course it’s all spun through that famous American humor that has always come with the rock-and-roll clowning around of the whole planet. Vai and the gang 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, especially got to spread their wings.
As usual, Vai enchanted with his exceptional charisma, which goes hand in hand with his elusive, one-of-a-kind virtuosity and his auteur art culture. He pulled all sorts of moves that don’t belong to standard guitar-playing etiquette, punctuated his solos with an entertaining barrage of facial grimaces, and masterfully articulated all those gymnastic twists with his extremely long, nimble fingers. The lean fifty-five-year-old comes across as exceptional in every respect. Charming, astonishing. As I said: unique and one of a kind. During the “Passion And Warfare” run he once again took over with the epic For the Love of God and its fading extended outro jam that seemed to have no end, plus an excellent video projection that in one breath lays out humanity, man made in God’s image, his beauty and all the horrors that, over the years of “grasping lust for dominance,” have sadly become the norm for us. A heart-wrenching portrait of where we stand.
The third and final part of the show opened with a number Steve Vai wrote with Frank Zappa, under whom he cut his teeth in the first half of the eighties, with archive footage rolling on the screen again of a then twenty-one-year-old Vai alongside the unforgettable genius Zappa. As has been the custom at Steve Vai shows for some years now, the man calls two volunteers from the audience onto the stage and tells each of them to come up with a motif in their head, which the band memorizes as a whole and then builds a new instrumental out of those very motifs. It’s a bit that’s extremely fun on one hand, where Vai and the gang especially get to loosen up on stage, but after a few years it can feel a little worn out, since many a fan of Vai’s music would rather see the musician fill that part of the repertoire with an extra original composition.
The regular part of the show flew by in a flash. Vai came back out for the obligatory encore and “modestly” asked the audience: “Can we play one more song?” The band then launched into the sorely missed Firegarden Suite, or rather the central moment of that suite called Taurus Bulba, wrapping up another top-notch performance that ran two hours and twenty minutes overall.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
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
