Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Trieste / Macaki klub / Italy
Concert date: 18.11.2012
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: €15.00 (advance) / €17.00 (day of the show)
I wouldn’t have guessed he was 56! Thirty-five tops. Remember Eric Martin, the original voice of Mr. Big? This year he booked a new solo acoustic tour, and the good man wormed his way onto the soil of the old continent too. A guy who has seen pretty much the entire rock era is seriously seasoned at what he does. The stage is his second home. A contagious personality and a distinctive voice swing the doors wide open to the hearts of music lovers.
This hardened musician has been building his reputation since 1978, when he founded his own band, Eric Martin Band, and until 1985 opened shows for acts as big as Foreigner, Rick Springfield, Hall & Oates, Marshall Tucker Band, Billy Squier and Moly Hatchet. And that’s not all. EMB’s 1983 debut »Sucker for a Pretty Face« opened the door to plenty of arena tours, on which EMB supported ZZ Top, Journey and Night Ranger. In short, by the day Eric Martin joined forces with Pat Thorpey, Billy Sheehan and Paul Gilbert in the Mr. Big »circus«, he was already a well-established and respected name on the North American rock scene.
And so Eric found himself close to our neck of the woods once more. Back in 2008 he toured Europe as a special guest on the Twin Dragons tour, where RockLine caught up with him at Bluesiana. This time, though, the man decided to travel with a single suitcase, stuffed with his acoustic guitar (probably with room left over for a toothbrush).
Macaki klub is a cozy late-night hangout with extremely inflated drink prices. Still, you’re always greeted by the club owner’s incredibly friendly staff. The venue where Eric Martin played this time is a stone’s throw from the famous Politeama Rossetti theater, where RockLine caught a bunch of interesting shows this February and March (Roger Daltrey, Johnny Winter, America).
Until ten in the evening, the crowd was treated to an acoustic duo of two guitars and excellent vocals, with a repertoire covering glam rock, hard rock and melodic rock acts like Skid Row, Gotthard, Whitesnake, Steelheart,… Very pleasant, and honestly, nobody would have minded if the duo had just stretched their set by another hour.
The club has two spaces: a longer, »elongated runway« that ends in a bar by the front door, and a smaller one, built as a balcony raised above the main area. That’s where Eric Martin climbed up, strapped on his guitar, put on his glasses and started leafing through a songbook, building the set list on the fly.
The packed room, with about 150 people squeezed in, included a few fans from Slovenia as well as Croatia. The crowd showed it hasn’t come close to forgetting who Mr. Big are. Eric’s set was built mostly on Mr. Big classics, so we got A Rose Alone, Electrified, Cat, Stevens’ Wild World, Alive And Kicking, Next Time Around, Goin’ Where the Wind Blows, Shine, The Chain, Promise Her the Moon, Voodoo Kiss, Take Cover and the obligatory To Be Wtih You. He mixed in a few solo numbers too, like Kansas and Where Do I Fit In, and for the finale he switched to pure singing, since he’d been covered by one of the guitars of the duo that warmed up the crowd before Eric, when he tackled the Cream standard Crossroads. That very number confirmed that Eric Martin is first and foremost a singer. He simply shone once he got up from the bar stool and suddenly had his legs and arms free.
For the first two thirds of the show, Eric Martin handled every range of the songs with ease. His voice served him really well. Slightly husky yet warm, even velvety, and in such an acoustic, stripped-down setting it was the quality of emotional expression through the prism of blues music that really came through. That’s the music Eric Martin grew up on, and it’s the basic starting point of his artistic development and maturing. He didn’t need to work hard on the chemistry in the room. It was built in an instant, because, as mentioned, it’s hard to resist a personality as charismatic and fun as Eric Martin. In between songs he kept entertaining the crowd with jokes at his own expense, and he couldn’t dodge the quips flying about his folding reading glasses. Eric’s eyebrows just couldn’t hold back the sweat! The white beam of the spotlight demanded its toll, and the man was literally bathing in sweat throughout the show. But Eric is well used to all that. He kept signaling the problem with long, squinting looks toward the audience, as well as blinking. The battle with sweat is simply part of his professional craft. The toll of every star who finds themself in the glow of the floodlights.
In the second third of the show, Eric Martin’s voice began to visibly fade. So he increasingly left the lead melodies to the crowd, who really proved themselves with their support and their command of the Mr. Big verses. A fully immersed Eric, who truly packed his soul and heart into the performance, was visibly tired after almost two hours of non-stop entertaining, but with the mega hit To Be With You right at the end he delivered one of the concert’s highlights again, for which he has to thank, once more and above all, the heartfelt devotion to Mr. Big’s music that the audience radiated that night.
After the show, Eric stepped out among the fans, signed autographs and exchanged a few words with everyone. A dream experience for every Mr. Big fan, no doubt, and with his authenticity and wholehearted commitment, Eric chased away the dark clouds of vocal wear in the closing stretch of the set and proved that going to his solo acoustic show is still as relevant as ever, even in 2012.
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