Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Trieste / Politeama Rossetti / Italy
Concert date: 27.02.2012
Attendance: 1200
Ticket price: €40.00 (front stalls) / €34.50 / €31.00 / €28.50 (balcony) / €23.00
It hadn’t even been a month since the House of Lords gig when Trieste came calling again. As part of a new European tour, and after two back-to-back visits to Zagreb, Johnny Winter, the older of the famous Winter brothers, stopped by in the Trieste capital, right on our doorstep. Blues has always been mostly the domain of the Black population, but Johnny Winter ranks among the biggest white names in the genre. So if blues runs through your veins and you’ve never met a blues legend face to face, going to his show was pretty much a duty.
Winter played the Politeama Rossetti hall, which looks a lot like the Ljubljana Philharmonic, only bigger and with a nicer atmosphere. The Trieste crowd filled the 1,500-seat hall admirably, though it didn’t sell out. Big thanks go to the organizer here, who set Aleš and me up with excellent seats to watch the show.
At nine o’clock sharp, the duo The Cyborgs took the stage and immediately grabbed attention with masks pulled down over their heads, the vocalist’s mic built right into his. If the term “horror blues” existed, it would suit The Cyborgs down to the ground! Their electric boogie sound drew on the legacy of delta blues, which the frontman breathed new life into with a rough but charismatic vocal line. The stripped-down sound, built on the simplest guitar/drums combo, felt completely natural and spontaneous, while the duo put their own artistic stamp on old-school boogie with psychedelic-tinged lines, hitting the nail right on the head! A comical but clever set warmed up the butts and palms of everyone there and got ears ready for the arrival of the legend.
The instruments were already set up, so the break lasted only a few minutes before the curtain was drawn back, announcing the start of the main event of the evening.
Johnny Winter has been backed for a few years now by guitarist Paul Neslon and bassist Scott Spray, while drummer (and occasional vocalist) Vito Liuzzi is still getting used to his role. The trio welcomed the big moment with a played-out overture, and then Johnny Winter appeared from the right and slowly made his way, with a roadie at his side, to the chair at center stage. Winter has been dogged by health problems throughout his career, so it’s downright incredible that, despite visible physical exhaustion, this 68-year-old little man still has enough energy for tour after tour. Hats off!
And so it began. The opening track, Hideaway, already gave a partial answer to how Winter was doing. His fingers still obeyed him nicely and raced up and down the neck of his beloved Erlewine Lazer guitar without trouble, so his right-hand man, rhythm guitarist Paul Nelson, never once had to jump in for Johnny and bail him out in any moment of weakness, right up to the last song of the main set, All Over Now. Johnny Winter thinks of everything! The show was put together to please every generation and taste in the crowd, and especially in the first half of the set he often glanced from the core blues sound toward the border of rock’n’roll and boogie, adding even more color to the backdrop of his legacy. After Chuck Berry’s cover Johnny B. Good, where the fast tempo left Winter completely out of breath, he surprised with a return to the seductively slow Blackjack. It was precisely in the slow numbers, with the focus on the vocals, that Johnny was at his best, even though the years have audibly taken an irreparable toll on his vocal power and intensity.
The trio of backing musicians handled the musical framework of Winter’s performance with routine ease, often stretching the songs into free-flowing jam sections and so giving the “boss” a moment or two of rest. In the instrumental passages, the musicians often worked in familiar delta blues motifs or even classic rock lines borrowed from Clapton’s Cream (Sunshine Of Your Love) and British old-timers Rolling Stones (Gimme Shelter). During Tore Down, drummer Liuzzi took over the vocal duties with a deep, throaty voice, taking on part of the job of the shaggy albino in the hat pulled down over his head at center stage even before the end of the show.
Johnny Winter came back on stage with a second guitar – hunched over in his chair, he cradled a Gibson Firebird and finally brought into the sound all the oomph his blues, or blues rock if you like, needs. Up to that point, Winter’s guitar had been far too hard to hear in the full interplay of the instruments, so the two closing songs of the night – Dust My Broom from the current album “Roots” (2001) and a cover of Dylan’s Highawy 61 – sounded all the more emotional.
The hour-and-20-minute journey with one of the few blues legends who hasn’t been forgotten somewhere on the fringes of music history (as happened to many of Winter’s contemporaries) admittedly didn’t deliver those euphoric moments that only live shows can conjure up, given the musician’s battered form. Still, meeting a master of musical interpretation, given his reputation and charisma, is a moment that won’t be forgotten any time soon.
Setlist
1. Intro
2. Hideaway
3. Boogie Real Low
4. School Girl
5. Got My Mojo Workin’
6. Johnny B. Good
7. Blackjack
8. Tore Down
9. Lone Wolf
10. Don’t Take Advantage
11. Boney Moroney
12. All Over Now
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13. Dust My Broom
14. Highway 61
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