Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Pat Travers Band
Label: Frontiers Records
Released: 2015
Running time: 62:30
Rating: 4/5
Canadian musician Pat Travers, a great rock veteran and one of the most distinctive voice-and-guitar combos ever rolled into a single being, loves to look back on 1978, when he played the Oakland Coliseum Stadium in front of 55,000 frenzied fans. The festival there also featured AC/DC, Van Halen, Foreigner and Aerosmith alongside Pat. The following year Pat Travers put out a live album from that event called »Live! Go for What You Know«, which connoisseurs of his catalog still consider his live classic.
In 2010 Pat Travers released a new studio album, »Fidelis«. In 2011 he took it out on the stages of Europe, and in 2012 across the North American continent. Already on European soil (including a stop at the Bluesiana club in Velden, Carinthia), he unveiled a revamped backing band, which saw drummer Sandy Gennaro rejoin the fold. Way back when, Gennaro recorded the album »Radio Active« (1981) with Travers and also did a tour with him, on which the Pat Travers band opened the nights for the legendary Rainbow! Bassist Rodney O’Quinn is the new man on the team, while Kirk McKim has been forming a tight tandem of two guitars that understand each other perfectly with Travers for years now.
The live document »Live at the Iridium NYC«, taken from a show on 08.08.2012, reflects the excellent form of the »uncut diamond« Pat Travers on the day and his outstanding stage presence. With an eclectic musical charisma that fuses blues and rock forms into a conglomerate all its own, it doesn’t skimp on a surplus of high-octane rock energy. As we’ve come to expect, Pat Travers’ rough-hewn vocal is the building block that puts the much-needed cherry on top of the recognizability and uniqueness of his songs. His songwriting draws at every step on the elemental power of the blues, where the improvisational wizardry of Travers’ solo spots naturally steps right up front. Travers has always translated the blues into the eruptive, high-kinetic energy of a loud, hard-hitting rock aesthetic, and he does it extremely effectively! For the fans, the album opens like a dream. With a performance of the ancient Gettin Betta, from Travers’ third studio album »Puttin it Straight«, followed by another original classic with an even mightier and more charismatic guitar phrase, in the song Crash And Burn, taken from the album of the same name released in 1980. There’s also Heat In The Street (“Heat In The Street”, 1978), and Pat didn’t skip two numbers from the then still current album »Fidelis« either. The cheeky Ask You Baby and the melancholically yearning Josephine.
Pat Travers certainly didn’t forget to bow to the character and work of a few musicians who had a fateful influence on his musical development. The first of these is I’ve Got News For You, originally by Ray Charles. He doesn’t pass over a tribute to the pioneers of Delta blues either, with the songs If I Had Posession Over Judgement Day (orig. Robert Johnson) and Spoonful (orig Howlin’ Wolf), where guest Jon Paris adds extra spice on harmonica, alongside Travers’ tastefully piercing, gruff vocals.. Travers also doesn’t skip his take on Hendrix’s blues classic Red House, where he once again stuns with his bag of soloing acrobatics. This live recording is closed by the folk-turned-standard slave song Black Betty, which in the hands of Pat and his stage crew gets a fascinating makeover. In Pat’s version it fits seamlessly with the rest of the material,
Travers is such a brilliant musician that, on top of the hard, erectile, manly vocal eroticism he still shows off so uncompromisingly in his later years, he teases the listener the whole way through with a display of the most varied guitar embellishments and filigree finesse, dictated by the superiority of his sharply attuned, alert ear. That ear is always lying in wait, full of feeling and passion. Travers is maturing like a fine old wine. And this album shows it directly. It’s played so wholeheartedly and with such sparkle that you find yourself on stage with Pat in an instant when you close your eyes! For all the high-flying live sparks this document brings so authentically and wholeheartedly, you do miss at least three or four more originals in the set, but how does that ancient saying go again? Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Lineup
Pat Travers – guitar, vocals
Kirk McKim – guitar, backing vocals
Rodney O’Quinn – bass guitar, backing vocals
Sandy Gennaro – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Jon Paris – harmonica on tracks 10 and 11
Track list
01. Rock And Roll Susie
02. Gettin’ Betta
03. Crash And Burn
04. Heat In The Street
05. Josephine
06. I’ve Got News For You
07. Ask Me Baby
08. I La, La, La Love You
09. Lone Wolf (Kirk solo) / Red House
10. If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day
11. Spoonful
12. Black Betty
