Location: Boogaloo / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: 24.11.2011
Attendance: 650
This November, Steve Lukather came back to Europe for the fourth time in a single year to present his latest solo studio album “All’s Well That Ends Well” (2010). One of the best guitarists in the world, the lead guitar of the unforgettable rock perfectionists Toto, who recently confirmed he’s joining the Australian tour of the legendary G3 lineup, that alliance of guitar aliens Satriani-Vai-Lukather, thus returned to Zagreb for the second time in two years.
The quartet backing him on the new European tour stays the same. Steve Lukather on guitar and vocals, the slender Renee Jones on bass, the gigantic drumming Atlas Eric Valentine, and the skinny, goateed keyboardist Steve Weingart! With Steve Lukather gigs it’s always hard to say which one was, or will be, the best. In fact, it’s impossible. Every Steve Lukather show leaves a special, unique impression, and its melodies and memorized images keep stirring the imagination of the average concertgoer long after the last note. Luke is simply one of a kind.
Last year, at the end of October to be exact, the white “bluesman” Joe Bonamassa packed Boogaloo to the last corner and the hall was bursting at the seams. A good year after Bonamassa’s visit, Steve Lukather drew a smaller crowd into the club, I’d say the ideal number. It wasn’t crammed, yet the club with a good 600 heads was still properly full. For creating the authentic atmosphere of full-on intimacy that a Steve Lukather show demands, you couldn’t wish for a better place than Boogaloo.
That night Luke and company were in great spirits. Great turnout, a stage of serious size. The backing trio is already on stage when Luke fires off a few opening notes, hidden behind the stage curtain. Only after a good minute does Lukather actually stride onto the stage. To his standard central position, strapped into his faithful companion, the Ernie Ball “Luke” flame top guitar model. The band opens this gig (again) with the new Darkness In My World. A song with a singable, melodic chorus that instantly tightens up and unites the gourmet crowd.
The sound was pristine, like fresh out of the box. Clearly Boogaloo is the right address for this kind of show. Luke hasn’t changed the setlist much for the fourth leg of the European “All’s Well That Ends Well” tour. He kept the signature numbers from the new album, while beefing up the repertoire with some “pre-Cambrian” pieces from his solo discography. Already early on, Hero With 1000 Eyes rang out in the most melodious way possible, followed a bit later by Party In Simon’s Pants, and together with the well-worn standards of Luke’s live repertoire, Song For Jeff and Extinction Blues, they gave a flinty revival to Luke’s classic solo studio album “Candyman” from 1994. Only the current Lukather studio record “All’s Well That Ends Well” was represented in Zagreb with a comparable number of songs.
That the quartet keeps playing like a dream hardly needs saying. Of course, the cherry on top is Luke’s form on the day, and in Zagreb the man was truly in phenomenal spirits. Luke obviously went for an instrumental setlist this time, which the excellent performance of Hancock’s Butterfly already confirmed, with Luke filling the gap of the horn parts with his “jazz”-sharpened galaxy of “solo-isms”. In this one the brilliance of the extremely sophisticated, nimble tightness of the Valentine / Jones rhythm tandem really shone. Fantastic, all in one piece. That song spilled spontaneously into the band’s first “jam”. One of the peaks of the show was conjured up by the multifaceted instrumental “Beck-style” carving Tumescent, which turned into a solo spot for the beastly Eric Valentine, who stunned with a combination of extreme speed, sudden bursts of explosive attacks around the drum kit, and brilliant precision, which not everyone can muster with such a performance seasoning. After it the band latched onto yet another “jam” number. Not just any, but Party In Simon’s Pants. The title of course refers to the song’s co-writer Simon Phillips, and the band stunned again with a phenomenal rendition of a hugely demanding and complex piece, packed with a galaxy of syncopations, progressively broken rhythms, sudden mood shifts, many lead motifs and spontaneous slaloming through demanding jazz-shaped passages, for which the masterful keyboardist Steve Weingart in particular deserves a thankful nod in places. This time’s subordination of the setlist to instrumentals was confirmed by the somewhat expected “Beck-ish” Song For A Jeff (listen to how the lead melody is played, that is, the solos in the song!).
The hall was woken from its hypnosis by Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Wheeps, and Steve effortlessly got the crowd singing the “evergreen” chorus of the classic in unison. Jimi Hendrix’s formative influence on Lukather as an artist was of course impossible to hide in Tears Of My Own Shame, which, as expected, flowed smoothly into Hendrix’s Little Wing. Here too Luke showed, in the manner of his generally highly pragmatic guitar rhetoric, that for him as an artist there are no artistic limits. A new fascination woven from subtly sophisticated sonic washes of the magic of six-string theory, the kind only this unique artist is capable of. Fascination for fascination’s sake.
Steve wrapped up the two-hour show with two compact new songs, Can’t Look Back and, in the encore, Flash In The Pan, which both carry choruses that ignite on first listen, once again spurring the crowd in the hall to give back a higher dose of decibels in noise.
This time we got no Toto classics, but we did get a special kind of show where the “jam” element led the way ahead of the vocal songs. Something that, in his mature years, suits Lukather’s sophistication and his extremely intelligent flexibility in drawing on a rich arsenal, a veritable treasure trove of knowledge and unbridled creative talent, that this wizard carries in his blood, better and better. Focusing on instrumentals also carefully protects the vulnerable character of vocal delivery that has marked Lukather in recent years. This was confirmed by the performance of While My Guitar Gently Wheeps, where Steve left part of the vocal lines to bassist Renee Jones, who pleasantly caressed our ears with her velvety voice.
Two hours of magic and serenade with Steve Lukather once again fully delighted and enchanted all the true music gourmets, who treat their souls and bodies only to carefully chosen works of musical art by top performers, marked by a unique combination of one-of-a-kind sonic and performance perfection. With feather-like lightness Steve Lukather proved yet again that he stays firmly at the very top of the best guitarists spinning around in our solar system right now. Every one of his shows is an experience you can’t get enough of watching, let alone listening to, so events like a Steve Lukather concert naturally invite visit after visit. Let’s hope we won’t have to wait too long for another such chance.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Darkness In My World 2. Hero With Thousand Eyes 3. Extinction Blues 4. Stab in the Back 5. Watching The World 6. Butterfly 7. Band jam 8. Song for Jeff 9. Don’t Say It’s Over 10. Tumescent 11. Eric Valentine drum solo 12. Party In Simon’s Pants 13. While my Guitar Gently Weeps 14. Tears Of My Own Shame 15. Little Wing 16. Can’t Look Back —encore I.— 17. Flash In The Pan
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