Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Gradski stadion / Varaždin / Croatia
Concert date: 12.07.2009
Attendance: 8
Ticket price: 290,00HRK
At the last minute, a trip to this year’s third consecutive Radar festival squeezed its way into the RockLine crew’s already “overstuffed” daily grind. For the second year in a row, Radar festival took place at the Varteks football club stadium in Varaždin. And it landed on the first normal, nice, sunny day after almost three weeks of non-stop rain from the sky, which in July is nowhere near giving you the feeling that summer is with us. Radar festival has obviously “caught on,” put down roots and is worth investing in, and the agency behind it, Nova Music from Austria, is clearly thinking long-term. This year’s Radar festival was old-school through and through, and so was the age makeup of most of the crowd that showed up. The name Santana stuck out a mile from the lineup, and for that reason alone it was worth driving every last inch of the adventure to Varaždin.
As a rule, I always get lost in Croatia. I hate Garmin and similar robotic traitors, because they tastelessly serve everything up on a plate, which makes me feel like a complete “dummy” with a single brain knot. So thanks to my stubbornness, my travel companions, who occasionally get lost along with me, suffer totally innocently in the car, like when I pulled up not at the stadium but at an air show at the nearby sports airfield in Varaždin. While we were hunting for the stadium, Voodoo Lizards played practically their entire show. So Lea and I only caught the final gasps of the last song on our way to the window with the press accreditations.
| VOODOO LIZARDS: 15.30 – 16.00 |
Voodoo Lizards are locals from Varaždin who play rock with a firm riff-driven grip that never loses its organic sonic contour. Especially not when a flirty, dynamic rhythm line comes close, one with a rapacious, voluminous groove. A touch of garage-style noise. Alternative? Indie? They pull retro impulses from the past, when the seventies and rock were young, that much is for sure. Judge for yourselves. Simple and catchy. Maybe Bernard Fowler himself, the Rolling Stones’ longtime backing vocalist, heard something Rolling Stones-ish in them and offered to produce the band’s debut, which was already a huge coup for them. The Varaždin show was all the more important for the band because it brought Bernard Fowler himself on stage as a special guest on one of their tracks. Fowler played with The Rolling Stones Project the day before Radar festival in the Austrian town of St. Viktring near Klagenfurt. So he wasn’t even a light-year away from Varaždin, and he could easily make it over to back the band. An extraordinary gesture. Sadly we missed the gig, but the musical noise of Voodoo Lizards that my receptors caught in traces sounds very promising. Nothing special in terms of expression, but it still manages to spark a certain interest.
| ZORAN PREDIN & LAČNI FRANZ: 16.15 – 16.55 |
I’ll never quite understand where the big veterans of Slovenian rock music came from on this year’s Radar festival stage. Especially since Predin keeps going completely self-assured and successfully defies the Slovenian “mainstream” with his solo output well into the new millennium. Still, he made the time. If only there were a spark of hope in the air for a reunion, or at least some kind of live album, for old colleagues, friends and all the survivors who still remember (we remember) those golden days. Anyway, it was great to see them back on stage together. Truly. In a flash I was taken over by a nostalgic feeling from more than 15 years ago, when we used to go to the student cafeteria in Rožna dolina in Ljubljana, where the band played us students plenty of fun rock nights that we never imagined would one day become such precious, valuable memories. The lineup of Zoran Predin (vocals), Milan Prislan (guitar), Andrej Pintarič (drums), Mirko Kosi (keyboards) and Zoran Stjepanovič (bass guitar) strung together five songs in 40 minutes, starting with Tiha voda (Vzemi si čas). It confirmed right away that the quintet hasn’t forgotten who they are and what they are. Predin’s velvety, warm, highly charismatic vocals, his famous sense of humor that broke down the barrier between band and audience in an instant, and of course a short but sweet repertoire of evergreens. The Croatian crowd in particular showed that it hasn’t forgotten the old “Yugo” hit-parade charts from unforgettable times of brotherhood and unity, when Lačni Franz followed Naj ti poljub nariše ustnice with Ne mi dihat za ovratnik, and the front of the stage came properly alive. As expected, one of their most beautiful creations (arrangement-wise), Čakaj me, was on the list, and it was the peak of the get-together in itself. Lačni Franz closed their set with their “mini requiem” Zadnja večerja, which stoked that timeless, nostalgic feeling of carefree days of youthful playfulness and big hopes even further. A song in which the very role of the lyrics, with Predin’s unique expressive power, dissolves the dreams and lays bare the bitter point of our age. But that unique feeling stayed, and it can’t betray the heart, even after more than 15 years since I last saw the band, all the way up to their Radar festival set. Good luck, guys, and thanks for coming.
One more thing. Zoran Predin, known for his innate sense of juicy jokes, marched on stage in a T-shirt reading “Kaj ti je Ivan?” (“What’s up with you, Ivan?”). Even with the firm conviction that music shouldn’t be dragged into politics, I can’t help throwing in an association of my own: given the current goings-on on the Croatian political scene, that question on Zoran’s shirt may well have been addressed to former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader?
| JOE JACKSON: 17.15-18.10 |
English pianist and singer-songwriter Joe Jackson took the stage with two longtime buddies from the start of his career, bassist Graham Maby and drummer David Haughton, with whom he has been playing live again for the past three years. The man, who released a new studio album, “Rain”, last year, opened his show in just that vein with the newer Invisible Man.
Joe Jackson earns points for persuasiveness and credibility with his trademark voice and singing. The voice is of course special and recognizable, his calling card, with a hint of longing and melancholy, but with a seductive accent that is never pathetic or annoyingly gloomy. The distinctive sound, with no guitar in the lineup, came across perfectly fine, a rarely heard thing, and what matters, it was undistorted and totally natural. It’s incredible how much space Joe’s piano playing and velvety voice alone can cover.
This is music that was interesting especially for music gourmets. You don’t exactly see Joe Jackson playing live in this part of Europe very often. Of course, this approach is doomed to be a seriously boring show, especially if you can’t get into Jackson’s music. It can feel as if the man is just playing to himself. Joe is hidden behind the piano for most of the show, and the drummer and bassist are pushed back yet another line, behind Joe. On top of that, the man rarely addresses the audience, or even spoils the image of his performance with statements like: “We don’t know where we are, what we’re doing here at this hour, when people usually sleep on their couches, but we’ll do our best to give it everything!” Statements like that make it feel as if venues outside Great Britain and so on… aren’t interesting to Joe Jackson at all. Anyway, the set, in which Jackson strung together The Uptown Train, So Low, Is She Really Going Out With Him?,Fools In Love and Love On Your Radio, among others, brought the special treat of the evening and a big musical change of pace. A listenable blend of excellent, compact songwriting, in which touches of jazz and classical music slot together nicely and compatibly into a special variety of art pop.
| ERIC BURDON & THE ANIMALS: 18.45 – 19.45 |
A name that’s hard to overlook on the rock music map today, and a name that played a major part in shaping the wave of white blues that swept over Great Britain and Europe in the mid-sixties, is that of singer Eric Burdon and his The Animals. House Of The Rising Sun is still one of the first things every fresh guitar enthusiast learns to play. In an hour-long show, the six-piece lineup got the crowd at this year’s Radar festival properly on its feet. The audience first let loose with more noise during the evergreen classic Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, with a pleasant touch of reggae swaying. The quintet backing Eric Burdon clearly enjoyed the large number of “ants” under the stage, and I have to admit they blasted out a good dose of the flirty energy needed to hold up the Rhythm N’ Blues-schooled rock classics. In any case, apart from the name Eric Burdon, very little remains of the real The Animals today, if anything at all. Years just do their thing. The best times are behind them, sadly. You’d just wish to see another musical relic on stage next to Eric, someone who was an elemental, vital part of the original The Animals
Eric did come across as bouncy enough, full of life, and above all he convinced everyone at the festival with his vocals, because they still serve him very well. He has proven charisma and a unique touch that makes the The Animals catalog convincingly alive on stage even in 2009. But you can feel that the hearts of the rest of the crew have nothing more to give than the routine playing of extras who accompany and obey their boss.
The band closed its set in a theatrical spirit with a heavily rearranged version of the ultra-famous House Of The Rising Sun, helped along by the crowd’s ecstasy under the stage, but they came back out, which was a must anyway, given the noisy chanting and applause from the audience, for an encore of We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, the band’s second biggest hit, a song that also helped the later disciples Blue Oyster Cult make a career breakthrough and get noticed on the rock planet. Besides the three songs already mentioned, the band also played When I Was Young, Don’t Bring Me Down, San Franciscan Nights, I Believe To My Soul and John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom. Despite my remarks, the overall feeling was uplifting, so don’t worry. Even in the new millennium, Eric Burdon and his backing menagerie are well worth catching on some stage.
| SOLOMON BURKE: 20.20 – 21.20 |
Along with Santana, one of the main attractions of this year’s Radar festival! Definitely! Already judging by the preparations for the concert spectacle alone. Solomon, in true big-star style, treated himself to a nice, hefty delay at the festival. About 15 minutes. Over the years he has put on serious weight, and the singer has to be brought on stage on a special cart and moved onto a royal throne. It’s obvious that his legs can’t take the weight anymore. Ah, poor Burke. Some pile up years, others pile up kilos. Burke belongs in the second category, because the years show absolutely nothing in his voice.
To hide all the fuss around hauling his body from backstage to the stage showcase, the “hometown boy” Burke filled out the band especially with two violinists and three female singers who, like scantily clad bunnies, “teased” the crowd under the stage and drew the attention to themselves. Of course there were no shortage of the familiar tricks that serve the same purpose, with Burke handing out a heap of trinkets to the ladies in the front rows, and roses at the end of the show too. No wonder that with such proven “gentlemanliness” he has 21 children, well, the ones he’s sure he can officially acknowledge.
Solomon gathered a sizable backing crew of 14 musicians on stage. Besides his daughter Candy, who is one of the singers on stage, an interesting member of the lineup is also Hammond player Rudy Copeland, who is blind, but no less skilled at his job for it. Burke, who also visited Maribor’s Lent festival a good two weeks ago, delivered an exceptional schoolbook lesson in soul, loaded with the eroticism triggered by his manly, gravelly voice and of course the perfect rhythmic and instrumental chops of the backing crew, who create such a first-class ambience for this unique king of soul hedonism to lie back in and work his vocal charm. The horn section, the flirty vocalists, the interplay of the piano and of course the thunderous singing lifted the audience high onto its shoulders and conjured up a one-of-a-kind experience that required absolutely no rational thinking. All you had to do was switch off completely. Songs like That’s How I Got to Memphis, Diamond in Your Mind, Fast Train, Soul Searchin’, (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, Stand By Me, In the Midnight Hour, Tonight’s the Night, A Change Is Gonna Come, Tutti Frutti, Lucille, What a Wonderful World, Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,… damn well dared the next act to take the stage. The great Santana.
| SANTANA: 21.45 – 00.15 |
This year marks 40 years since Santana’s spectacular performance at the legendary Woodstock festival in 1969. So it’s no surprise that the band immediately set its wheels spinning at full tilt with the classic Soul Sacrifice. A big screen in the background, powerful stage lighting with colorful gradients, the classic setup of two percussionists, two singers, and a rhythm guitarist holding down the riffs while Santana himself amuses himself with improvised solo strolls of single-string noodling and tormenting of strings. Soul Sacrifice is a unique musical experience in itself. In an instant it presents Carlos Santana as the artist who fused elements of blues and rock with traditional Latin melody driven by solid salsa rhythms. An extraordinary blend of listenability that unconsciously gets your body wiggling. A masterpiece right at the start of the show! Fascinating in every way.
A standout name in the current lineup on this tour is of course the black drummer Dennis Chambers, known for working with performers such as Steely Dan, John Scofield, John McLaughlin and Maceo Parker, and even fans of the harder stuff may know him, because with the trio Niacin, in a lineup with Dave Novello (Hammond) and Billy Sheehan (bass), he released four studio albums. The rest of the crew accompanying the guitar legend is made up of: Tony Lindsay (vocals), Andy Vargas (vocals), Bill Ortiz (trumpet), Jef Cressman (trombone), Karl Perazzo (percussion), Raul Rekow (congas, percussion), Tommy Anthony (guitar, vocals), Benny Rietveld (bass guitar).
Let’s go back to our Carlos. Dressed in lighter, loose-fitting clothes, and in the new era obligatorily equipped with a cap and sunglasses, this time Santana served up powerfully dynamic, cheerful playing that constantly fired up the musicians accompanying him. His behavior on stage is interesting. Whenever someone from his crew takes a solo and with it the main role on stage, Santana moves right to the edge of the stage, all the way to the left or right side, and in this way turns into “just one more” member of the lineup. He comes across as completely unpretentious and approachable, and just hanging out with him at a concert is a big sermon-school lesson about love and about reviving all those values that lead to it and to peace. Values most of us forgot long ago and don’t pay much attention to, for which we get daily “slaps in the face” and warnings screaming to heaven, and we couldn’t care less.
Santana delivered top-notch sound. Carlos’s decision this time not to include the almost obligatory song Samba pa ti in the live repertoire on this tour is interesting. The missing song was entirely confidently replaced by a similarly erogenous adventure, the instrumental Europa, seduced into waltz rhythms. A Carlos Santana concert is one big hit after another. The man can afford to be picky. Early on he fired off Into The Light, which is also known to all the fans of the post-grunge crybabies Nickleback, then switched again to an absolute siesta whirlpool with Life Is For Living and then upped the ante with one of the sugar-lumps of this setlist, Incident At Neshabur (“Abraxas”, 1970), which thoroughly fired up the instrumental sense of the great harmonic coexistence of the Santana band on stage, with Carlos absolutely at the center. The band returned to such moments many times, stretching the basis of a song into longer, juicy stretches of improvisation where it could come fully alive and spread its wings. In short, the repertoire was built from a sequence of a fast song followed by a calmer one.
When the guys moved from Evil Ways into A Love Supreme, where Carlos got the entire crowd under the stage singing the verses of “A Love Supreme”, the air breathed total switch-off. That kicked in with Black Magic Woman, because from there on Santana strung together the best-known evergreens and the revelry could begin. The crowd worked up into a dance frenzy, Santana and the crew in excellent spirits, incredible energy everywhere! It was hard to say goodbye to the spectacle, and the finale was especially spiced up when the roadies brought about ten kids on stage, put tambourines in their hands, and so helped the band entertain everyone in the closing song Jingo.
Latin rhythms, Latin melody, caught in a unique blend of rock energy, had an almost hypnotic effect, and you didn’t even have time to think that a full two and a half hours of hanging out with the guitar shaman had suddenly flown by. With his crew he proved that he is still full of life energy, which he shares selflessly through his unique language of musical sermon. If you’re looking for a good time, don’t think twice about where to go if the great Carlos Santana and his crew are anywhere near your part of the world.
A magical evening of magical togetherness was marred, though, by an unfortunate incident right after the end. As people were already heading home, someone ran over and killed the Croatian music critic and art historian Darko Glavan, which also led to the cancellation of the “after show party” that was meant to wrap up this year’s Radar festival. Despite this black mark, I’d like to point out that the day passed in a one-of-a-kind sharing of musical energy and excellent organization, which of course supports the idea that in the long run Radar festival could one day grow into one of the bigger and more important European summer festivals.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
SANTANA SOLOMON BURKE ERIC BURDON & THE ANIMALS JOE JACKSON ZORAN PREDIN & LAČNI FRANZ VOODOO LIZARDS SANTANA setlist: 1. Soul Sacrifice 2. Into The Night 3. Life Is For Living 4. Incident At Neshabur 5. Maria Maria 6. Foo Foo 7. Africa Bamba 8. Love Of My Life 9. Batuka / No One To Depend On 10. Europa 11. Evil Ways / A Love Supreme 12. Hot Pants Power 13. Black Magic Woman / Gypsy Queen 14. Oye Como Va 15. Smooth / Dame Tu Amor 16. Corazon Espinado 17. Jingo
Photo gallery
