Location: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden Am Woerthersee / Austria
Concert date: 10.08.2008
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: 28,00€
Richie Kotzen! A brilliant musician who earned his place among the world’s most respected guitarists after joining the notorious glam rockers Poison and playing in the Mr. Big lineup must be head over heels in love with Velden in Carinthia, or more precisely with a lost blues oasis going by the name of Bluesiana Rock Cafe. Richie Kotzen is the soul of the blues. His solo catalog is immensely rich, and it’s also where Richie is by far at his strongest. That catalog is simply him, through and through. We’ve had the honor of seeing Richie three times between the end of October 2007 and the third decade of July 2008, and let me tell you, it’s hard to find a more sincere and genuine musician when you set him next to his “contemporaries”, starting with Paul Gilbert and ending somewhere around George Lynch. The wild years he devoted to his glam rock brothers didn’t fry his brain curls, and today the man is the embodiment of what every musical artist should follow. Their own heart. A charismatic guy, he still comes across as demonically attractive to the ladies, and he doesn’t need narcissistic glitz, beauty products or other “prosthetics” for it. All it takes is the energy of living as yourself, which Richie radiates from the inside out.
Am I getting overly sentimental? Let me add some more “facts” so the mix of words in this read is a bit more balanced. Well, my colleague Daniel still got it wrong in the previous report from Kotzen’s July show at Blueisana (RockLine report HERE), when he predicted it wouldn’t be long before Blueisana turned into a grand Kotzen mausoleum by August. There were no statues of him anywhere to be seen in Bluesiana yet.
Also on the bill was Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Pallante, who opened tonight’s show at Bluesiana. In the good half hour his set lasted, starting at exactly 9:30 PM, he served up an interesting blend of Mediterranean “azzurro” melos, mixing in elements of jazz, while the mood he conjured often swayed along on easygoing Latin rhythms. The guy lounged lazily on a bar stool with a semi-acoustic beauty in his lap, cheered on above all by an enthusiastic bunch of fans from Italy, so conspicuous in Bluesiana that Paolo soon forgot about addressing the crowd in “universally understood” English and switched to pure Italian.
We didn’t have to wait long for Richie. We almost bumped into each other when I came in through the entrance past the bar, while he was hurrying the opposite way toward the restrooms. “Hello Richie,” I greeted him. “Hi there,” replied the ever-pleasant and approachable guitarist, politely. And then? From the restroom straight onto the stage. What would Richie be without us? And what would we be without him? I can’t remember seeing him in such a cheerful mood. He pulled on a headband inherited from his naughty sleaze rock days and started entertaining the folks with the song Rust, while a fan on his right sent a gentle breeze his way and played with his long curls. Let me point out that it was just Richie on stage, alone with his acoustic Yamaha guitar. The repertoire leaned slightly toward the current studio release “Go Faster”, though Richie touched on other albums from his career too. This time his passionate vocals and soul acrobatics got extra room to maneuver, and they intoxicated with special intensity the well-represented female part of the audience, who sighed below the stage from the first minute to the last.
Some songs have by now caught on with the crowd more than splendidly. That goes especially for Change, High, Faith and Go Faster. These were songs from the latter part of the show, which the audience sang along to superbly. Richie visibly enjoyed such a roaring response, and his face kept breaking into a smile on its own as he watched music lovers who know his repertoire inside out. Normally rather passive, Richie was this time firing people up himself to sing along with him, and during Go Faster a special energy flux flowed between him and the crowd, urging everyone into some serious jam stomping. Above all he was surprised when applause swept through the room, spreading from the front rows at the first bars of Doin’ What The Devil’s Says To Do from the excellent “Into The Black” (2006), and he followed it with: “Oh, well. You know that song.” In the second part of the show, Richie was joined on stage by a buddy on harmonica, and the songs I Would, What I Lost and Go Faster grew even further through a magnified blues charge. Passion mixed with eroticism, longing and pain. Richie brought the show to its end practically with his eyes closed, completely switching off over an hour and a half.
In the first encore the man of course served up Shine and the by-now obligatory, demanded Poison classic Stand, during which almost the entire Blueisana was stomping on the floor and surrendering to musical pleasure. People simply wouldn’t let Richie go. After he’d said goodbye following the obligatory encore, he marched back onto the stage and played a song he introduced with “I was inspired by Bob Seger…”, called Night Moves, one of Bob Seger’s biggest hits, which climbed the charts back in the seventies, and Richie of course played it in the language of his own musical character.
Kotzen, the hero of Bluesiana, once again convinced us without any special effort that he’s a top-class musical attraction. His songs are easy to fall for, they carry a convincing blues sentiment and that real soul spell of Richie’s extraordinary feel for vocal acrobatics, which Richie as a composer and performer reinforces even further with an exceptional innate sense for bringing in melodies that fit the foundations of the blues perfectly. He pulled it all off with a cheerfulness and authenticity that is an ever rarer quality these days and so all the more sought after. An acoustic evening with Richie Kotzen is a completely different experience from plugging into the mains. Handling the natural, that is “organic”, sound and its spontaneous twists, without the prosthetics of effects, is something this excellent musician simply can’t and won’t hide in his expression. It was a special evening, which Richie wrapped up with a moved thank-you to the audience, saying it was a great honor for him to play for such a fantastic crowd who’d come to cheer him on in Bluesiana. All in all, I can teasingly, if not a little jealously, take one last jab at an important Kotzen trademark, which he of course markets successfully and which one of the female fans, who’d come all the way from Crikvenica in Croatia (near Rijeka) to cheer Richie on, experienced especially intensely: “Blue eyes do their part too, don’t they, girls?” Richie just nails it!
Setlist Richie Kotzen, Bluesiana Rock Cafe, Velden Am Woerthersee (Austria), 11.08.2008:
1. Rust
2. Stoned
3. Where Did Our Love Go
4. Lose Again
5. What Is
8. Don’t Ask
9. Fire & Ice
10. Don’t Wanna Lie
11. Doin’ What The Devil’s Says To Do
12. Remember
13. I Would
14. What I Lost
15. Change
16. High
17. Faith
18. Go Faster
—encore I.—
19. Shine
20. Stand
—encore II.—
21. Night Moves
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