Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Orpheum / Graz / Austria
Concert date: March 4, 2011
Attendance: 550
Ticket price: €30.50
Finally, a gig from the category known as the perfect ear massage. The kind of show where you know you’re getting way more than the ticket is worth. Steve Lukather, lead guitar and voice of one of the finest rock bands ever to walk this planet, Toto, masters of brilliant rock composition, is considered one of the best guitarists in the world. Ever since Toto more or less stopped operating and/or only get together for shorter tours (one-offs, anniversaries, charity), Steve has been devoting himself more to his solo career and, musically speaking, to the things he actually enjoys and finds inspiring. So in a relatively short span of time we got two phenomenal studio albums from him, quite different from each other but endlessly appealing, because they personify every masterpiece that culminates in an exquisite studio diamond of musical perfection whenever Steve Lukather finds himself in the role of creator, conductor’s baton in hand.
The guitar wizard and know-it-all is out on a new tour of Europe. He’s dedicating it to promoting his current studio album “All’s Well That Ends Well” (Mascot Records, 2010) – RockLine review HERE. After almost a year we’re back at the cozy Orpheum Theater, a venue that has hosted plenty of big names from the music world over its long career. From jazz to metal and everything in between. But lately gigs at this venue have been a rare sight, even though the location is ideal for the kind of show an artist like Steve Lukather puts on.
Luke put together a quartet for this tour. Steve Lukather sings and plays guitar, of course, the rhythm section is drummer Eric Valentine and bassist Renee Jones, and behind the top-notch Clavia / Nord keyboards (Siddharta use them too) sits the other Steve, the master Steve Weingart. Luke and company took the Orpheum stage at exactly eight in the evening and, as expected, kicked off the show with the punchy, riff-driven opening track from the new album “All’s Well That Ends Well”, Darkness In My World.
A solid crowd filled the venue, which is all to the good, given what past visits to the Orpheum have shown: people in this part of Austria somehow don’t pay much attention to the excellent concert lineup that rolls through every year. Luke pulled in about 500 heads. The place was full, but not packed. The famous Asia, who played the same venue last May, had a crowd of 250, while Nazareth a few days later sold it out completely (800 heads). So Luke came out of it very well on that front. There were plenty of Slovenian visitors too, and in the front rows you could immediately feel the steam rising off the boiling cauldron of an extremely active congregation. Eyes instantly locked onto the maestro’s magic fingers, and yes: a whole bunch of guitar professors and guitarists in the crowd right below the stage were following Lukather’s onstage tricks and stunts with doctor-cool faces, carefully and with delicate attentiveness.
The sound met every demand from the first note. It delivered a full, warm, active and dynamic weave of instruments and an outstanding spread of the live sound picture. The first part of the show walked through Luke’s solo discography. He took us first to the album “Luke” with the chunky rhythms and erotic connotations of Always Be There For Me. This very song brought the full power of the chemistry between the musicians to the surface, and the tightness of their sound was stunning in its precision. They don’t say for nothing that black musicians have rhythm in their blood. Always Be There For Me, with its melodic chorus hook, firmed up the opening atmosphere and took it up a notch in a rhythmic funky groove.Extinction Blues (from the album “Candyman”, 1994) carried on with that pleasant feeling of a special setlist and delivered a surprise just by showing up, and the band kept the rockier, cranked-up side of the first part going with it. After that the guitar wizard took a few moments to catch his breath and, in a short address, greeted everyone in the hall. The band shifts down from the high gear of the opening and discharges the room with the swaying Stab In The Back, which brings to life “close encounters of the Luke kind” with the legacy of Steely Dan. Six-string theory was finally revealed once Steve explained that sometimes you just don’t get exactly what you expect from a woman. So position 69 is off the table, and the replacement a man has to make peace with is 68! The song, which appeared on Lee Ritenour’s solo album Six String Theory (where, besides Luke, another guitar devil guests, Neal Schon of Journey, and even the curly-haired Guns N’ Roses hellraiser Slash), is where Luke takes over completely with wild acrobatics from his own unique artistic school, and the band drags a real rhythm & blues dinosaur into the light with Brodie’s from the new album, where the velvety sound of the organs firmly wraps around the song’s chunky rhythm. Steve Lukather’s vocals are in perfect shape at this point. The chorus confirms the superb interplay with multi-vocal harmonies, which Renee Jones and Steve Weingart contribute to the little choir. An emotional address follows, with a dedication to the late Gary Moore, and Steve doesn’t go for one of his covers but for Hendrix’s Up From The Skies, redefining the solo experience through divine improvisation, with smiles from above coming not only from Gary Moore but from Jimi Hendrix himself.
Luke slips backstage, and the trio hammers out a longer jam that never stops impressing with the many layers of what three instrumentalists can do. A dedication to the late Jeff Porcaro and the song Song For Jeff first brought both Steves to the stage. Long pull-offs, sustain effects and generous use of tremolo in many variations, with a clearly emphasized touch of unpredictable development. In the second part the rhythm section joins in too. At this point it was interesting to watch how the musicians communicate with each other onstage. Mostly it was Valentine and Weingart holding eye contact, while Lukather broke the melody apart in a totally jazzy way in a wild solo for the finale. The closing guitar noodling flowed almost unnoticeably into Don’t Say It’s Over, one of the strongest moments of the new album, and Lukather, like the other three, once again astonished with their remarkable tightness. This is exactly where Steve’s exceptional command of the guitar really came through, and the band played the song as an instrumental.
They stuck with instrumentals. Here comes Tumenscent, led by a sharpened guitar riff, and once again the quartet thrilled with a progressively designed development of the song, especially the broken-up rhythm. Generally a tough nut to crack, which the quartet got through with feather-light ease while having an immense amount of fun. The middle section was topped off with a short drum solo spot.
After that came a moment that will stay with many people at this gig as an unpleasant memory. In the middle of an emotional address, before the performance of Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Steve was anything but boring in his talk, and yet some “promising” local in the audience yelled at Lukather onstage to shut up and keep playing (“Shut up and play your music!”). Lukather was left speechless, rolled his eyes, took a breath and stood completely still for a while. Clearly he really hadn’t expected a move like that. So he asked the tough guy whether guests at his house scream at him when they arrive. With the middle finger of his right hand raised, he dispatched the fool and accompanied the gesture with: “We’ll play!” From there on Steve wasn’t the same. Nerves and unease took hold of him. You could feel it in a few notes that weren’t played precisely during the soloing. He even started tossing his picks around the stage, behind his back and not out to the crowd, and eye contact with the audience became rarer and rarer. Still, during the excellent While My Guitar Gently Weeps, the Orpheum crowd partly made it up to the guitarist by belting out the chorus. A surprise follows! The choice of a Toto song, namely Out Of Love, which turned up on the “best of” album “Past To Present” as a bonus track and which revives the less cheerful side of the story with singer Jean Michel Byron, whom the label Sony forced on Toto at the time.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps had already shown that Steve’s voice is no longer at its freshest and that the higher registers in particular give him trouble, and Out Of Love, followed by the otherwise fantastic Tears Of My Own Shame from “Luke” (1997), seasoned with the drama of blues soul eroticism, only confirmed the guitarist’s partly worn-down vocals. Tears Of My Own Shame owes a lot in its structure to the figure and work of Jimi Hendrix, so Lukather sensibly stretched it out into Hendrix’s Little Wing, which he once again masterfully reworked and upgraded in every way with an outstanding new solo excursion full of guitar extravagance. But that wasn’t all. From Little Wing the band moved into a longer “jam” ruled by strictly Oriental sounds that just wouldn’t end, raising the already high spirits in line with the approaching close of the show. The regular set ends with the new Can’t Look Back, a nice approximation of what Toto offered on their last album “Falling In Between” (2006) and which could easily have been part of it. The hall comes alive and sends the band backstage with thunderous ovations.
Lukather is thrilled with the new album, since he presented it generously to the audience in the obligatory encore too, taking on the lively and mischievous Flash In The Pan. And as has been his habit in live sets for a few years now, Steve said goodbye to the Graz audience by reviving a bit more “Toto-mania” among those in the hall, strumming The Road Goes On from “Tambu” (1995) on his own with an acoustic guitar as a farewell.
The hypnosis of musical magic, of pure stage perfection and brilliance. Those are the humblest words I can use to describe the experience of the Steve Lukather concert and his backing band. Two hours and twenty minutes that flew by as if they hadn’t happened. The master remains the master. Without that escalation in the second half of the show, the feelings would surely have been even stronger and the impressions even more intense, but still. An experience worth every bit of your attention, if you respect yourself even a little and care what your mechanoreceptors take in when hanging out with the magic of music. Let’s hope there are plenty more occasions like this.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Darkness In My World 2. Always Be There For Me 3. Extinction Blues 4. Stab In The Back 5. 68 6. Brodie’s 7. Up From The Skies 8. Instrumental (Weingart / Valentine / Jones) 9. Song For Jeff / Don’t Say It’s Over (instrumental version) 10. Tumescent / Eric Valentine Drum Solo / Turmescent (outro) 11. While My Guitar Gently Weeps 12. Out Of Love 13. Tears Of My Own Shame / Little Wing / jam 14. Can’t Look Back —encore— 15. Flash In The Pan —encore II— 16. The Road Goes On
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