Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana (Slovenia), VPK Mediapark
Concert date: 21.09.2005
Attendance: 1200
Eric Sardinas plays for an hour and wraps up at 9:00 PM. The VPK hall is packed, roughly 1200 people. A great warm-up for the crowd: witty, perversely erotic and above all energetic. You couldn’t breathe up on the balcony, and it was no better down on the floor, the oxygen concentration in the air was probably 0mg/l. The sound was very decent. The trio of bass, guitar and drums put on a great pre-storm drizzle.
Steve Vai And The Breed. A guitar maniac surrounded by nothing but world-class musicians played for almost 2.5 hours. It was a demonstration of an extraordinary mix of power, tightness and stage presence that took everyone’s breath away. MacAlpine and Wiener doubled Vai here and there on the transitions with their guitars, though MacAlpine spent most of the time lurking behind the keyboards. Seeing Steve Vai live is always a special kind of treat, but when you’ve also got Billy Sheehan in the group, it becomes an absolute must. Roughly speaking, Billy on bass is what Steve is on guitar. Of course, professional bass players will sentence me to death for that last sentence. An extraordinary pair, extraordinary stage communication and an extraordinary hailstorm of played notes. Near the end, when Eric Sardinas joined the band on stage to play My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mamma together, Sheehan dared to grab MacAlpine’s guitar right out of his hands and even pull off a bravura solo on it. So Sheehan – “The Alien species”. There’s almost no point in wasting words on Vai. As always, his communication with the guitar is astonishing. Just like the melody he coaxes out of the whammy bar rolls like waves, Vai’s facial expressions shift in perfect step with it throughout the concert. Vai is an exceptional actor who also serves up some seriously witty comments between songs that had the crowd cracking up. This time, Cindy Lauper unfortunately ended up on the anecdote wall.
However. The sound wasn’t good. Through the whole concert it was nothing to write home about. Sheehan’s bass swallowed most of the sonic space! First off, as already said, the air was breathed-out and smoked-up. Enough to piss you off. Second, the stage was noticeably too small and set up “at an angle” (in the corner). Why? To cram more people into VPK, which, thanks to its notoriously bad air conditioning, can turn deadly dangerous in an instant? Especially in summer temperatures and with any headcount over 500. These two things definitely kept the band from really letting loose. On top of that, the tour had only started a good week earlier. Given the complexity of everything Vai and his perfectionism always want to serve us, the road crew and the band hand in hand surely hadn’t yet become a hundred percent tight-knit team in that short stretch of the tour.
So, as I was leaving the hall, I was overcome by mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was shocked once again by the crazy guitarist and his minions; on the other, I was dissatisfied and ripped off, first and foremost because of the sound. Tickets for shows like Vai’s aren’t cheap anymore these days, and if something isn’t okay at a concert of that caliber, it just isn’t the most enjoyable experience. And then the despair of all despairs! 4 dl of beer for 500.00 SIT??!! C’mon, have you gone mad, you so-called “hospitality service providers”? Drink your own beer!
So, to wrap up this write-up! After his April show at Hala Tivoli in 2000 and last year’s G3, again at Hala Tivoli, this time Vai just didn’t conjure up all of that again in Ljubljana. The room for improvement was in the sound and in how into it the band got on stage. As the minutes of the concert ticked on and on, you could tell the crowd was getting worn out by the performers’ long jamming, which was no surprise given the unbearable conditions in VPK. So how are you supposed to breathe and stay soberly focused when the oxygen runs out of the air at temperatures hovering around 35 degrees Celsius and more? Once again it turned out that Ljubljana doesn’t have a suitable concert hall for shows like this, full stop.
Steve Vai in Zagreb two months later was a completely different story!
Setlist
Part one
1.) Glorious
2.) The Audience is Listening
3.) Band Introduction
4.) Building The Church
5.) The Crying Machine
6.) K’m-Pee-Du-Wee
7.) Dave Weiner Guitar Solo
8.) The Reaper
9.) Whispering A Prayer
10.) Answers
11.) Tony MacAlpine Keyboard Solo
part two (acoustic set)
12.) Strumming
13.) Melissa’s Garden
14.) Sisters
15.) Rescue Me
Or Bury Me
16.) The Boy/Girl Song
17.) Red Bull
18.) Call It Sleep
19.) Pusa Road
20.) Jeremy Colson Drum Solo
part three
21.) Midway Creatures
22.) Billy Sheehan Bass Solo (incl. The Suspence Is Killing Me)
23.) Becoming
24.) Lotus Feet
25.) I’m The Hell Outta Here
—encore—
26.) Liberty
27.) My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mamma
28.) For The Love Of God
Photo Gallery
