Location: Zagreb / Tvornica kulture / Croatia
Date: Friday, November 9, 2012
Seven years roll around and Steve Vai shows up in Europe again. On a new tour! The new album “The Story Of Light”, another beautiful, top-quality studio document, is served up by this musician’s inexhaustible, genius head. Seven years ago, in the last ten days of September 2005, Steve Vai stood on Slovenian stages for the third time in his career, delivering his spectacular show at Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna, and a month and a half later, on November 13, 2005 to be exact, he also stopped at Zagreb’s Tvornica Kulture with an even better show than the Ljubljana one. Well, the story repeats itself after seven years! Only the gap between the Ljubljana and Zagreb shows is just 4 days, and this time Zagreb came first, so Vai leaves himself the door open to upgrade his Zagreb concert spectacle in Ljubljana and deliver Slovenes an even better gig. Whatever. The inner restlessness stirred up by constant curiosity and devotion to the magic of music in all its forms shot the RockLine crew exclusively to Zagreb, so that before Vai’s Ljubljana show we can bring you a report on the form of this out-of-the-ordinary artist.
Unlike the last tour, this new one is set up in more of a “thrifty” way. On the previous one Steve Vai had delta-blues maverick Eric Sardinas as the opener; on this tour he brought along singer-songwriter Beverly McClellan, almost unknown in our parts, who had to drop out of the world tour with Vai midway because of family matters. Steve Vai also disbanded his backing band The Breed, which besides Dave Wiener and Jeremy Colson also included his Devil’s Slingshot buddies Tony MacAlpine and Billy Sheehan (Mr. Big). For their replacements he called up two lesser-known but no less eye-catching names, bassist Philip Bynoe and harpist Deborah Henson-Conant!
It’s nine in the evening, Tvornica Kulture has filled up nicely, though tickets didn’t sell out like they did at the same venue seven years ago. The tension was building, and the heavy minutes, dragging on like an atomic age, were eased by music from Devin Townsend – Vai’s friend, who laid down the vocals for Vai’s album “Sex And Religion” (1993). First onto the stage with her electric harp comes the extravagant Deborah. The effect was as if someone had carried a Christmas tree onstage, because the body (its “vault”) of the harp was fitted with a whole constellation of little lights, delivering the expected “glam allure” of the Steve Vai story. Vai’s superior little pupil Dave Wiener was of course there too, though the slightly nastier music professors who followed the show as a bonus could easily have missed him. Wielding his giant six-string bass oar, Philip Bynoe joined the lineup as well – at first glance you’d almost mistake him for T.M. Stevens – while in the back, behind a drum fortress, sat the savage drummer Jeremy Colson, tattooed down to the last square centimeter of skin – last seen in Slovenia on June 24, 2010, as Billy Idol’s drummer at his show in Hala Tivoli. This time the view of Jeremy was extremely thankless, because Steve Vai had lined up his main stage amps – the entire core rig – in a row right in front of Jeremy’s drums, so the audience was robbed of a view of the kit setup and of the kit Colson was pounding on.
Never mind. The foreground has room for only one man. The devilish guitar doctor, who can only be Steve Vai. The man had put on some kind of Mexican hat, strutted onto the stage in the style of a Latin lady-killer, the long hair is a thing of the past for him, but he didn’t forget the glamorous shades. The monumental exposition of all-round guitar excess was embodied in an instant. As expected, the man struck with new material from the album “The Story Of Light”, namely a pair of typical “Vai cavalry charges” of full-blooded rally driving (Racing The World, Velorum), which instantly conjure that typical uniqueness of shock theatricality, the “Vai figures”!
The man’s communication with the audience is of course first and foremost the guitar language (hm,… really big news!!!), but Vai works with his whole body and mind and, you could say, in his philosophy, his soul too. Every note is accompanied by a response from the body (a bodily reaction), and Vai delivers his performance to the audience with a series of facial grimaces, trying to underline the mood sensitivity of the emotional state he finds himself in. Soon a girl from the front row blows him a kiss, which Vai theatrically catches in the air and presses to his face with his palm. Ah, that old “pervert”, oiled up with every trick in the book. Vai is a master of glam excess and in situations like this he knows how to handle a crowd in a contagious, under-the-skin cheeky way that doesn’t just enchant you, it literally wins your heart. No wonder he played in David Lee Roth’s band and in Whitesnake. Guitar behind the back, a moment later somewhere high in the air, then the right hand goes up, only the left does the work, as the guitar magnets squeeze a sharp melody of improvised licks out of the grips. No problem for Vai. He doesn’t miss – in even the most unimaginable stage pose and body position. Switching hands, the left going over the right and vice versa, is a given for him. He theatrically chases the mic around the stage and makes melody out of it in his solo escapades. And everybody waits for the moment when, for the big finale, Vai puts his tongue on the strings too – which always happens at the end of his shows. An incredible outburst of pure experimental culture. But the bulk of the biggest guitar-madness freakouts Vai creates with the tremolo arm. He has taken its technique and playing to such an extreme level that it gives him an even wider range of notes than the basic ones, “pinned down” in the positions of the guitar neck, can ever allow. And of course, what adds fuel to the fire in this boundless shock-and-show theater is Vai’s exceptional speed, precision and absolute control of every movement. Vai is Vai. A fully formed one-of-a-kind music guru who wrapped Tvornica that evening in an unforgettable voyage. Just as he announced in the first break, inviting us into his unique world.
The opening stretch surprises with an excellent Tender Surrender from the album “Alien Love Secrets” (1995), and Steve Vai heads to his wardrobe for the first costume change during Dave Wiener’s solo spot, in which Dave spent a few minutes pampering the crowd with an acoustic guitar. Steve Vai, finally free of the hat and wearing a fresh silk shirt, announces a new song, and the band spins into Wheeping China Doll, followed by yet another brand-new one – the gorgeous The Moon And I. The crowd jumps to its feet for a wild version of the “Passion And Warfare” track The Animal, which brought the emotions of everyone in the hall to life especially intensely. The “Passion And Wafare” tracks are the ones everybody waits for most impatiently at Vai shows, and as a rule Vai plays them even faster than the studio album versions we know. Vai changed outfits a few more times onstage, and the one that kicked up the most dust was his “laser lights” getup in the “The Ultra Zone” tracks, namely the title track and, right after it, Frank.
Another killer moment of the show was the solo on the electric harp, which served as a kind of intro to the acoustic set – Vai kicked that one off with the only vocal number of the night, the song Rescue Me Or Bury Me (“Sex And Religion”, 1993). This part of the show was hypnotic again. The harp especially came through much more in the sound picture, because during the electric numbers it was mostly drowned out by Wiener’s guitar wall of riffing. It was precisely in the acoustic set that the harp’s expressive value got the recognition Steve Vai himself felt when he decided to outfit his songs completely with arrangements for electric harp. With the harp onstage, Deborah actually evoked a kind of distant substitute for the show excesses of the previous tour, when the “great-minded stupidities” that Vai, Billy Sheehan and Tony MacAlpine kept cranking out shoulder to shoulder at concerts as if on an assembly line seemed to have no end. Wiener deftly navigated the stage among many kinds of guitars, even an electric sitar, and a few times he also helped out on keyboards, keeping up the mood backdrops for individual songs.
Before the raucous finish, the band took time for a special moment of the night. Vai called up two volunteers from the audience, who, after Vai’s vivid “fatherly introduction”, each pulled a random rhythm or melodic motif out of their heads for each band member. All of this theater, a certain amount of stage chaos included, the band under Steve Vai’s conductor’s baton then composed and arranged in an instant into a completely new song. At that point everyone in the hall could get right up close to what it’s like when Vai and company are in the studio or at rehearsal. A crazy experience!
One more thing! The song Treasure Island is also among the special moments of the night. It’s a skit between Jeremy Colson and Steve Vai, somehow inherited from the skits that Vai’s great mentor Frank Zappa once staged with his drummer Terry Bozzio (check out the double live album “Zappa in New York”). Alongside all the ultra-freakouts brought by Vai’s elemental and unique stage show, this is one more extra spice of the spectacle that makes his concert absolutely worth attending!
Vai bewitched Zagreb. That’s indisputable. This one-of-a-kind musical epic lasted almost two hours and three quarters, rounded off by the long-awaited compositional perfection of For The Love Of God and carried to a stellar finish by the “Fire Garden Suite” standard Taurus Bulba. After this show, Vai remains a born stage entertainer, a grand wizard and master of shock-and-show excess, spiced up with the elusive playing of a unique six-string, even seven-string, theory! But that’s enough, I’ll save a few more words for the report from Ljubljana, where Steve Vai hits on November 13, 2012!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Racing the World
2. Velorum
3. Building the Church
4. Tender Surrender
5. Gravity Storm
6. Dave’s Solo
7. Weeping China Doll
8. The Moon and I
9. The Animal
10. Whispering a Prayer
11. The Audience Is Listening
12. Deborah Solo
—acoustic set—
13. Rescue Me or Bury Me
14. Sisters
15. Treasure Island
16. Salamanders in the Sun
17. Pusa Road
18. Drum Solo
—end of acoustic set—
19. The Ultra Zone
20. Frank
21. Build Me a Song
22. For the Love of God
—encore—
23. Taurus Bulba
