Venue: Hala Tivoli / Ljubljana
Concert date: 16.10.2009
Attendance: 5000
Ticket price: 44 €
The wait for a show by Texas blues rock legends ZZ Top at Ljubljana’s Hala Tivoli was a long one, and no doubt a nerve-racking one too. The big event got a pretty lukewarm promo push, and the thought of yet another entry in the string of canceled concerts was hard to shake. You’d understandably have figured at first that nothing would come of it. ZZ Top in Ljubljana, and on the big stage of Slovenia’s biggest hockey arena at that? Mission impossible, surely! Which is exactly why the biggest surprise of the night came as I carefully made my way down along the west stand: the heartwarming sight of a more than decently packed floor in the main hall of Hala Tivoli. Against all expectations, people were crawling toward the stage from practically every nook of the “already slightly decrepit” sports venue. Personally, that filled me with fresh hope that Slovenian music fans still have enough healthy taste. The wheels in the heads of the brilliant Slovenian promoters seem to have finally started turning in that direction too. In the past, whenever rock royalty came to town, they kept surprising us on an assembly line with some especially “fitting” support act, the kind that, before the much-needed dose of genuine rock & roll, always knew how to “thrill” us with soulless racket that appeals only to pre-pubescent kids.
TIME:
Dado Topić’s crew was a real breath of fresh air this time, an excellent pick both in terms of performance and substance. The Yugoslav rock scene legend and his Time (the lineup now has five members) got the temperature rising nicely. Dado remains a good-natured soul who, whenever he plays on the juicy side of the Alps, always tries to address the crowd in the most fluent Slovenian he can manage. That gives us an honest stage image of a musician who could be a role model for a whole galaxy of self-proclaimed stars. Topić, this time with a guitar strapped on instead of a bass, delivered a lesson in old-school hard rock, washed up here on the temperament and liveliness of the southeast. Time came out swinging, brisk, energetic, no hesitation, with good chemistry between them that occasionally stood out through inspired keyboard and guitar solo excursions. Unfortunately, besides the understandable time limit, what hurt them was the sound, which in the grand Tivoli tradition was nowhere near up to par. That’s a shame, given the tremendous emotional charge of “Za koji život treba da se rodim”, “Istina mašina” and, of course, the evergreen “Makedonije”, which after all these years is still the crowd’s top favorite.
ZZ TOP:
ZZ Top have written an important page in the thick textbook of rock music. The Texas stallions are still holding up well, considering their not exactly dewy years. Okay, the years have understandably taken some energy and youthful zeal from the gentlemen, but nowhere near enough to write their performance off as pure routine. What they went after most thoroughly was Gibbons’ voice. Over the course of the evening Billy only rarely, and with visible effort, squeezed out a halfway representative vocal, and its intensity noticeably dropped as the night went on. Billy’s vocal delivery was by no means bad, but at times it struggled to reach the standards of that trademark gargling and mumbling which, backed by perversely dissected lyrics and intuitively turning slide moves, has for the past forty years been effectively feeding the filthy blues rock machine. Vocally, his bearded colleague Dusty Hill sounded considerably fresher. Together with drummer Frank Beard’s by-now-traditional, barely noticeable musical contribution, he kept “poisoning” the air of the packed Hala Tivoli with a confident delivery of a mischievous rhythmic foundation.
The ZZ Top concept hasn’t changed much over the years and it remains full of minimalism today, vividly illustrating the unique philosophy of blues rock with a whiff of Southern flavor. Put differently, the gentlemen have been inseminating the airwaves on the same frequency since time immemorial. Even at their commercial zenith, when samples and electronic gadgets of all sorts suddenly flooded albums, ZZ Top stayed true to the original message. So these gentlemen never made a revolution in music. On the contrary, the Ljubljana show predictably confirmed that the vast majority of what ZZ Top do belongs more in the category of polished showmanship excess typical of entertainment culture across the Atlantic. That goes for the funny choreographed bits of the bearded men and their kitty-plush props, with which they cheekily push us into the embrace of impure thoughts. To those entertainment tricks Gibbons this time added a handful of short sentences in decent Slovenian, which of course sparked some extra emotional fireworks in the crowd.
The bulk of the attraction burden in the ZZ Top business naturally falls on the duo of Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill. In gentle, synchronized swaying the two presented a colorful selection of songs drawing from every creative period of the band, and by swapping the lead vocalist role they kept filling out the tight sonic picture. ZZ Top aren’t changing the set on this year’s tour, which is understandable since they hit the bullseye with it. Older and consequently more obscure material works great live next to today’s half-mythical numbers like “Gimme All Your Lovin'”, “Sharp Dressed Man” or “Legs”! It was lovely to hear the old-timer “Just Got Paid”, Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” was a surprise, and there’s no point wasting words on the impact of the ironclad “La Grande” and “Tush”! Worth highlighting is also the excellent rendition of “I Need You Tonight”, otherwise one of the unjustly overlooked gems of the famous album Eliminator!
ZZ Top stretched their Ljubljana visit, with two encores, to almost two hours of wringing out the basic blues rocker forms, and that, we can safely say, fully met expectations. To close, one more thing is worth stressing: ZZ Top evidently cultivate a distinctive demographic cross-section of fan base, which sets them widely apart from thoroughly “fossilized” colleagues of the Deep Purple caliber, or worse yet, AC/DC! ZZ Top concertgoers are first and foremost well-seasoned men and women of mature years who undoubtedly know how to handle the good stuff.
Setlist
1. Got Me Under Pressure 2. Waiting For The Bus 3. Jesus Just Left Chicago 4. Pincushion 5. I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide 6. I Can’t Tell My Faith 7. Cheap Sunglasses 8. Mexican Blackbird 9. I Need You Tonight 10. Foxy Lady 11. Party on the Patio 12. Just Got Paid 13. Gimme All Your Lovin’ 14. Sharp Dressed Man 15. Legs —encore— 16. La Grange 17. Tush —encore— 18. Tube Snake Boogie
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