Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Tonhalle / Munich / Germany
Concert date: September 25, 2009
Attendance: 2,500
Ticket price: €37.70 / €40.00
The Mr. Big reunion is just one in a long line of band reunions from acts that hit their commercial and creative peak, let’s say, some 20 years ago. It’s pretty much a trend by now. Musicians get back together because it’s a sure-fire money maker. Why bite the hand that feeds you, right? Luckily, Mr. Big managed to reunite with the original lineup. Alice In Chains weren’t so lucky, and they’re hitting the road on a similar tour anyway. If Thin Lizzy can play without Phil Lynott, if The Cult can play a 20-year-old album in full on their current tour because it brought them their biggest glory, if… Anyway, to cut a long story short: there’s a whole sea of good excuses out there to justify this kind of thing…
Except for Eric Martin, who more or less vanished from the scene after Mr. Big shut up shop for a few years, the other three buddies didn’t sit around twiddling their thumbs. They kept busy building their reputations and marketing their names. Pat Torpey kept playing as a member of former Mr. Big man Richie Kotzen’s band and with Chris Impellitteri, and as for Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan, there’s really no point wasting words. Everybody wants those two in their band.
The surest way to lure old fans to your show is, naturally, to reunite the lineup that made you the most money and fame, if at all possible. And that’s exactly what Mr. Big did. The reunion tour, which kicked off in Japan in June 2009, was already a huge success. Official live DVD and CD releases are coming out of that leg of the tour too. Mr. Big, who’ve now popped over to Europe as well, trimmed the repertoire a bit compared to what the Japanese crowd got, but the Munich show still ran a full 2 hours, not a minute less.
For the first time since I started roaming around foreign countries and concert venues, I ended up at the Tonhalle, in Munich’s Kunstpark Ost. It’s another nice hall, with a roof structure that’s actually just covered with canvas. But the stage is big, wide and deep, which lets the performers really spread their wings. You can squeeze in about 4,000 people, by my eye. This time the turnout was truly impressive. You could feel the fever of massive enthusiasm in the air, from fans who had waited a long, long time for the day they’d see their heroes on stage again. The crowd was aged 30 and up, which tells you the audience has gotten older along with the band. But among the faithful, especially up front, there were plenty of young people too, and above all lots of women, which kind of fits the band’s reputation, thanks mainly to the hit To Be With You. Especially ecstatic was a group of Asian girlfriends of the band, who made by far the most noise at the show and “snapped up” off the floor, or even mid-air, everything that came flying their way from the stage.
You rarely witness this kind of excitement at German shows. Germans have an overabundance of everything. That’s why they mostly approach concerts casually. Quality hard rock shows are as ordinary to them as breathing. They always turn up right on time, when the headliner is scheduled to play. No signs of euphoria. This time it wasn’t quite like that. Already at 8:00 p.m., when the support act, a duo of instrumentalists and local heavyweights, started warming up the crowd, they entertained everyone with melodies that gave off an interesting whiff of the exotic, especially thanks to the sound of instruments I haven’t got the faintest idea how to even name. A guitar with no body, percussion in the “weirdest” shapes, etc….
The crowd was bored to tears. Still, they were packed up against the stage and on the lookout. Some 2,500 heads jealously guarded their own little patch of space in front of the stage and wouldn’t let anyone get close. Everybody was waiting for the moment Mr. Big would appear. It’s nine o’clock. A roadie shines a flashlight in the dark and signals the tech at the mixing desk that the band is coming on. The hall comes alive. At first it’s only Torpey and Gilbert. You can hear the rumble of Sheehan’s bass, but the man only leaps out from behind the monitors once Eric Martin is on stage too. The band kicks off with the naughty Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy. By the second go-round of the chorus, Martin tests whether the audience is on the same wavelength as Mr. Big, and gets his confirmation when the crowd confidently sings back the title line. All good. The quartet is going to be hot tonight. That’s for sure. The excitement is huge, and after the intense opening, Sheehan steps into the spotlight, laying down with the warmth of his bass tone the runway for a relaxing jump into the new musical atmosphere created by Take Cover (if I may add – one of this concert reporter’s personal Mr. Big favorites). The sound is excellent, with everything in the right place and the right balance. Martin comes through great, and Gilbert and Sheehan stand shoulder to shoulder for the first time in the outro of Take Cover. For a few moments the stage becomes Paul Gilbert’s, as the intro rings out to the song that further cemented the name of Mr. Big in the first half of the eighties. Green-Tinted Sixties Mind. A song with a seductive chorus that always reminds me of Mr. Big borrowing some of the vocal harmony wizardry of the legendary Boston. Here I want to single out the superb interplay of vocal harmonies, where Sheehan, Gilbert and Torpey delivered so well that, not just in this song but throughout the rest of the night, I wasn’t totally sure whether Mr. Big might be using a harmony backing track, they sounded that phenomenal. Then it’s another gallop in a higher gear with Alive And Kickin’ and the brand-new Next Time Around, which has everything a true fan of their catalog could want from Mr. Big. If the guys keep going in this direction, a new album, if it ever happens, will surely be another treat!
The first real surprise on the setlist was actually Hold Your Head Up, originally by Argent. It’s actually Argent’s best-known hit, which Uriah Heep first covered back in 1989 for their album “Raging Silence” and also released as a single. Even though the Uriah Heep version comes across far more convincingly, Mr. Big didn’t put a foot wrong here either. Martin called on the crowd to pitch in more actively on the chorus, and they didn’t think twice. Then the passions cool off again with the dreamy Just Take My Heart, where people eagerly cheered Gilbert’s recognizable opening motif, and in the chorus the entire front half of the hall was singing again. Magical.
Martin is still a lively presence, not exactly the sharpest wit when it comes to tossing out clever banter, but he still keeps up the stage energy and an excellent voice that held its own against the powerful, instantly recognizable riffs, the solo escapades and the venomous rhythmic undercarriage. Still, you could feel that Martin is the weakest link in the quartet. Sheehan and Gilbert are simply such heavyweights instrumentally that they take over the stage at every moment. Martin also showed the first signs of vocal wear in the first encore, when the band tackled the obligatory To Be With You, since he had to adjust all the highest notes, singing them lower in an improvised manner, or even skipping a word or two of the verse.
All three instrumentalists got their space to show why they’re so highly regarded. After a less interesting Torpey drum solo, still in the first half of the show, Sheehan and Gilbert finally crossed guitars more seriously. It was an (inter)lude, a bridge between Take A Walk (“Little girl, go for a walk!”, heh heh) and The Whole World’s Gonna Know. Gilbert started off playing around with the intro on a white double-neck Ibanez guitar. It wasn’t long before Billy Sheehan joined him with his double-neck Yamaha bass. They challenged each other, tossing off quickly improvised motifs back and forth, and logically reaped thunderous ovations of general delight in the hall. There weren’t many moments like that, though, and the tightness of a highly dynamic show, commanded by classics from the first four Mr. Big albums, wasn’t threatened in the slightest. A moment of great fun, which is a constant of American hard rock bands like this. Like this? Wrong. That’s exactly one of the key elements that helped first make Mr. Big, give them a special place, and later keep their name alive, so the audience was far from forgetting them, even during the band’s quiet years!
Anyway, it’s a pleasure to watch the refinement of their playing technique. You actually get a little shocked at how effortlessly both Sheehan and Gilbert pull off the most impossible acrobatics (especially for the ear, let alone the eye). At one point the latter played a solo whose speed was more than a little reminiscent of the monophonic Super Nintendo game melodies. Gentlemen. What can you say. In the opener Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy, Sheehan stole the spotlight after a tech handed him a running power drill and he played a few licks along the bass with it. No wonder Martin’s vocals become kind of “tiny” at moments like that, which in the physical sense Eric Martin actually is, though as I said, the man confidently commands every inch of his role on stage, even on this Mr. Big reunion tour.
Mr. Big wrapped up the regular part of this merry-go-round of one-of-a-kind energy exchange with the crowd in high spirits, with slick playing through Rock & Roll Over and Addicted To That Rush. The latter especially, with its deliberately stretched-out length, gave the show a feeling that might never end. Arrogant, in the best way! As expected, Gilbert and Sheehan built solo upgrades onto the original versions of the songs. As expected and as demanded!
Next comes the obligatory encore with the “old chestnut” To Be With You, which Martin pretty much handed over to the audience entirely. Gilbert grabs an acoustic guitar for the second time, as he did in the little gem Wild World (a Cat Stevens cover). The scene in the hall was very similar to Wild World, only To Be With You naturally came across even a notch more intense. I’d been waiting all night for Colorado Bulldog, and I finally got it at the very end. One last time, everything we understand by the term Mr. Big came alive at the Tonhalle. The “grooved-up” accelerated rolling of the rhythm wheel, the naughty guitar riff, the bravura soloing, another stunning crossfire between Gilbert and Sheehan, and of course a grabby chorus that once more subjugated everyone in the hall.
The ecstatic hall demanded the band back again. First to peek out from backstage is Billy Sheehan. What comes next? A surprise. Gilbert kicks off a motif. It sounds damn familiar, but the sound is just cut from a totally different cloth. What the hell? This can’t be real. Mr. Big are playing The Who. Baba O’Riley! Hello? What a fun version! You have to see it for yourself. The guys cracked up on stage, having a blast during this big The Who classic. It was interesting to watch the younger people in the hall, who had no clue what the heck Mr. Big were playing now, heh heh… Time to brush up on their classics. Of course, in this song the top honors went to Gilbert!
I should also mention that during one of those instrumental shenanigans by Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan, Martin had a hard time getting back into the action on stage. Before the return to the Take A Walk chorus, Gilbert “deliberately” wouldn’t let Martin start singing the last round of the chorus. It’s probably a well-rehearsed stage prank the band uses to heat up the crowd even more and to have as much fun as possible on stage themselves. Anyway, Gilbert simply kept ending the lead-in to the chorus in a way that Martin couldn’t come in normally on the opening line of the chorus after him. After the third failed attempt, Martin exclaimed somewhat irritably to his buddy: “Oh for heaven’s sake! Stop that playing!”, while Gilbert’s own mischief kept sending him into endless fits of laughter.
The Mr. Big reunion tour is a must, dear friends of music. See at least one show, do yourself the favor. Every drop of sweat you spill for it will be repaid, even if beforehand you happen to get stuck in a many-kilometer traffic jam on the way to Munich and spend two whole hours fuming in a highway cramp at the Austrian-German border before Bad Reichenhall, and then barely catch the tail end of the show, which is exactly what happened to me this time.
You’ll get everything you want from Mr. Big. Their biggest classics, a generous helping of fun and positive energy, a hefty dose of proper shock therapy that’ll have your jaw and eyes wide open as you watch Sheehan’s and Gilbert’s “out of this world” virtuosity! Two full hours of big fun theater that keeps Mr. Big in a special place among the giants of hard rock. The great gentlemen showed they’ve kept their heads held high. As befits the greats! Anything else is out of the question for pros with that kind of mileage.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy
2. Take Cover
3. Green-Tinted Sixties Mind
4. Alive And Kickin’
5. Next Time Around
6. Hold Your Head Up
7. Just Take My Heart
8. Temperamental
9. It’s For You
10. Price You Gotta Pay
11. Wild World
12. Take A Walk
13. The Whole World’s Gonna Know
14. Rock & Roll Over
15. Addicted To That Rush
—Encore I—
16. To Be With You
17. Colorado Bulldog
—Encore II—
18. Baba O’Riley
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