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show review by MAIKE >> MAIKE's show pictures and video clips
Hannover, 3 April 2004, Blues Garage
Since this concert had been postponed from December to April, I had been looking forward to it for quite a while. My parents and I live in Hamburg and it's a ninety-minute-drive to Hannover. The concert was supposed to start at 10 pm and we arrived in Hannover at 8 pm. Then we had to wait for two hours until Bjorn Berge, an overweight, tattooed, Norwegian blues guitarist started his set. Like Eric he is a slide player, and apart from songs from his new album he also played some Robert Johnson, Led Zeppelin and Motörhead stuff according to his way of playing, which sounded really cool. He is an awesome guitar player but I must admit that I was looking forward to seeing Eric so much that I couldn't really concentrate on what he was doing. After forty-five minutes his gig was over and then Paul Loranger came on stage to check the cables and do some other "roadie work." He greeted me friendly and then left the stage again.
At 11.15 pm the concert eventually started. I don't know for sure what the first song was. It sounded familiar to me but I didn't recognise the lyrics. Probably it was one of the old blues classics. This evening Eric had to fight against technical difficulties and a completely indifferent audience that was more interested in getting drunk than in anything else. First his monitor didn't work so that he couldn't hear his guitar, after this problem had been solved there was a terrible feedback from the microfon and his amp made some strange noise. However, the guys played two hours and the setlist was as follows:
-?
-Sidewinder
-Can't Be Satisfied
-Same Ol' Way
-Get Along Rider
-Low Down Love
-Flames Of Love
-Down In The Bottom
encore:
-Treat Me Right
The setlist is quite short but he improvised a lot and of course Mike and Paul had there solos, too. As I already mentioned the audience was bad, a fact I had not realized until Eric told us that, "in case we didn't know, it was a Saturday evening and it was time to party."
I had been standing in the front row, taking pictures, dancing a bit and therefore had no idea what was going on behind me. Then I saw that about seventy percent of they audience was talking and not moving at all, apart from going to the toilet all the time. It must have been very frustrating for Eric and I felt so sorry for him! Nevertheless he did a great job, played, as usual, the guitar duel against himself, burned his guitar, left the stage to play in the audience and used his bottle of beer as a slide. When he spat some beer into the air, most of it hit me and it ran down into my underpants. Hope I won't get pregnant! ;-)
But that was not all. Most of the time he played in front of me and of course he was sweating heavily, so I had to take several salty showers. But that's pure and raw blues power!
After two hours everything was over but we didn't leave at once since I wanted to talk to Eric and the other guys whom I've known for several years now. There were surprisingly many people who wanted to have autographs from the band and even his cds were finally sold out! Well, it took a while until I could talk to Eric. He had just signed a hairy fat belly from a drunken ugly man (does it surprise you that he gave this guy his felt pen afterwards?) and it seemed to me that was glad to see me. He hugged and kissed me several times (what seemed to annoy many women in the crowd) and then he told me that he was really dissatisfied with this concert. I assured him that nevertheless I had had a great time (which was true) and told him that my parents and me were also planning to see him on Tuesday in Hamburg. He suggested to put our names on the guest list and then took two pictures of us. They didn't turn out very well (I look like a monster) but he promised to take better ones next Tuesday. So let's see! Well, we arrived in Hamburg at 3.30 am and were really dead, but it was definitely a cool evening! Can't wait until Tuesday!
MAIKE's show pictures and video clips
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