mean fiddler

Walter Trout – Mean Fiddler

October 6th 2006

You know when a gig was a good one when the audience leave with a bounce in their step and can’t stop talking about the gig. You know it was a great gig when the press stop showing each other who is least impressed and do the same thing. This was a great gig.

Arriving for the latter part of an excellent set by Carvin Jones – thank you Mr Livingstone – it was good to see the crowd really get behind him. He is a terrific showman and the audience seemed a little disappointed not to get an encore. Still Carvin will have sold a lot of T-Shirts and CDs on the back of it.

Then the wait while the stage is emptied and looking around seeing that the crowd has filled out even more and there probably isn’t room to slide a rizla between the bodies. The temperature is getting up to cooking and a massive cheer went up as the band took the stage. Suddenly Sammy Avila’s keys are exiting stage left – broken/blown/dead. Quick conflab on the stage and the announcement "Well Sammy’s keys are blown so we’re gonna play this as a fuckin’ power trio".

At this point all pretension to objectivity from me goes out of the window as WT and his remaining Radicals – Joey Pafumi, stylish and right there on drums and Rick Knapp on stygian and rock solid bass – rip out a set of pure blues/rock that had the entire place – including the press corps – dancing and boogying in slack-jawed homage. The set-list was discarded and the three basically ripped out a two hour jam that proved that Trout is probably the most under-rated guitarist around at the moment. A couple of items appeared from the ‘Full Circle’ album and Walter, sensibly, went for older material that suited the format but we got stories and name-dropping about the stars that he has played with –John-Lee Hooker, John Mayall, Guitar Shorty, Coco Montoya, Jeff Healey, Joe Bonamassa et al. And we got an incredible display of guitar playing at its best; not just technically the best but played with spontaneity and heart and soul. Sammy came out to do lead vocals on ‘Down Down’ – not his greatest talent but … and Andrew Elt was brought out a couple of times to do lead vocals but basically what we got was raw Walter Trout. I said to the man afterwards that I thought that was the best I had ever seen them and Trout collapsed with laughter as he said that he hadn’t played that hard in years. This from the man once told ‘You play too many notes, too loud’; No he doesn’t.

Review by Andy Sniper / www.music-news.com