A Review From Concert
From Calender Live:
POP MUSIC REVIEW
You didn't miss much, Les
Glitches and bombast mar the salute to guitar wizard Les Paul.
By Josh Kun, Special to The Times
DUE to his hospitalization with pneumonia earlier this week, 90-year-old electric guitar icon Les Paul was unable to attend his own Tuesday-night tribute concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre. Which might not have been such a bad thing.
Marred by technical problems and low ticket sales (barely a quarter of the venue's 6,000 seats were full), the night was a three-hour-long train wreck that beyond the occasional "get well soon" shout offered little connection to the man responsible for building some of the first electric guitars and pioneering multi-track recording technology back in the pre-rock days of the 1940s. Indeed, few in the crowd of former high school guitar gods (a sea of Tommy Bahama shirts, denim jackets and male pony-tails) seemed to care that Paul was a no-show. They were there, as the silver-maned Edgar Winter liked to remind them throughout the night in his trademark howl, to "rock and roooooll."
The night, which was also a benefit for the South L.A. youth organization A Place Called Home, got off to a rocky start when there were technical difficulties with Paul's taped black-and-white broadcast from what looked to be a hospital basement — initially it wouldn't show up on the stage video screens and when it did, nobody could hear a word he said. Then, in announcing a technical delay, the show's emcee (radio host Chris Carter) delivered the night's worst omen of all: "We'll be back in 10 minutes, and then the show will start with Steven Seagal."
It's hard to imagine what the organizers were thinking in choosing the actor — an aspiring blues musician who has suddenly developed a thick Southern accent — to open the show with former Muddy Waters guitarist Hubert Sullivan playing, believe it or not, as his sideman. At least Seagal mumbled his way through actual songs. The rest of the night was mostly a spectacle of screaming fret board pyrotechnics, courtesy of Toto's Steve Lukather (who drained the nuance out of Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing"), Robben Ford and crowd favorite Joe Satriani, who got the award for loudest and longest solo without melody. Punk band Suicidal Tendencies (or at least a few of them) were also called in at the last minute and somebody decided it'd be a good idea to invite along Christian power-rockers Switchfoot. It wasn't.
For all of the night's guitar worship, the most memorable moments happened away from the Marshall amps. R&B belter and former "Rent" star Shayna Steele showed Journey's Neil Schon that the voice is mightier than the ax, and a too-brief set from Dobro-meister Jerry Douglas and singer-fiddler Alison Krauss packed more emotion into one song than the rest of the night put together. The best performances didn't even come from the squealing guitarists themselves, but from the their backup players — especially drummer Kenny Aronoff, organ pounder Greg Mathieson and bassist Abraham Laboriel Sr. Laboriel was the night's secret anchor, equally at home leading Winter and former Guns N' Roses slinger Slash through a funk-steamed take on Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" as he was holding it together for a closing set from blues legend Buddy Guy and Aerosmith's Joe Perry.
Paul's innovative recordings for Capitol in the '40s and '50s — many with his late wife, vocalist Mary Ford — were remarkable for their attention to technical craft and subtlety, playfully blurring genre lines between jazz, blues, and international pop. The tribute's generally clichéd performances, which rarely ventured beyond stock blues formulas, unfortunately showcased the opposite: a size-matters approach to guitar playing where bombast and speed trump all else.
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