Robin Trower
Live!

Introduction:

The story of Robin Trower is similar to that of Gary Moore, to stick to quite famous people: guitarists with strong personalities and a stunning approach to the instrument, who both started their careers playing what was fashionable at the time, only to later disregard it highly and establish a second part of their career successfully centered on their personalities and largely devoted to their great passion: the blues.

Blues played in a rock manner, therefore hyper-amplified, powerful, atmospheric, even virtuoso.

Blues rock is a difficult genre to propose. Already constrained as it is by the circumscribed harmonic rules of the blues (which limit the melodic and harmonic universe from which to draw and do not capture the unprepared and distracted listeners, relegating the genre to a niche dimension), it also risks flattening in the objective monolithic and rigidity of hard rock, a genre that can easily reach the stomach but more challenging to the brain.

To break away, since the thematic melodic way is not available, the executive way, the way of the soul, remains. To be great in this genre, you need to play, and sing, in a certain way, that only way with which rock blues can dig into the soul and reach many people, not many but enough.

Here, Trower is a musician capable of this. He "enters" the notes he plays remarkably, one by one, takes them as if there were no tomorrow, works them with the pick and fingers, seasoning the effort with continuous, funny grimaces, constantly pushing his heart to the tip of the phalanx, wisely dosing the tremolo lever, the effects at his feet, the interaction of the six strings with all that air moved by the cones of his row of amplifiers, to extract every possible nuance, to brush his rock without lowering it to mere rhythm, or noise, or repetitiveness.

The sound: every great guitarist needs to achieve his sound. To stand out, and to play best what he intends to play. Trower took a lot to reach it; his entire career in Procol Harum (five records and five years, 1967/1971) saw him striving in this direction, without reaching adequate results. At that time, he was fiddling with Gibson guitars, whether Les Paul or "diavoletto," gradually perfecting his technique, occasionally releasing beautiful riffs and incisive solos, but it wasn't there yet, he felt he lacked something, the right feeling.

The switch flipped one evening when Robin decided during a sound check on stage to pick up the Fender Stratocaster of a colleague who would play with the opening group at Procol Harum. And it was instant illumination, like finding a wife after many girls... like a piece fitting perfectly into the still vacant niche.

Therefore Stratocaster, preferably with the middle pick-up inserted for the rhythms and in combination with one of the other two for solos, and then Uni-Vibe brand chorus always inserted or almost, and wah-wah often and willingly... A sound frighteningly similar to Jimi Hendrix’s, but who cares, Trower had found and would never abandon again, the solid base on which to optimally support his phrasing, his ideas, and his riffs. The cake was finally cooked to perfection, and the world had to make room for a new, great electric guitarist, marvelously regenerated from a performer long on the scene and good until then, but like many others.

And regarding the singing, the immediately perfect solution was hiring the never-enough-lamented bassist and singer James Dewar, a lanky, shy, and humble guy as much as he was covered in talent, a kind of Paul Rodgers in timbre and approach but better, better: not as... braggart, more modest and essential, with the "soul" rising up his neck, trachea, balls and gushing from his mouth and nose, to end up in the microphone in the system and then in the speakers to please and give the sensation of the right, the healthy, the best white blues possible.

James left early, in 2002 still in his sixties, his profoundly resonant voice shines in this live album from 1976, adding to his equally deep, simple, linear, and effective bass, indispensable complement to the sulfureous and darting guitar of his band leader.

Context:

It seems strange today, but in those years Robin Trower and his rock blues were "hot" in half the world, even in the far United States. Thanks to the second album "Bridge of Sighets" and its three/four deadly riffs contained therein that hit the mark. This record is thus a testimony of the peak of our career. Great sales, great concerts.

In fact, the cover improperly shows the musician playing at an outdoor venue, a stadium, in front of an ocean of people... in reality, the recording concerns an indoor concert, in the most prestigious hall in Stockholm. With this, perhaps something is lost in rock imagery, but you certainly gain in non-dispersive and goodness of sound. The date is February 3, 1975, and the place is the Concert Hall in the very center of the Swedish capital. The album (unfortunately) is single... only seven tracks for forty-one minutes.

At that point in his career, Robin's trio (drummer Bill Lordan completing the rhythm section) had released three studio albums, and equally three are the excerpts from the first work "Twice Removed from Yesterday" and another three from the second "Bridge of Sights." Only one, however, from the then-recently released "For Earth Below."

Strengths and Weaknesses:

Joe Cocker? Rod Stewart? Paul Rodgers? Steve Winwood? David Coverdale? About blue-eyed soul singers (in short, white people who keep the blues deeply immersed in their veins), personally I choose the guy who sings here all my life (while he also plays the bass). Yes, he lacks being a stage animal, but the vocal emission is invaluable, invigorating.

The recording is decent although not exciting, with screams and shouts (few, we are in Scandinavia) from the audience kept at a respectful distance from the mix. Trower's performance towers, as the true bandleader, over that of the others, slightly overshadowing Lordan's sharp and precise drumming.

There are songs that replicate the goodness of the studio originals and some that surpass them, let's see which ones.

Album Highlights:

Three absolute masterpieces of repertoire appear on this record, remaining such if not further rising with the live performance. Two come from the debut album a couple of years earlier, and among them, there's the absolute pearl: titled "Daydream" and it is a slow, very slow blues... In my personal blues chart, it has always battled with Zeppelin's "What Is and What Should Never Be" for the award of the best blues in nature.

Trower opens it in solitude, hinting at the main theme, soon joined by the singer and almost immediately after by the first thud of drums and bass. Voice and guitar travel in parallel on the same melodic line, yet while the singing is steady, calmly oscillating wisely around the obligatory, characterizing blues tritone (thus generating in the listener's brain the inevitable upward/downward disorientation, from the real "devil's note" as it was decided to call it back then), the guitar is instead mobile and lush, alternating arpeggios, vibratos, bicords, slides, syncopations.

The few phrases of the text are interspersed with a skillful central guitar solo, but it's in the song's depths that the best happens: Dewar calms down and a second solo starts that grows and seems to resolve in the Hendrixian catharsis of the thunderous clattering of ninth chords, chromatically ascending towards the highs...

Instead, there's a stop, a pause, and the Stratocaster immediately begins to speak again, this time lamenting, on an ever softer and supportive rhythm: there's Robin Trower making love with his instrument, with the object that filled his life more than any other. He spreads wise and heartfelt touches here and there on the keyboard, delicately “working” every single string taken, pulling it, vibrating it, sliding to the next note. You can almost see him, bent forward, eyes closed, with the grimace of the mouth accompanying every slightest executive gesture.

The acme is reached almost at the end when the master pulls a string and stays on that note, still, letting the distorted Marshall behind him work, which immediately glissades a clear octave to the upper harmonic, almost in feedback. It's all in suspension, the drummer quietly beats time on the cymbal, the bass continues the rarefied harmonic progression at intervals of a tone.

Robin is not satisfied... changes tile on stage, or perhaps simply changes position of the body concerning the amplifier, maybe imperceptibly rotates the torso to "hide" the strings a little more to the ensemble of barking cones behind him. He turns off the feedback with a tremolo lever hit, phrases for a moment and then re-plays the same note as before, in the same way.

This time everything works better: the Marshall holds it thus for a while, then when it seems about to wane here comes the first harmonic, this time rightly, more hidden, full, satisfying, nourishing. Maybe Robin then leans back and opens his mouth in a supreme grimace, waits, and enjoys it (and I come too, admired and conquered)...

It sounds like a hippopotamus's lament. The entire stage resonates, even the snare drum's wire starts whining... long seconds of amplified blues paradise. Until Trower gently grabs the tremolo lever again and waves the sound, turning off the harmonics and giving respite to the speakers of both the Marshalls and the system, at risk of "skipping" on that beastly resonating frequency.

Some more increasingly lazy moaning up and down the keyboard, ever slower, and then the final chord, the farewell arpeggio to nine minutes of supreme blues sensitivity, duly dilated by those meritorious electroacoustic devices that allowed rock‘n’roll to transform into rock, to amplify music beyond the imagination and add further pathos to its astonishing, unsurpassed effectiveness on people’s brains, hearts, and intestines. Thanks to Leo Fender, Jim Marshall... and again to Robin Trower capable of making the best use of the aforementioned inventors' intuitions!

Also commendable is the performance of "I Can’t Wait Much Longer," the vaguely psychedelic rock blues that in the studio version opened Trower’s first album, inaugurating with a bang the mutation of the ugly duckling lent to progressive (in the Procol) into a noble swan of Hendrixian-styled rock blues. Here the major voice is the sumptuous, Homeric, imperial, sculpted riff soaked in tremolo and chorus, as usual a mix of arpeggio, tritone, fast legato, and string slide with built-in vibrato as the finish: a real beauty and with the most right sound in the world: stunning (psychedelic, indeed) for how filamentous and wavy it is.

On it, Trewar strives to sing his prayer to the beloved, telling her he can’t wait much longer... Ok, Robin Trower’s lyrics are worth nothing, they are mere blues/love clichés created just to add the voice (and what a voice) to the palette of colors set up by the guitar. That's fine, if good lyrics accompany the music it's better, but if it doesn't and the music is excellent anyway, hooray! It's worth it all the same.

The third prominence of the album is at the opening: "Too Rolling Stoned" boasts a bass line for which myriads of musicians, groups, producers, record labels, insiders would steal, sell their mother, donate a kidney to have conceived it. The live rendition here is slightly lower than the original studio version, for two reasons. The first is that the bass is not dominant enough in the mix: Trower is a bit too selfish... it's true that his rhythm, first with wah-wah pedal shredded stops and then in a marvelous counter-riff, is a blast, but the bass train is the most invaluable thing and should have been adequately rewarded.

The second contingency is created by the rhythm and feeling of the second part of the song, the essentially instrumental blues/boogie, which halfway, after a dragged and atmospheric stop, sets off on canonical twelve-eight triplets, at a slower cadence than the previous hustle and bustle theme. Well, the rhythm in this execution is quite accelerated and the instrumental rendition is somehow penalized, conveying a slight sense of haste, a feeling that certainly did not exist in this long coda's slow, glorious, compact pace in the original version. But these are subtleties if you wish, the track remains magnificent anyway.

The Rest:

"Rock Me Baby" is there, the blues standard of anonymous authorship and extensive cover, taken by many (B.B.King, Otis Redding...and of course Jimi Hendrix). Our version is at pretty canonical speed, calm, as usual inspired and rich in the solo, with Lordan insisting on his privileged jazz-school accompaniment, with all twelfths played and marked on the cymbal and the snares more caressed than pounded. However, Trower is also all worth hearing here, lost in his six-string world, captivating, warm, impetuous.

Incidentally, the best "Rock Me Baby" I know is the one released by the late and wonderful Texan guitarist Johnny Winter on the 1973 album "Still Alive and Well," in his most admired and sparkling youthful style: angry, agile, dry, tumultuous.

"Lady Love" is an excerpt from the second album, based on a riff of simple yet effective guitar, as usual vehicle for the irresistible wander of the leader's guitar.

"Alethea" is the only contribution from the third album "For Earth Below," a stumbling rock in which the guitarist relies heavily on his wah-wah pedal and chooses to rush in the solos, releasing agile clusters of legato notes. The track is somewhat expanded by a drum solo, as simple as it is circumscribed in time (luckily... all drum solos are a little boring when listened to and viewed live, and altogether tedious when put on record).

The closure "Little Bit of Sympathy" is a Hendrixian rock blues sprint to the core, even in Dewar’s singing delivery. On this occasion, his buddy Trower "cleans" the Strat's sound a bit from the usual distortions and attempts with semi-clean timbres beloved by the genius of his inspiration, Seattle. The song lingers long on volume and intensity retreats, forerunners to subsequent angry restarts... classic expedient to capture the audience's attention. Almost six minutes of guitar delusion, with the usual ninth chord barrages as culmination, before the final stop, a hasty "Thank you and good night!" of the bandleader and everyone home, or rather record finished and to be put back. Or to listen again.

Final Judgement:

Excellent live album: three unmissable episodes and four others of completing, certainly not fillers but a bit more ordinary. I'm undecided between four and five stars: I adore Robin Trower, so five.