Grolsch Blues Festival, Schoeppingen, Germany May 30-31

Just back from the most wonderful weekend away – and so soon after the RAH trip – lucky me -  ‘cause it doesn’t get much better than this!

A small, comfortable setting on the lawn behind a swimming pool, always enough room to get to the front of the stage if you wanted to despite there being around 1000 in attendance, friendly people, good beer, bratwurst, fantastic weather and several musical surprises. And Joe!

(I’ll be posting separately in Other artists about the ‘surprises’ and I’ll be adding photo links here when I get around to them.)

Andre, Marco and I arrived at the site Saturday afternoon to discover that our Eva was the merchandising assistant! Hugs and kisses all round. We then found Andre’s friends Rudi and Johan and, as regularly happens to me before shows, ran into Carmine and Rick doing their usual site reconnoiter. Met Bogie and Joe and Warren too before settling down to await the entertainment.

Wolf Mail from Canada opened the show. All I can honestly say is that nothing that I heard grabbed my attention or generated any interest. Like most people, I was concentrating on beer and safely grabbing rays at this point.

Henrik Freischlager’s Five Live clearly had a big local following, as the crowd was immediately up for this band who had a great sax player along with the standard four piece. These boys certainly had something, though again I must confess that they didn’t grab my undivided attention.

Dana Fuchs grabbed my attention – and held it – big time! Much more about her in the topic of her name. I was lucky enough to find out that Joe was going to join her band for one number and was able to get into a decent position to film all 15 minutes of Joe jamming with Dana!! I will post a link to the clip just as soon as I get it up somewhere (I can’t just send it as it’s over 300 Mb!)

http://www.bluesmagazine.nl/video-dana- … en-germany

Then it was time for the main attraction, the crowd now tightly packed. As always, the first chords of TBOJH floated towards us with Joe still out of sight, then I got whammied as Joe appeared with a gleaming red double-neck monster that I hadn’t seen before.

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/1045/dsc00174r.jpg

The first show after the RAH, one in such totally different surroundings, was always going to be, er, very different. So it proved – back to the standard shorter set, open air acoustics (though the sound was generally excellent!), Joe with very light shades that he never took off (yes, snappy suit). Of course I loved it, because I love the man and his music – but my previous nine shows included shows that I have loved more. Fair ‘nuff?

TBOJH
Last Kiss
So many roads
Mountain Time
Further on up..
Sloe Gin
Great Flood
Your funeral….
Blues Deluxe
Woke Up…(with flamenco intro)
Just got paid

Encore
Quarryman
Asking around…

We got to hang with the guys afterwards, Joe signed some stuff for me and kindly gave me a pick, had an excellent talk with Roy too – but before we knew it, Warren was rounding everyone up for the 10 hour bus ride to Munich. I told them, ‘till August, or sooner’.

We got messed up in a one way detour going back home to Andre’s and eventually got to bed at 3 am. (Marco and I spent the night at Andre’s in Holland – the festival was not far over the border in Germany.)

The second day started earlier and the sun was even warmer. I wore a hat on the nurse’s orders. It felt kind of strange being there to see other bands without a Joe climax at the end, and even though I was really looking forward to seeing Michael Burks, I didn’t know what to expect from the day’s entertainment.

Khalif ‘Wailin’ Walter from Chicago started proceedings. A journeyman guitarist who had to play to around 100 people, so for one number he took his mic stand with him right into the ‘crowd’, and stood there singing and playing. He was ok, but nothing in any way special.

Layla Zoe from Canada was the first surprise. A small, feisty lady with tattoos on her arms and legs and a voice that cannot help but make you think of Janis – but then without that extra whisky croak.  She was the only performer to come out for two encores. Let me tell you, this little lady can sing and I strongly urge you to check her out and support her (she’s an independent artist). I’ll be starting a topic for her downstairs as soon as I get to it.

Next we had the Van Wilks Trio from Texas. Now Van’s been playing for years and has learned some pretty fancy finger movements around his guitar. He wasn’t offensive, but he just didn’t have it more me – Andre and I agreed that he just didn’t have ‘the tone’. He was also on a hiding to nothing having to play after Layla, who had really wowed the crowd and got everybody going. Van Wilks was unable to keep the crowd going.

Beth Hart. Wow, what can I say? She’s like a contemporary, foul-mouthed Joni Mitchell on speed. She has some very funny lines, but she also says a lot that would be impossible to say in front of a family audience – which means that I cannot share her funniest lines with you here. She was interesting, she has a hell of a voice, but I thought that she was kind of out of place at a ‘blues festival’. The crowd liked her, but not as much as they had liked Layla Zoe.

The sun had gone down, but it wasn’t completely dark yet when the day’s headliner took the stage.

Michael ‘Iron man’ Burks came out and grabbed the audience by the throat from the first notes he played. I will do my fulsome gushing in the topic with his name. All I’ll say now is that the very vast majority of the audience were seeing him for the first time, as were all of us in our group. I can only compare the impact he made on this audience by reminding y’all of your Bonabaptisms. There is no musical experience more wonderful than being unexpectedly completely blown away. Michael Burks made himself a lot of new fans Sunday night.

We drove back to Holland in silence, avoiding the detour horror. There was nothing we wanted to hear just then. Marco decided that he’d rather drive through the night than spend another night listening to me snore, so he left and Andre and I went to bed with smiles.

Make sure to check Marco’s site for the first, excellent pictures of this festival - http://www.bluesmagazine.nl/