PAT TRAVERS and Rick Derringer - Pumpehuset, København 5/5/02
From Aural Innovations #20 (July 2002)
I had never seen Rick Derringer before and it has been 17 years (1985) since I last saw Pat Travers. I met up with my Swedish friends Patrik and Mads. I was not sure what to expect from Rick. I sure was surprised how small the guy was when he came out to play, especially compared to the drummer (the freight train), who was incredibly huge (more than 200kg!). Anyway, he started off really poorly, playing some horrible spiritual 80's hard rock pop stuff. Ugh... I thought this was going to suck. The 3rd song was "Still Alive And Well" by Johnny Winter and this was quite good. Then he played a few more before he started going into his classic songs like "Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo", "Let Me In", and "Sitting By The Pool". He played a really cool instrumental song in the middle of the set. Ok, he picked it up after a horrible start but he sure did not seem to have the fire in his fingers and seemed a bit rusty. His big hit of the night was "Hang On Sloopy", which he wrote in 1965. The 3 minute pop song made into ten minutes was too long though. He played about 70 minutes. Unfortunately, I did not get a recording. For some reason, nothing registered.
After 15 minutes Pat Travers was up and it was his band, the bass and drummer that were backing Rick, so there was not much changes but I did think they would want a few more minutes break. I barely made it back from taking a piss and grabbing a beer before Pat was starting up tuning. He opened with "Hooked On Music". It sounded really excellent and he was playing great. The band sounds a little thin with only one guitar player but he sounded very good. His voice was more rough than before but passionate. He played a few blues songs (Just enough money to buy me a case of the blues, The Pain), which were great but mostly he played his classics like "Stevie", "Makin' Music", "Boom Boom", "Whipping Post", "Snortin' Whiskey", etc. After 70 minutes they left the stage and Rick came out and played with Pat. Pat did a 6 minute instrumental thing that was very cool, then they ripped into "Born Under A Bad Sign". Pat was really great. Rick was so low in the mix you could hardly hear him and he seems so shy and outplayed. Pretty damn cool night and about 300 people or so, mostly older than me!
Reviewed by Scott Heller