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Live review: The Georgia Satellites, Johnny Diesel and the Injectors and Alvin Lee at Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide on Wednesday, August 2 1989
By STEVE MASCORD
“WE HAVEN’T met the band yet, but they tell me this Johnny Diesel guy is good looking,” teases Georgia Satellites frontman Dan Baird through his unkept mop of hair. The responding audience squeal almost smashes this old theatres lights.
“I hate am already.”
The Satellites, it has to be said, are not overly good coming. Dan looks like he’s taking time out from a bit-part on Dukes of Hazzard; he wears a bright-orange University Of Atlanta football shirt, old jeans and, um, well thats it. Maim gee-tar man Rick Richards is trollish, a huge mop of hair and menacing face. What they conspire to produce is a merciless wall of hick-riffing, like an old Cadillac stuck in the same gear, powering on through the southern scrub. The hugely female and teenage audience cheer politely because they think its cool to do so. With claustrophobia a real problem on the restricted stage, Richards and Baird fling their see-through axes around and hop around the place in a valiant attempt to promote a new album.
But “Hippy Hippy Shake” and “Keep Your Hands To Yourself” are the only offerings that come close to bringing the naive house down. “Battleship Chains” leaves me trying to convince the bloke next to me to fall over in astonishment. The rest, mainly from the new opus, leave a disturbing taste of sameness, the same taste giant floperoo Open All Night has induced. The Satellites know how to rock honestly but we can only hope they didn’t use up all their neat riffs on their debut album.
There is no riff and melody, no highs and lows, just decadent southern boogie. And without the lows, it’s very hard to tell how high the rest is. But jeez, there’s nothing apologetic or pretentious about the Satellites and they are still trying real hard to fulfill the potential we all saw in them.
Despite the amount of shared ground with Baird’s mob, the only touch of Americana on stage with the Diesels is Johnny Tatt’s Jack Daniel’s t-shirt. That, of course, and the blues.
The Diesels hit the new but still unelaborate stage set running, and while so much is familiar. the richness of Bernie Bremond’s sax hits you in the face like a cool gust of wind in the desert.
Perhaps the acoustics here are nicer to old world instruments than booming guitars, but the sax emerges as the one thing the Diesels have over the Satellites.
The other is versatility. The simply breathtaking new “City’s Got Soul” displays just that – soul. Sleek and stylish, it’s the sort of song you could never imagine the Georgia Satellites doing.
“Don’t Need Love”, “Since I Fell”, “Comin’ Home”, “Getcha Love”,..
A middle aged Englishman tip-toes tentatively into the spotlight. Once again, they cheer because it seems cool to. “Alvin Lee”!!!
Now, you gotta have your doubts about rock dinosaurs making comebacks, especially at the same time as the ‘Stones and the Who. I expected Woodstock classic “Goin’ Home” to be about as exciting as Pseudo Echo singing “Rock n’Roll All Nite” and the new stuff to be trumped up, derivative garbage.
Wrong on all three counts. The new Ten Years After songs on show here tonight, “Victim of Circumstance” and “Shake It Up” were mind-blowing, impossibly staggeringly, amazing.
With two new songs, a band he had only rehearsed with twice and at the first gig on a complicated tour, Alvin simply blasted away anything that had happened earlier or would happen later. He toyed with the guitar like a tap, turning the dexterity on and off at will. And few knew who he was…
A couple more broken strings from Diesel, a couple more hit singles, an encore, and Alvin was back to thunder through Memphis, Tennessee, bringing an astonishing night to a close.
It was the best l’d seen the Diesels play, energy-wise (there was some feedback and other such irrelevances). But the good looking American-born West Australian had more than a bit of help from a middle-aged old pom and four ordinary-looking young Georgians.
Their common thread was a dusty studio in Memphis, some obscure African American warblers from the forties and fifties and the electric guitar. And the backstage bar tonight was called Beale Street.
Music may be universal, but the blues are eternal.
This review originally appeared in On The Street
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Johnny Diesel and the Injectors
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