Text: Glenn Leaper | Photos: Caroline Traitler
When Geoff Tate announces that he’ll be performing Queensrÿche’s seminal Operation:Mindcrime in its entirety one final time in conjunction with his imminent [May 3] solo release of the third instalment of the greatest rock opera of all time, a certain kind of immediate rejuvenation occurs across the crinkling countenance of the lifelong Queensrÿche devotee. Plans are made forthwith to relive what is known to be among the greatest experiences known to man, and if the mountain won’t come to Muhammed, then Muhammed must go to the mountain. This means a sojourn to picturesque Slovenia and the beautifully unblemished city of Ljubljana, City of Dragons (well, there’s a couple of marble ones on a bridge), home to Prešeren, Pogačar, the giant of Ljubljana himself philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and, as it turns out, thoroughly lovely people in general. It seems the ideal place to once again engage with an era-defining artist and his trademark Gesamtkunstwerk, which are nothing if not of eternally numinous appeal.
There’s just one – potential – problem. The stage in the Orto rock bar, in which this legend among men has been booked through the tireless efforts of kickass promoter Black Label Events as part of a wider European tour, is tiny. The venue is definitely decent enough, sufficiently large and commodious for a hell of a night out. But the stage itself is miniscule (maybe 3 metres deep and 6 metres wide – at best?), located at the end of a long cavernous passage, and better suited for the denizens in Plato’s cave to reflect on shadows dancing on the wall over a beer or ten than for witnessing one of the great artworks of the modern age conceived to explore existential truths eternal. Already, openers Masterplan, who play an otherwise great set under the circumstances, struggle for space and to reconcile their über-proficiency laced with tremendous compositions with the sound in the venue, clearly to the irritation of its deeply experienced musicians, and one was left to wonder just how the situation would be remedied for the main event.
Geoff Tate these days appears to be travelling with something of a merry troupe of mainly European troubadours, seemingly picking his musicians at will from a larger pool of his tightly knit entourage. This meant that no less than three top-tier guitarists – Dario Parente, Amaury Altmayer, and James Brown (!) – were jostling for space on this narrow Ljubljana stage tonight, alongside giant funball bassist Jimmy Wynen, powerhouse drummer Michele Panepinto, and Sister Mary extraordinaire/keyboardist Clodagh McCarthy. “This has got to be the smallest stage I have ever played on since 1983,” as Tate laughed good-naturedly later in the set – and it may have been no exaggeration.
But what might have proved a logistical nightmare – 7 musicians, so roughly three foot’s worth of wingspan for each, basically (including drums and PA)- was handled with aplomb aplenty, not least due to the tightly choreographed and clearly thoroughly well-rehearsed individual performances in service of the inexorable holism this performance would require. This was seamlessly coupled with a debonair atmosphere within the band that ensured that no individual ego (not even Tate’s!) would detract from the greater whole. Indeed, the band, and not least Tate, appeared to be having a genuinely good time, perhaps not despite but because of the circumstances, with each player deferring to the other and retreating (lord knows where) when it came time for a solo, lead, or goofball moment from bassist Wynen, for their respective moments in the spotlight. The camaraderie between the younger players supporting an obvious manifest hero of their youth is in ample evidence, with even some coordinated stage moves nodding to their predecessors’ antics in old Queensrÿche promo videos (back when such wonders still existed) thrown in. Tate clearly feasts on the energy of his younger cohorts, delivering on his own lifetime of professionalism from the highest levels of the Metal and Hard Rock firmament to the more intimate venues of later musical exploration and experimentation. The takeaway was that this band could have played in your living room and would still not have balked at the challenge of delivering at the highest level – and this night, they sure as hell did.
When the lights go down and the backing tape rolls out the ‘I Remember Now’ spoken intro to the greatest Heavy Metal album of all time, frissons are guaranteed no matter what. The only question, really, is just how intense the performance is going to be, given the circumstances and nature and impossibly high standard of the, well, entirety of the material. The band sans Tate emerges joining a Panepinto already nestled in place for a tighter-than-a-virgin ‘Anarchy X’, portending a great performance to come, and by the time an already buoyant Tate emerges for the opening lines to ‘Revolution Calling’, the place is about ready to sack Ljubljana’s presidential palace. Orto may not be a large venue, but what it lacks in width it makes up for in cavernous depth, which has the effect of making a sold-out crowd of even just 450 resonate with its concentrated rumble up front. The sound issues from opener Masterplan’s set have been definitively fixed and the mix is decidedly and surprisingly good, the instruments finely balanced even within this challenging space and Tate’s clarion voice not only in fine – nay, practically perfect – form, but also deliciously resonant in a manner possible only when all band elements are given equal shrift to support the greater whole. There’s nothing like going back to absolute basics to strengthen a unit to its extreme.
Tate, his presence and charisma enormous, proceeds to take us through the full-bloodedly, unapologetically revolutionary first half of Operation:Mindcrime with the conviction and control of – not even central O:M protagonist Nikki – but of Dr. X himself (see forthcoming Operation:Mindcrime III…), delivering ‘Operation:Mindcrime’, ‘Speak’, and ‘Spreading The Disease’ as if he were singlehandedly executing the overthrow of the present fascist American government he so accurately prophesied almost 40 years ago. The goosebumps and fervour are rampant at every lyrical turn and musical lift and nuance; the union with the music and its message is pure. For true believers such as your correspondent, it’s legitimately enough to sign up to the underground revolution working overtime, for a job in the system with nothing to sign. Again.
But it’s in the magisterial operatic midsection of Operation:Mindcrime that expectations are highest, and, just as in the Queen of the Reich Night’s famous aria of (fellow revolutionary) Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, everything rises to divinity or falls to infamy with whether the delivery and performance can match its immortal compositional ordainment, putting immense pressure, obviously, on the performer(s), as no amount of rehearsal can guarantee the meeting of the moment. And it’s precisely here in the climax of the tragic duet between political assassin Nikki [Tate] and mistakenly absolved sex worker Sister Mary [McCarthy], where this Opera:Mindcrime narrative takes its most transcendental turn, that the greatness of Tate’s current enterprise resides and veritably comes into being. Something of this magnitude is obviously designed for grander stages (and, providence willing, the opera houses of the future), but to be able to pull it off on the smallest of all stages, with zero artifice or technical support (save from the obligatory backing tape with the Verdi-inspired Michael Kamen-arranged Dies Irae choral verses) is a feat that can only be chalked up to the genuinely passionate interplay of this particular band constellation, the professionalism and talent of which clearly rises to the level of their lodestar and frontman.
Without question, the highest praise here must go to the sublime Clodagh McCarthy, her voice not only genuinely pregnant with Mary’s tragedy and holy suffering, but the performative poesy of her and Tate’s intertwining choreography reaching another level entirely, an aesthetic composed of delicacy balanced with confidence, passion with professionalism, and mutual respect with respective artistic assertion. One is compelled to believe McCarthy and Tate’s embodiment of the story without reservation as one is swept up helplessly in it, for the umpteenth time, yes, but here not without especial attention paid to the exact chemistry between these two performers. The interplay between McCarthy and Tate does what all great art is supposed to do, which is to collapse the spectator’s reality with its own, creating for a fleeting moment the absolute emancipation of self in fully free identification with the characters portrayed, thereby creating the truly revolutionary moment within subjectivity to suspend itself, however momentarily, from the infinite horrors of striated objective reality. The Olympian Operation:Mindcrime centrepiece triptych of ‘The Misson’, ‘Suite Sister Mary’, and the always ferocious ‘The Needle Lies’ flies by like a dream too good to be true, but which is, for once, true nonetheless.
As tremendous as all the players are, a special mention must be made of Dario Parente, who to this writer uncannily summons the spirit of Chris DeGarmo like few seen at Tate’s side since, not only in his playing and tone but also in his mannerisms and aura, almost as if he’s some distant cousin of the great, long-lost, and much-missed genius from the old country. Which takes nothing away from the equally impressive Altmayer and Brown, each just as clean, precise, and elegant as the storied Wilton-DeGarmo hybrid of old, and indeed, who replicate that nonpareil and never successfully emulated twin lead tone of the two old masters to the ne plus ultra. But still, Parente may as well be as if wandering around Elsinore on the Tri-Rÿche, communing with DeGarmo’s ghost. It’s clearly a promising thing, then, that he’ll feature on the new album alongside Altmayer. It’s hard not to imagine ‘ole Geoff having a right old chuckle assembling his troubadours while ticking off fulfilment of the job requirements, one by one.
The final third of Operation:Mindcrime naturally ensues, the haunting ‘Electric Requiem’ of Nikki’s loss of his only hope of redemption in Mary’s killing slightly extended, and leading seamlessly into the one-two relative pop punch of ‘Breaking The Silence’ and ‘I Don’t Believe In Love’ (by far the most accessible songs on the album to Metal Joe Average), though by the end of the latter, with the full band giving their all throwing the backing vocals to Tate’s lament, one very much does believe. Slightly reworked versions of ‘Waiting For 22’ and the haunting ‘My Empty Room’ finally give way to the maestoso pièce de resistance ‘Eyes Of A Stranger’, simply one of the greatest songs ever written for its canonical capture of the human predicament in toto between the lines, Tate delivering each with the conviction with which he first wrote them. Revolution, it turns out, must occur within as well as without by necessity, and the rousing ‘Anarchy X’ reprise of the grande finale so beloved since the original Livecrime performances serves to drive home the interlocking of the eternal struggle between hope and despair. The individual can hope to resolve the latter in favour of the former only by both subverting the authoritarian strictures of society as it stands, but also, paradoxically, renouncing the tyranny of their own self-conceit, at pain of incarceration within their own mind, and by extension, in the eyes of strangers. Which is something that Tate has explored artistically his entire career, whether his craft found favour and understanding, or not. The final command of “REVOLUTION” sounds over the PA, Tate and the entire band raise their arms above their heads in the shape of X, at once signalling distress and resistance in these darkest of times, and the masses are educated once again, if only for an ephemeral, ethereal moment.
The crowd, long enthusiastically participant, now fully won over and practically delirious, Tate immediately asks if it wants more, explodes jubilantly in the affirmative. To which he responds: “good, ‘cos we’re just getting started” (!), the band launching directly into the gargantuan ‘Empire’, the obvious companion piece to the Mindcrime dystopia and the perfect additional coda, especially now that said Empire is imploding of its own accord. The performance is tight and beguiling, the atmosphere of impending systemic downfall enveloping the venue and the crowd, none of whom to which the song is a stranger, singing along to its unified heart’s content. And then it was simply off to the races for the (admittedly largely ageing, but not only) Children of the Rÿche, with Rage For Order crown jewel (of all 11!) ‘Walk In The Shadows’ following in short order, shored up by the perhaps obligatory ‘Jet City Woman’ and, delightfully, The Warning centrepiece ‘Take Hold Of The Flame’, the original incubus for the youthful Tate’s grander designs on the world, and a song with every inch the inner revolutionary potential today as the day it was written. Incredibly, Tate pulls off the E5 in that timeless post-solo pre-final chorus lift… Even allowing for the possibility of – if so – only very slight and forgivable down tuning (but which your correspondent was in no state to ascertain) – this is simply otherworldly. “See, that the light will find its way” – indeed.
Following that immortal exhortation, the band leave the stage into an antechamber in the back, but in this atmosphere of heightened awareness, there is zero doubt they’ll be right back (not least because they’d have to move through the crowd to actually leave the stage…). And so they are, Tate mischievously introducing the next song as a tune he has heard all sorts of people tell him that they have done all sorts of things to, including “making babies”. Which, well, obviously then ‘Silent Lucidity’ follows, Tate here delicately oscillating between the extremities of his range to lullaby the crowd into the requisite dreamstate, and those of us lucidly in love into a private moment. But the greatest surprise is the fully unexpected finale of ‘Queen Of The Reich’, which Tate cheekily designates as a return “to the beginning of Heavy Metal itself”, and which sees him nail – yes, incredibly, the E5 again – no doubt a deliberately friendly and nodding wink to current Queensrÿche Geoff Tate clone Todd LaTorre. As a personal anecdote, I had told my wife when she was squealing about Tate’s vocals on this at home that he doesn’t play this anymore; I mean for Christ’s sake, be fair to the man; nobody at his age back then could sing this except him, 40 years ago – but, there it was, he did – and he nailed it.
There are a lot of life lessons to learn from Geoff Tate, the man, something the larger ex-community of the Queensrÿche faithful used to understand, not least of which that great things can fall apart, people grow older or apart or both, one cannot capture lighting in a bottle indefinitely, and it’s sometimes time to move on and do different things to the heart’s own content, rather than seek to constantly recapture past glories. But a wise man knows everything moves in circles, even when the world is at its most disadvantageous to him – but not without forfeiting the right to demonstrate why he is king of his own hill, be it in front of 5, 500, or 50,000 people, none of which can ever be facsimiled screaming in digital on the technological roads to madness. And that, then, is a Rÿche of the spiritual realm nobody will ever be able to take from Geoff Tate, something also exemplified and understood so well by his current entourage. And, not least, the masterpiece that is Operation:Mindcrime, which is now truly Tate’s own for posterity, as demonstrated here once again – Revolution and all – and both of which today are more pressing than ever.
The entire meaning-forging world of the ultimate Heavy Metal Gesamtkunstwerk executed to immersive perfection on the smallest of all possible stages with no props or effects whatsoever save the music and performance has the effect of rendering it an even more grandiose experience, and an even greater privilege to witness. Do yourselves a favour and catch this while you still can – especially if you’re in the U.S. for the upcoming leg of the tour… you’re going to need to hear some things. You may even find yourself engaging anon with the outer reaches of your mind that you were made to believe were now futile and impossible to attain – let alone speak of out loud.
Now, wouldn’t that be the greatest Mindcrime of all…
Speak the word.
Special thanks from Glenn and Caroline to the awesome Emre Alkoç of Black Label Events and Clodagh’s kickass husband for taking care of us, and of course Geoff and the band, for this most magical of evenings.
SET LIST
Operation: Mindcrime
I Remember Now
Anarchy-X
Revolution Calling
Operation: Mindcrime
Speak
Spreading The Disease
The Mission
Suite Sister Mary
The Needle Lies
Electric Requiem
Breaking The Silence
I Don’t Believe In Love
Waiting For 22
My Empty Room
Eyes Of A Stranger
—
Empire
Walk In The Shadows
Jet City Woman
Take Hold Of The Flame
Encore:
Silent Lucidity
Queen Of The Reich
