At Club Soda on Thursday night, Steve Hill celebrated 30 years of career, an opportunity to gauge the magnitude of a work too often reduced to the virtuosity of its creator. A chance to also thank Jimi Hendrix for diverting the Quebec guitarist from the much less rock ‘n’ roll path he wanted to take.
Posted at 2:37pm
Before Steve Hill came across a guitar magazine dedicated to Jimi Hendrix as a teenager, he dreamed of another life: that of comic book artist. He only had two scenarios in mind: getting hired by Marvel or by DC Comics. But he was soon to realize: “Playing the guitar is the craziest business that doesn’t exist,” repeated the master of the six strings on Thursday evening to those who had come to celebrate his 30-year career with him at Club Soda.
“We have a lot of music for you tonight,” the birthday boy immediately warned, a promise very, very, very well kept.
His performance lasted more than three hours (!) and included songs from each of his 12 albums, from his Homeric reinterpretation of I’m a King Bee (recorded on this 1997 CD of the same name, which features a chubby-faced Steve on the cover). ) to the Pete Townshend riff of Don’t Let the Truth Get in the Way (Of a Good Story) (a tongue-in-cheek hymn to alternative facts, taken from the excellent Dear Illusion, published last November).
After doing much on his own as a one-man band since 2012, the owner of Quebec’s largest collection of denim jackets reunited with his musicians Thursday, including his faithful drummer Sam Harrisson (who can evoke both the anvil and the butterfly ). , bassist Alec McElcheran and a brass trio consisting of Jacques Kuba Séguin (trumpet), Édouard Touchette (trombone) and Mario Allard (baritone saxophone).
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Steve Hill and his musicians
So strung together, the 48-year veteran’s songs shed light on one of his least celebrated aspects of his work: the flexibility of his prolific work as a songwriter who knows how to use his encyclopedic knowledge of blues, rock and country at the service of music never found in pastiche slides off A music enriched by this increasingly cavernous voice, shaped by whisky, age and adversity. Adversity remains one of his main themes, the guilt of a career that has seen many obstacles.
Some beautiful moments of this evening? Her funky version of Emily, usually a blue flower ballad, and Out of Phase, one of the more introspective songs in her repertoire, emerged from the torpor on Thursday, which its lyrics describe with a shimmering coda featured on the slide.
window of vulnerability
At the risk of opening an open door, we write for the umpteenth time that Steve Hill is an exceptional guitarist whose solos are of course breathtaking, but not just to amaze.
Behind his instrument, Steve Hill is something of a miracle, proof that there is grace in this world. Steve Hill, superhero? In fact, he behaves like the cartoon characters of his childhood, showing in each of his solos that even mortals can achieve superhumans.
If a good guitar solo is a way of telling a story, Steve Hill has nothing to envy to the finest storytellers whose improvisations know how to convey both ecstasy and melancholy.
Lyrically, Never Is Such a Long Time is a song that gets your chest pumping, but where your fingers cut windows of vulnerability, a tension typical of so many great blues standards. Even in its darkest passages, his work remains on the side of light thanks to this play of insanely expressive richness.
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Steve Hill
“I still love playing guitar,” Steve confided at the end of a two-hour first part, which he ended with Devil at My Heels (his unbeatable 2007 hard rock foray). Back on stage, beer in hand, the little fellow from Trois-Rivières interpreted a dozen Hendrix classics, a generous hat to the one without whom he might be making a living at his pencils.
“Give me something real / Give me the truth / Give me something I can feel,” Steve Hill repeats at the end of The Collector, a few sentences that could also sum up a career in which he never had any other goal than to stay true and make his fans, the moment of a show or a solo, feel intensely alive.