The number of people that came to listen to the music on the main stage at Jagoče, a bit outside of the town centre, was approximately the same as last year on Saturday, when Slovenian musicians such as Jan Plestenjak, Tabu and others performed. Photo: MMC RTV SLO/Sandi Fišer Foto: MMC RTV SLO/Sandi Fišer
The number of people that came to listen to the music on the main stage at Jagoče, a bit outside of the town centre, was approximately the same as last year on Saturday, when Slovenian musicians such as Jan Plestenjak, Tabu and others performed. Photo: MMC RTV SLO/Sandi Fišer Foto: MMC RTV SLO/Sandi Fišer
Triggerfinger
Triggerfinger were scheduled to perform in Slovenia last year already, at the Schengenfest festival. Slovenian listeners got to know them after the adaptation of their _I Follow Rivers_ by the Swedish singer Lykke Li became a hit song on European radio stations. During their visit to Slovenia, they also got the opportunity to listen to Slovenian adaptations of their song and said they liked the version by the most popular Slovenian Oberkrainer band Modrijani best. Triggerfinger also paid a tribute to the late Johnny Winter at the concert. Photo: MMC RTV SLO/Sandi Fišer
The Winery Dogs
The Winery Dogs concluded the first evening of the festival on the main stage. Photo: MMC RTV SLO/Sandi Fišer Foto: MMC RTV SLO/Sandi Fišer

The regular Thursday evening at the Beer and Flowers, the Laško-based summer festival, has seen smaller crowds both at the concerts with free music in the town centre as well as concerts on the main stage, which the visitors had to pay for.

The scarce audience started to warm up with Slovenian bands DoT, Jackson, Carpe Diem and Kill Kenny on t

he main stage at Jagoče. The latter band came on the stage at 8pm, when about 50 visitors had gathered, and offered an upgrade of the guitar sound, reinforced with screaming outbursts of their frontman Jure Košir (the band is about the release a new album) and their regular songs Outta Control and Killin' Time. Not even the first star group of the evening, the Serbian band Bajaga i Instruktori, managed to attract bigger crowds.

Many came to see the second star of the evening, the one and only Mike Portnoy (former icon of the progressive metal band Dream Theater – well known to Slovenian fans) in a milder hard rock version. “I don’t miss the members of Dream Theater or their music, I miss "it", you know. I miss what I helped build for 25 years. I spent half of my life helping to build a group, so that it could have such a big fan base and safe financial footing as it does today. But I’m much happier and satisfied as part of The Winery Dogs,” admitted Portnoy for MMC.

The Winery Dogs consist of two more celebrity names – guitarist and singer Richie Kotzen and the heart and soul of the band, bass guitarist and singer Billy Sheehan (former long-time member of the Mr. Big band).

The festival celebrates its second 50-year anniversary this year. “To put it humorously, we started the activities announcing the 50-year anniversary of our festival last year already – the thing is, the Beer and Flowers Festival had been cancelled once in the past due to a bridge being built at the time,” explains Matej Oset, head of the organizing team, about the reasons for another 50th edition of the festival.

As visitors can see for themselves if they decide to come to Laško, the former flower festival has turned into a festival where you can get all you could wish for – music, entertainment, beer for two euros, a (payable) rock festival for a second year in a row –, but if you took a stroll down the streets of Laško yesterday, you could hardly avoid a slightly creepy feeling that the ghost town had been occupied by a well-oiled festival machine.