Last Friday I went to see Dream Theater on the Progressive Nation tour.
The opening bands were Scale The Summit, Big Elf and Zappa Plays Zappa.
Scale the Summit are great musicians. Stellar. But they need to work on letting things breathe a bit. Their songs are a bit too noodly and that is coming from a guy who digs really notey players.
Big Elf. Eh. Apparently a band formed around an arrogant (it seems) keyboard player/vocalist* who really digs Moogs. They were pretty boring, they’d get an interesting idea going then end it too quickly.
Zappa Plays Zappa. These guys and gals rocked. The musicianship was stellar. Flawless performance by everyone and it appeared that they were having a blast. If you get a chance to see these guys, do it.
Dream Theater. Eh, not the best show I have seen from them. They, as usual, played very well but not quite as well as last time I saw them. They were also (and I think this is only the second time I have ever said this) too loud. I had a serious case of ear fatigue going on about a quarter way through the set which made it hard to actually listen. I was wearing ear protection (Hearos) so I can’t imagine what it was like without the protection. I was also extremely tired (damned on call ) by the time they played. As usual, there were no mistakes but the energy didn’t seem to be there this time around. Or maybe it was me. Hard to tell. Still a good show, better than most bands out there but I’ve come to expect quite a bit from these guys.
The only downside to this show is that I now need to go recreate my Zappa collection. I don’t have any of my old LPs anymore.
Anyone else see this tour?
Slee
*The singer got pissed at someone who laughed, though it wasn’t clear that the guy who laughed was laughing at the band. I am not sure but I totally got the vibe that the singer is one of those heavy handed ‘Its MY band’ types. More band but less of him would have been good. The band was pretty good but it was repetitive and I totally felt like I somehow warped back to the early 70’s.
Saw 'em at the Greek Theatre, L.A. on saturday nite. Dweezil Zappa came on stage during “Beyond this Life” and jammed with the band for about ten minutes, then Steve Vai showed up and jammed for another twenty minutes. Cool show, but when you play for two hours and only perform six songs, the word “excessive” comes to mind.
I’ve seen Zappa Plays Zappa twice, and they were great both times, but the most recent time they played one of Frank’s most difficult pieces “G-Spot Tornado”. They prefaced it by saying that it was possible they could crash and burn, but they nailed it. It nearly makes up for having never seen Frank live. I had tickets for a show, but was forced to miss it because I had to fix someone else’s screw-up on a project that had to be delivered the next day.
I saw the Chicago shows, and went just to see ZpZ (who I had never seen before); I missed the opening bands and, never having heard of Dream Theater, checked them out for about fifteen minutes and left. I agree that ZpZ came closer than I thought I would ever come again to seeing a tight Zappa band in action, and the set list was heavy on the 70s stuff, which is my favorite.
So the show was amazing, but there was definitely something weird about the whole thing. It felt as though the band was striving for a totally accurate representation of the music as written rather than for any interpretation of their own (mind you, I probably wouldn’t have liked it as much if they had tried to add their own touches, but it was still weird). Has there ever been another case of a famous performing artist whose child devoted his own career to slavishly replicating the old man’s work?
I see they have released a few DVDs and CDs, which makes me ask “WTF?”. I mean, it’s great to have the option of the live Zappa concert experience, but for listening at home, why wouldn’t you just listen to Frank himself?
As an aside, this may have been the first rock concert I’ve ever been to where I didn’t see a single person smoking weed. Based on the look of the Dream Theater demographic, this was a bit of a surprise to me, but it goes to show you don’t ever know…
