An Evening With Dream Theater
“It’s been a long time comin’; it’s goin’ to be a long time gone
And it appears to be a long, appears to be a long; appears to be a long time
Yes, a long, long, long, long time before the dawn”
No worries, that wasn’t me at Woodstock 1969, listening to CSN, more like me less than a week ago upto my ears jammed with Dream Theater… and here it comes at last… I just had to get off my butt and write this up before there was some sort of an involuntary memory lapse on this one – the DT “Train of Thought” concert tour in NYC’s Madison Square Garden. I was watching them live for the first time, the last I had seen them in concert was on the DVD of the Scenes from a Memory tour way back in 2001. The usual gang of suspects – Satish, Shanky and me and accompanied by Megs who was traveling through NYC at that time – landed up at the garden on time for the show and what a set it was.
The lads started of with a video collage that traced their history of 18 odd years all the way through their Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence album; fortunately we managed to watch most parts of it as we were seated in a place where we could not see the center screens.
And then hell broke loose for the next three and a half hours – opening act of “As I Am” from their most recent ToT album, followed by “This Dying Soul”, also from ToT before they just did an about face and reached back into days of future passed (with apologies to the Moody Blues). Mike Portnoy’s drum kit was huge, we managed to snatch glimpses of it through the set, the most impressive piece being the triple bass and bell set he had constructed for the show.
The play was essentially spread through 2 sets totaling over three hours and featured all of their 8 studio albums, with ToT taking limelight. There were performances of very rarely heard live ones through the set and I was almost sent into intensive care, a’la that retro chick from the Outkast video of Hey Ya, when they played an EP of “Beyond This Life” from 1999’s Scenes From a Memory album.
There was an superb instrumental jam featuring Rudess and Petrucci conducted through video by Frank Zappa, hey what the… don’t hold your noses, no BS here, they were actually showing a montage of Zappa from the Baby Snakes DVD conducting the jam and I believe we all went berserk, more because the jam was eerily reminiscent of Zappa’s compositions/music!!!
Myung remained his usual reserved self and didn’t hog the camera eye but what the FCUK, what a phenomenal display of “fret”ful dexterity – he just PHREAKED out on the Chapman Stick, just 2 handed finger tapping, the sound at the garden comprised 2 rows of speaker arrays, I think that’s the latest and the greatest in industrial audio technology these days and packing quite the punch, almost blew our ears off.
First set tracks included “Trial of Tears” and “Hollow Years”, from the Falling Into Infinity album, both crowd faves/raves as well as The Great Debate, one of the songs that they wrote up on genome research, though I personally preferred the sheet music to the lyrical content.
Second set saw them start with Metropolis Part I, from the 1992 killer album, Images and Words and moving onto the lengthy “A Mind Beside Itself”. The great treat was the video featurette from the “Dead Poets Society” for the Change of Seasons track, oh freak, that sent me over the edge. Listen, you hear it? Carpe, hear it? Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys; make your lives extraordinary… I think that was the track where I must have screamed myself voiceless…
And Guess Who or more appropriately what, Portnoy, not be “undun” invites a couple of guys, one from the mosh pit and one from the arena equivalent of the “back benchers” to play on set with him… more an exercise in crowd agitation, if you ask me, but whew!!! I think he went into a jam with Rudess that lasted close to 10-15 minutes and had most of us in the audience turning tricks. Final closure was to Pull Me Under, again from the IAW album.
Afterthought – these blokes are slowly turning into the progressive rock version of Garcia and the Grateful Dead with incredible jams, shuffling set lists across evenings and concerts and performing EP improv versions on their smaller songs.
Post that mindfk experience, all we could do was head out to the Village at 1 am, to the Bitter End, a pub that serves ridiculously overpriced single malt – we drank to the accompaniment of the house band, Dog Eatz Dawg, I think it was, playing an extremely good cover of Neil Young’s “Keep On Rocking In The Free World”… Fitting Finale!!!!
Peace out y’all
S