Tonight is Progressive Nation 2009, which is a summer music tour festival, kind of like a Warped Tour for music nerds. Obviously that is a category I'm in. The bands playing tonight: Scale the Summit, which is a cool instrumental band I downloaded since I knew I'd be seeing them at this show; Bigelf, which I know next to nothing about and might not even see depending on what time we arrive; Zappa plays Zappa, which is Dweezil Zappa and his band playing the music of his father, the late Frank Zappa; and the headline act, the mighty Dream Theater. If you follow this blog with any semi-regularity, you've read about them before.
Tonight will push Dream Theater into the Number 2 spot for acts I've seen the most times live, surpassed only by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. This makes perfect sense since I would list my top 3 musical acts, to anyone wondering, as Bruce Springsteen, Queen, and Dream Theater in a three-way tie. The three bands are so dissimilar there is no way to choose one over another because they are all so important to me in different ways.
My first DT show was the Metropolis 2000 tour. They had just released what I still consider their best album, "Scenes From a Memory," which is a concept album that tells a story of a love triangle, and double murder, and reincarnation. They played the entire album in order, note for note. And this is a pretty complex album, so to witness that happening really was something.
The second time I saw them was on the "Train of Thought" tour when they were an opening act for Yes at the Target Center. They still played about an hour and did a fully-produced show instead of the usual opening act, crammed on the front of the stage with horrible sound mixing crap. During one song, "The Spirit Carries On," I was singing along and wearing my bright gold Vikings sweatshirt, so the singer, James LaBrie, saw me out in the crowd and pointed at me for a few seconds. It was pretty cool.
The third show was their 20th anniversary tour, which went with the release of their album "Octavarium." We were on the main floor and could barely see the stage, but it was still great. It did convince us (us now being me, my sister, and Nephew #1) that balcony seats were going to be the wave of the future.
The fourth show was just two years ago, for the "Systematic Chaos" tour. There were two opening acts for this: Into Eternity, which my sister renamed "Into Frickin' Crap" because they were so bad, and Redemption, which turned out to be a pretty good band when I downloaded their album from iTunes the next day. DT put on a great show that night, probably the best I had seen them mostly because they had played a few favorite songs of mine I hadn't seen live before.
And tonight's show will make it No. 5. Looking forward to it.
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Days later....
Good show for #5. We got there late after having dinner downtown and missed Scale the Summit, but that's okay. They must have played for only about 25 minutes, because we only heard the last 3 or 4 songs from Bigelf. They were four really hairy-lookin' dudes dressed up in their best not-wanting-people-to-think-they-care-what-they-look-like 70s rock dirty clothes. The sound mix was horrible; the singer and the keyboards were way too loud. After they played, Zappa Plays Zappa turned out to be our most controversial band of the night since my sister and my future brother-in-law liked them a lot more than I did, with Nephew #1 kind of in the middle but I think leaning more in my direction. First of all, the band was without reproach. Insanely talented, incredibly tight band. And the music was interesting, if you're into the kind of meandering, structureless, nonsensical rock-jazz fusion laced with lyrical touches that exist only to be bizarre that from the sampling we heard seems to define Frank Zappa's legacy. Half an hour less would have been fine with me.
As for Dream Theater, I'll say only this: Their show had several musical moments that were so perfectly done that they were examples of when you're watching five people put all of this together right in front of you, and it gives you pause to consider just what is possible when the most gifted of us put themselves to the task.
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