Set List Geekery

That Mike Portnoy spends a lot of time putting together set lists is common knowledge among Dream Theater fans, but something about this quote makes me think of him running complicated algorithms through some fan-developed database program:

That is something that I personally spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy determining. I will send out a master song list to the band and crew to learn/program at the start of the tour with a few songs I've picked from each album...I then change up the sets each night depending on the city. I do a tremendous amount of research for every single show....looking at what was played in that particular city the last two or three times through the years and I will write a set that hopefully doesn't repeat anything to make each time a fan sees a show a unique experience. I also take into account if we are playing two or three shows within driving distance of each other, to make those shows different from each other as well. It's a ridiculous, obsessive compulsive process that I don't think anybody else in this business does for their fans, but somehow I make myself insane doing it. It's like trying to solve the ultimate puzzle each and every day!

Via Blabbermouth

Album Review: Dream Theater - Black Holes and Silver Linings

According to iTunes, I've now listened to Black Clouds and Silver Linings eight times, so I finally have enough perspective to give the album a fair review. I'm completely serious: I love the band, but there's something so manisfestly undisgestable about every album Dream Theater has put out this decade that it takes some serious listening time to form a consistent opinion. With Black Clouds..., for example, I blasted the band's Queen covers after my first listen, but after a few more listens I had a change of heart. Clearly, either I found more to like as time went on, or I'm just a fanboy with a large capacity for second chances. Either way, my thoughts on each of Black Clouds and Silver Linings' six tracks:

1. A Nightmare to Remember: Petrucci's tale of the painful aftermath of a car crash channels a lot of the feel of the songs from the first disc of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulance. There's the now-standard interplay of solos between Petrucci and Ruddess and an awkward use of sound effects to underscore the moment of the crash, but there are two memorable moments: the hospital scene where Petrucci rocks a very King Crimson arpeggio line and the bridge in the next scene where the tension explodes into some lovely soaring melodies and the vocal harmonies that the band has (unfortunately) generally eschewed in their more recent material.
   
   
2. A Rite of Passage: A catchy song with super-transparent lyrics (a common theme for this album). My feelings on this one haven't really changed since I first heard it in early May, except now I've heard a good 20 times and I'm a little sick of it.
   
   
3. Wither: One of those dark ballads that the band occasionally enjoys writing, with lyrics by Petrucci instead of usual suspects Myung or LaBrie. Based on the artwork in the album and the wording, it seems to be about struggling with writer's block. There's a nice constrast between the size of the chorus and the subdued, subterannean feel of the verses, but if you don't like Dream Theater ballads, you aren't going to like "Wither," either.
   
   
4. Shattered Fortress: The end of Mike Portnoy's Twelve-Step Suite, where Portnoy attempted to translate the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program into music. The suite as a whole is full of the references that Dream Theater loves to use in their music, but as with "Forgiveness," the 12-step track from Systematic Chaos, "Shattered Fortress" is not a particularly inspired piece of song writing, stitching together harmonic lines from the previous tracks with an extended Portnoy voice over and - as has become the case far too often in Dream Theater's music - a reliance on the difference between Portnoy's barks and LaBrie's melodies to establish vocal contrast. I should note that even though I'm not a big fan of this track, it took me a good fifteen minutes to write this blurb and even now, I'm coming up with justifications: the song as a whole isn't that strong, but it has some nice component pieces (the riffs from the earlier tracks are among my favorites), the Portnoy barks might be there for consistency, as they're less prevalent on this album than they have been in the past, etc.
   
   
5. The Best of Times: Portnoy's other contribution to the album is a straightforward tribute to his late father that has about as much lyrical ambiguity as a child's picture book. Musically, it's a nice enough track - a combination of "I Walk Beside You" and "Octavarium" with a great coda solo by Petrucci - but by writing such naked lyrics, Portnoy seems to have missed the point of good song writing: ambiguity allows for individual interpretation, which, in the spirit of all good prog, allows the user to find their own way of relating to the song. "The Best of Times" could have been an anthem to anyone who grieves, as Petrucci did so effectively with "Another Day," but instead it's a cenotaph to one man's feelings that leaves me feeling cold.
   
   
6. The Count of Tuscany: By far the album's best track with a delicious mix of ingredients: Start with an introduction that mixes Rush, King Crimson, Dream Theater vintage 1992 and 1999 while building to a driving forte. Mix in lyrics that reprise Petrucci's brushes with the fantastic from Systematic Chaos, telling a story that could be cribbed from an Edgar Allan Poe notebook. Throw in one of those classic heavy Dream Theater verse riffs, a multipart solo section that transitions sections of the plot, and the kind of anthem-like ending that brings "Learning to Live" in mind and you have a great song that becomes this album's saving grace.

Song Review: Dream Theater Covering Queen

I've now listened to Black Clouds & Silver Linings once through, which means that I'm nowhere near ready to give my thoughts on it. However, I do have some thoughts on the cover of the "Tenement Funster/Flick of the Wrist/Lily of the Valley" medley: I finally understand why people think that Dream Theater's covers are so soulless.

You see, Queen was my favorite band from around the time Wayne's World came out. I spent far more of my adolescence listening to A Night at the Opera, Sheer Heart Attack, A Day at the Races, and News of the World than I did pretty much anything else. I wanted to be able to sing like Freddy Mercury; I wanted to find a gigantic copy of the cover of Queen II and put it up on my wall; and I definitely gave Queen's music enough ear time that a lot of it became ingrained on a subconscious level.

When I listen to the original "Tenement Funster," I hear the essence of rock music: musicianship that's loose without being sloppy, a vocal line that sprouts sex appeal and attitude. When I listen to "Lily of the Valley," I hear one of Brian May and Freddie Mercury's most beautiful collaborations, a song that builds from a fragile beginning to a gorgeous bloom that crescendos with one of the best examples of Queen's multitracking vocal experiments. The Dream Theater covers seem pale in comparison, faithfully rendering the material without being able to execute the idiom that made the originals so powerful. As the song closest to a metal track, "Flick of the Wrist" is the best showing (which might be more indicative of either the limitations of the band's abilities as a cover band or their stylistic choices when arranging covers than anything else), but overall these recordings sound like Dream Theater covering Queen - if Queen sounded like Dream Theater.

Dear Roadrunner: Suck Less

I wanted to watch the video for "A Rite of Passage" and write something about it, since I seem to be trying to turn BBB into a Dream Theater blog.  However, because it seems that Roadrunner has about as luck working with technology as its Warner Brothers namesake has avoiding, I am reduced to writing open letters:

Dear Roadrunner, 

Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.  There are existing technology channels that will serve up all of the sweet, sweet content your eager users do, in fact, want to consume with minimal fuss and - at this point - years worth of experience.  Take, for example, the video for "A Rite of Passage."  You could have put the thing up on YouTube, included an HD version so the cool backgrounds that probably cost an arm and a leg to render actually look good, and went on your merry way.  Instead, you decided to go with some craptastic software that you may have very well written up in house that makes streaming video feel like its regressed back to the Real Player days.  So yeah: suck it up and go with the solutions that work.

The Fans

Thoughts on the New Dream Theater Single

The concept of singles seems wonderfully archaic to me, but at the very least it allows me to hear a track from the new Dream Theater album a little ahead of schedule. The track - "A Rite of Passage" - is supposedly available for download from Roadrunner, although good luck with getting traction on their underpowered servers. If you don't get through by midnight tonight, they'll have a streaming version up tomorrow. My thoughts:

• My first thought: "interesting." But I always think that about everything Dream Theater puts out and then I end up liking it.
  
• There's something about the production on this song that sounds different from what Dream Theater has been doing on their past few albums: the guitar in particular sounds a lot more vibrant. Either they're compressing things differently, or they've cut down on the number of tracks. The guitar parts also sound a lot more thrashy than they've been in a long time.
  
• The chorus has a strong enough hook to stay with me for a while after I first listened to it. Could be I was right about this being a more melodic album.
  
• Remember how I thought "A Rite of Passage" might be the next twelve step song? Unless joining a mysterious quasi-religious organization is one of the steps, I was dead wrong. Instead, this song has one of Dream Theater's more transparent lyric lines: the entire thing is about Freemasonry. So far, I can't tell if the band is for or against the concept. Possibly - "The Great Debate"-style - they're going for both angles.
  

Dream Theater's Pre-Order Package: Our Take

Roadrunner opened up pre-orders for Dream Theater's new album today, providing - as has become the norm - a variety of extras intended to lure in the more devout into paying more money for options otherwise unavailable. Let's take a look at what they're offering:

• Producers Edition Box Set: for $132, you get the following:
• Find a SILVER TICKET and Win a MEET & GREET with the Band!
• 3-CD Special Edition Set Includes Album, Instrumental Mixes and 6 Newly Recorded Cover Songs
• Limited Edition Audiophile 180-Gram Double LP Set with Exclusive Artwork from Hugh Syme
• Try Your Hand at Producer! Black Clouds & Silver Linings Producer's Edition Includes Isolated Audio Tracks of the Entire Album, Bonus Disc only available in this set.
• Limited Edition, Numbered Lithograph by Legendary Artist Hugh Syme. 100 Lucky Winners will Find a Litho Personally Signed by the Artist!
• Computer Mouse Pad, Exclusively Available with Box Set
• Packaged in a Silver Foil Embossed Black Velvet Box.
  
  
• Special Edition: $22, with the following:
  • The album
  • 6 Newly Recorded Cover Songs
  • Instrumental Mixes of the Entire Album
  • Expanded Artwork and Packaging


• Double LP: $27.50. The album in LP form only. Pressed in Germany, for some reason - maybe they make vinyl better there?

Our take:

• Meet and greets are cool, but unlike the meet and greets attached to a lot of Dream Theater's ticket packages, this one isn't guaranteed. For the price, you'd think this one would be - and if availability is a concern, just make the option guaranteed but with fewer packages available.
• All copies of Systematic Chaos came with a signed lithograph if you preordered early enough: it was a great excuse to part with your money. This time, the lithograph is extra, and again, you'll only get the really valuable part (the signature) if you're lucky.
• Giving the fans the opportunity to make their own mixes is a great way to build community. Putting that opportunity behind a limited chance pay wall misses the point of online community generation completely. I'm also willing to bet that most of the people who are buying the producers edition are looking for the signed lithograph or the silver ticket, not the audio tracks, so the possibility is even further removed from success.
• Who uses a mouse pad anymore?
  

Have Dream Theater and Queensryche Buried the Hatchet?

No NYC dates for Progressive Nation just yet, which makes me sad, but I was very interested to note that Queensryche will be joining the tour for one night only in Washington, DC. It's not because I'm jealous, per se, because I'm putting myself of what very well might be an ordeal of a Queensryche-only evening in May, but...well...those two bands have a history.

Dream Theater geek that I am, I opted to buy the biography the band authorized a few years ago and learned what might be termed a metric fuckton about the group's history: how they idolized Queensryche from the beginning, had a singer that sounded a bit like them in one of the band's VERY early incarnations, were excited to tour with them in 2002...and how that tour turned to acrimony off stage because of ego size or douchery or whatever causes people to dislike each other irrationally. Most of Dream Theater had something to say about with varying degrees of frankness in the book, but the outcome was that they really didn't like Queensryche very much and weren't afraid to say so. And now they're doing a show together. Either they've buried the hatchet or this is some sort of reconciliation created through labels Roadrunner and Rhino through their parent label Warner Brothers.

The Top Five Dream Theater Albums

What would your top five Dream Theater albums be? I wonder about this question occasionally because a.) I am a huge music nerd and b.) I care enough about the band to mentally rank the albums, feel slightly guilty about leaving something out, and then go back and rank them again. I've never committed to an ordering before now, but About Heavy Metal writer Dan Marsicano drew a line in the sand (see what I did there?) with his list (Octavarium makes the cut but Systematic Chaos does not? Really?) and now I feel I have to respond with a list of my own:

1. Images and Words. Maybe it's because I heard it first, loaned to me by a guy who lived on my floor my freshman year of college who thought I'd like the sound. Maybe it's just because it's got an incredible amount of staying power nearly 20 years later. Maybe it's just "Learning to Live," which remains one of the best songs the band has written. Whatever the case, in the subjective world of best of the best, where every margin is razor thin, Images and Words gets my vote for the top.
   
2. Scenes From a Memory. My senior year of college, I spent the year writing an analysis of Scenes From a Memory and got to know it very, very well. That it not only held up to those hours of abuse but persevered as a regular member of my listening rotation ensures its place in the top five.
   
3. Systematic Chaos. When I put together my best-of list for the decade later this year, Systematic Chaos will likely be included. I've enjoyed the Ruddess years immensely, but I think this album stands head and shoulders above everything else Dream Theater has done in the past decade.
   
4. Awake. Born out of the kind of creative tension that Dream Theater hasn't really experienced since - which, given its effects on the band, isn't necessarily a bad thing -this is the album that's found them at a mix of heaviness and melody that they haven't really reached since. There are a number of highlights to enjoy, but the king of them all has to be the standard-setting "Erotomania," with its section of triumphant guitar chords - a section that one guitar tab transcriber out there referred to as The Chord Progression of the Gods - that has been been my ring tone for the past three years. Still, the inclusion of "Space Dye Vest," a great song that doesn't fit with the rest of the album, gives Awake a flaw that knocks it down a few notches.
   
5. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulance. This was a tough one, because I don't think the second disc of this album holds up as well as the first one, and I love A Change of Seasons, but don't think the rest of that EP is strong enough to merit inclusion in the top five. In the end I choose Six Degrees... because I love all of the tracks on the first disc, love how they're all tied together with the between-track transitions, and have some powerful personal associations with the album: it was the first Dream Theater album that came out after I got into the band, I saw them for the first time on that tour, I had a powerful dream once about an apocalyptic event that involved "Blind Faith"...you know, standard stuff.

Your turn: give me your lists (and thoughts on mine) in the comments.

Black Clouds and Silver Linings...Thus Far

More details emerging on the new Dream Theater disc on Friday, as the band released the cover art and track listing to the public. Remember how Mike Portnoy tossed out some hints about how Black Clouds and Silver Linings (or, as my brain keeps translating it, Black Holes and Revelations) would sound like a good portion of Dream Theater's old catalog? It looks to me like they took that aesthetic to the cover art, too: the surreal grouping of objects makes me think of the designs Larry Fremantle did for Images and Words and Awake.

The song titles are intriguing, too: I'm guessing "A Rite of Passage" or "The Shattered Fortress" is the next 12 Step song and "The Count of Tuscany" screams "instrumental" to me. "A Nightmare to Remember" could be another edition the fantasy kick John Petrucci brought (with great effect, I thought) to Systematic Chaosm, while "Wither" seemed like it could be an Awake throwback at first glance until I saw Jordan Ruddess's comment about how they're bringing in a full choir sound and going gothic with the music - now I'm thinking it'll be something out of left field from what the band has done before.

Thoughts on Portnoy's Teaser

Somewhere, someone has probably already taken the left channel/right channel clips from Mike Portnoy's teaser promo from the next Dream Theater album and slapped them together into one file, but if you haven't heard the teaser at all, you can get it here. However, I'm more interested in what Portnoy had to say about how the album as a whole will sound:

"Imagine a Dream Theater album with 'A Change Of Seasons', 'Octavarium', 'Learning To Live', 'Pull Me Under' and 'The Glass Prison'... all on one album... COULD YOU HANDLE IT?? Excited? I sure am!!!!"

"Glass Prison" is pretty obvious, because they've still got some steps left in Portnoy's 12 step suite, but it looks like after making a really heavy album with Systematic Chaos, Dream Theater is swinging their musical pendulum back to the progressive side of things. Portnoy's list is also half older material, too; maybe we're about to hear something that's more melody-focused than the material the band has produced in this decade?

Progressive Nation Pt. 2, a rebuttal

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD! Dream Theater and Zappa Plays Zappa on the same bill!

Aside from all the other great things about this, the high profile gig will probably lure some A-list members of the original Zappa band to join on the tour. Here's hoping for more Vai/Bozzio action.

I don't know Beardfish and Pain of Salvation is not my cup of tea, but I wasn't planning on showing up when doors opened anyway.

I hope it is at Terminal 5 again. This bill screams for some Hallo Berlin beer boots beforehand.

Progressive Nation Volume 2

I've heard that Zappa Plays Zappa is pretty intense, so I say this with a big grain of salt, but isn't it a bad sign when a package tour hires what's essentially a cover band as their main opener? I mean, is the state of progressive music so bad that Mike Portnoy can't find a band he likes to open for Dream Theater that is playing music of a more recent vintage than the early 1990s?

That might be a little harsh. I suspect the real reason Portnoy tapped the Zappa crew is that he knows there's a good crossover between fans of the two groups and he's looking to give people more reasons to come to the show. Good strategy for the tough economic times and all that, but I hope he's not relying on two relative unknowns from Sweden to expand peoples' horizons.

Roadrunner, what is your angle?

So I am on the Roadrunner mailing list. I normally tune out most of what they send but today's headline was "Exclusive News About Dream Theater's Upcoming Album..."

So I opened it...and they make me click through to read the "exclusive news" and those results are below. I don't really get their angle. That is neither news nor exclusive, as it has been on Blabbermouth. They are making an album and Portnoy/Pertrucci are producing. No shit. They produce ALL the records. As someone who works online and with web marketing in my professional life I have been trying to figure out why they sent this out. Are they trying to see who is an active user on their mailing list? Hoping to increase page traffic? I don't see any advertising they would be boosting their traffic for. So why make me click through on an email for completely useless information? WTF? Any ideas?

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/news/DREAM-THEATER-WORKING-ON-THEIR-10TH-STUDIO-ALBUM-19838.aspx

Requiem for a Dream

I see that Opeth is taking their tour back to the US again this Spring, which is great, because I wouldn't mind establishing the same see-once-a-year pattern with them that I've done with Dream Theater or Megadeth. They're bringing Enslaved with them, which is also cool because a.) I wouldn't mind seeing what those guys can do live and b.) while the metalgaze/black indie metal tag-team of High on Fire and Nachtmystium wasn't so much of a musical stretch paired up with Opeth's progressive black magic, going with another Swedish act might keep the douchebags at bay, or even - one can only hope - out of the auditorium entirely.

However, I'm also sad, because Opeth's tour announcement puts the final nail in the coffin of one of my fondest hopes: an Opeth/Ihsahn double bill. I won't give up hope, though; some day, I'll see these two play together, even if I have to travel to Oslo to do it.

More Thoughts on Lords of Chaos

Towards the middle of the book the authors interview two men who write for what the book describes as Norway's "cultural newspaper," Morgenbladet: a Satanist of the old (Aleister Crowley-influenced) school and a Christian who writes on theological matters. They were both discussing the rise of the association between Satanism and Black Metal in Norway and had some interesting theories, but what I found resonant enough to write about was their comparisons of Ihsahn and Varg Vikernes; how after speaking with Ihsahn, they both found his beliefs to be far more sophisticated in both their level of development (more because he had abandoned the idea of evil for evil's sake and settled on a philosophy that was pro-Satan and not just anti-Christ) and their desire for elegance. After reading their thoughts, I realized that the same desire for elegant evil was what I find so attractive about Ihsahn's music, both with Emperor and as a solo artist.

I'm a big fan of evil music - if that wasn't obvious from the blog's title - but I also need my evil music cloaked in different forms (which should also be obvious from the blog's title) to keep it interesting. Alternation between different types of metal certainly does the trick, but a closer examination of the albums I come back to time and time - Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, Blackwater Park, Images and Words (to name a few), and more recent additions like angL and Kolossus - reveals a fascination with brutality mixed with elegance. Beat me over the head with high-speed shreds, thunderous bottom ends, and bone-crushing pounding of drums; screech your images of destruction, alienation, and soul-destruction into my ears; put me through the mill of your sonic pain machine, but while you may earn my respect, you'll only win my lasting love if you mix that assault with elegant constructions that emphasize the beauty in your chaos.

A Mind Besides Itself

You know, I've always enjoyed Dream Theater's "Erotomania," but I never bothered to look up what the title meant; I think I just translated the word literally and went from there. Thanks to Law & Order: SVU, I now know it refers to a romantic obsession with a celebrity. You know, like the subject of "Space Dye Vest," the song that Kevin Moore wrote, the one that only ended up on the album because the rest of the band didn't know he was leaving...the one that didn't fit. I've never seen a reference to it - not in the old Dream Theater FAQ, not on Wikipedia, not in the biography - but I have to wonder if Petrucci named the first part of "A Mind Beside Itself" (if not the whole suite) after Moore's strange obsession...after Moore left the band. There has to be more than one reason why Moore won't talk about Dream Theater fourteen years later...

Drumming This Dying Soul

Never thought I'd see the day when I thought watching a man drum for about 7 minutes would be entertaining, but that's Mike Portnoy for you. If you're a fan of "This Dying Soul," check out this footage from Portnoy's drum cam recorded during the Train of Thought sessions: maybe it's the bandwidth on the original recording, but seeing this video helped me pick out some new bits of drum part I couldn't hear before. Seeing Portnoy's hands fly across the set during a fill is pretty spectacular, too.

Jeff Wagner Plans Book Release, Solves a Life Mystery

I saw this headline and I did a little dance of glee: "Former METAL MANIACS Editor JEFF WAGNER To Author History Of Progressive Metal." See, I'm not just a metal nerd who loves himself some Opeth and Dream Theater: I actually have a history with the non-existent history of progressive metal.

Back in 2002/2003, I was a senior in college. I was a music major - no surprise there - and because my aptitude was in analysis (and because I thought I was going to go to study ethnomusicology) I decided to spend the year writing a lengthy senior thesis in music. On Dream Theater, Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory, and the history of progressive metal. Like I said, huge metal nerd. Or maybe just nerd in general.

I wrote the history part first, as part of another paper I had to write for a colloquium class I took in the fall (doubling up was the way they kept thesis writers from going insane and strangely enough, it worked). As it turns out, there are no good histories of progressive metal out there. In fact, from what I remember, my options came down to the short blurb in the All Music Guide, whatever was up on anus.com, and the BNR metal pages, none of which actually answered the fundamental question: what exactly prompted all of these bands to mix progressive elements into their music? Lacking access to any of the artists in question, I did the next best thing: took a history of progressive rock, a history of metal, and came to my own conclusions. The result was, well, it's probably wildly inaccurate, but I look pretty smart doing it, and I get to say I wrote a 120+ page page while in college. The ladies were impressed, believe you me.

Reading all of that history should give you an understanding of why I'm excited to read this book once it comes out next year: if Jeff Wagner really did his homework, he might just come up with a common root for all of the experimentation done by bands as diverse as Dream Theater, Celtic Frost, and Voivod and answer the question I failed to answer five years ago. And you know what? I'd really appreciate that.

Liquid Tension Experiment at B.B. King's

A story for you: After coming home from this concert, I went to sleep, and suffered from a reoccurring/waking dream for three or four hours that involved both LTE's music and snapshot images of the show I had just seen (Mike Portnoy standing up on his drum riser to address the crowd, for example. Lord knows why so many of my music dreams feature Mike Portnoy, but I suspect it's because he does of putting himself forward, so he's really noticable). I've had these dreams in the past; the only way to break the cycle and get any real sleep is to wake myself up completely for a few minutes. That night, it took me until 4:00 AM, and when I finally did so, I came to the conclusion that the source of my mental distress was, to quote Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus, "too many notes." Basically, I couldn't sleep because I was still trying to process all of the aural information I had absorbed - or because my legs still hurt after standing still for two hours.

Sleep deprivations aside, the concert was worth the admission price: a full capacity of Dream Theater, King Crimson, and prog/jazz geeks (perhaps the biggest concentration of pudgy middle-aged white males I'm likely to see a show in a while - or at least until August) watching four master technicians do their thing on stage. The extreme cerebriality was fun (because, to face facts, I had a love for the possibilities of prog drilled into me in childhood), but the guys also looked like they were having fun - and there's a hard edge to enough of their music to make me feel like I'm witnessing something that still rocks in its own fashion.

However, I discovered something about LTE (and by extension, Dream Theater) while watching this concert: the music is a lot more enjoyable when it's prescripted material from an album, as improvisation isn't really a strong point. Actually, that might be a little inaccurate; during the three improvisational jams the band played during their set, you could see the genesis of songs that, once time had been taken to polish, would make for tracks as interesting as anything LTE has produced thus far, partially eliminating the charge of wankery for no purpose, because at least the band sounded like they were sharing how they go about writing new material. Seeing the beginnings of that process was (in retrospect) cool from a purely geeky perspective, but because these songs didn't go anywhere - and ended, at least once, in pure shredding noise - it wasn't very interesting to watch. Overall, a good show to see, but one that could have been more effective with some more tightening down on the self-indulgence.

Iron Maiden at Madison Square Garden

What to say, what to say...well, this happened, which pretty much sums up anything I could say about how awesome this show was. Playing soccer on stage while the crew deals with a blown speaker (during "Powerslave"...the irony is gigantic) and making it fun for 20,000 people to watch does take a special talent. Hell, watching a band play the exact same set list three months apart and loving every minute of it because they managed to make their show that much bigger the second time around (Madison Square Garden: big frickin' space with decent acoustics that sounds massive) is proof positive by itself that Iron Maiden is one of rock's premiere live bands. See them live, but don't take all of the tickets because I'll be coming back for more.

Before the show, I was explaining the rules of t-shirt wearing at concerts to my brother-in-law. Many people don't understand these rules, so it's worth going over them here, if for no other reason than that I was validated for following them immediately after the show. So, here we go:

1. Do not wear a t-shirt put out by the band you're going to see. Doing so makes you look like a poseur who lacks a deeper knowledge of the subtleties of the music scene, or at least the understanding that there are other bands out there who play the same kind of music. On a corollary, don't wear a shirt put out by a fan of the band you're going to see paying homage to that band (like this shirt, for example. By the way, this picture makes me happier than I can say), for the same reasons. You'll just be That Guy, and no one wants that (although the legions of people I see buying shirts at a show and then wearing them during the show might disagree). Also, variety makes people watching far more interesting between sets.
   
   
2. Don't wear a shirt of a band that has a long-standing disagreement or feud with the band you're going to see. For example, if you're going to see Megadeth, don't wear a Metallica t-shirt; if you're going to see Iron Maiden, don't wear an Ozzy t-shirt (or a maybe just a shirt with Sharon Osbourne on it, which would be pretty lame anyway); if you're going to see Dream Theater, don't wear a Queensryche shirt, etc. Much like breaking rule one, breaking rule two makes you look like a tool who doesn't pay attention to the subculture you're invading. Chances are this means you cost some fan who really does care about the music a ticket, which means you're an evil person. It's also possible you just don't care about feuds, but then you're missing the point.
   
   
3. When picking a shirt to wear, the goal is to choose something that's either old or obscure or (preferably) both. Both factors give you credibility, and can help you strike up conversations with random people during the show. Having an old tour shirt (we're talking a piece of clothing that's a minimum of 20 years of age) can even let you break rule number one. I'm pretty sure I saw a shirt from the original Somewhere in Time tour last night, and even though it was a Maiden shirt, it was an old Maiden shirt, which made it pretty cool. People with shirts like that tend to have interesting stories.

Anyway, those are the rules. Follow those rules, last night I chose to wear a GWAR shirt I picked up during the We Kill Everything tour, and sure enough: walking back to my car, I was hailed by two guys who thought my shirt was the coolest thing they'd seen in the past half hour. Instant validation, at only pennies a day!