Dream Theater concert

Most people will argue that if you're a fan, it's in a concert that you like your band the most. I mean think about it, you wait patiently for their next album to come out, you pre-order it, once you get it, you listen to it day and night, you dissect it looking for the most minor of details that only the ears of another fan as passionate as you might catch. You start checking websites regularly to see when your band is coming to town and as soon as you sniff the tickets, you snatch some for you and your friends, if possible in the front rows where you can see your idols' wrinkles and indulge in the aroma of their sweaty bodies, all in a state of trance that every hypnotist would envy.
Now if you think something like that might happen to me ... you're dead wrong. I'm not a fan in that sense of the word.
And I would even dare to argue for a different point of view. It's in a concert that you hate your band the most. You hate them because you listened to all their CDs (well, most of them, let's not exaggerate here) and you know they're capable of so many tricks, but they can't fit all that in 2-3 lousy hours. You hate that the quality of sound is crap comparing to a studio, you hate it because you'd like less distortion, you hate it as you'd like to rewind and listen to that snippet of a stave that caught your ear yet you didn't quite catch it and now the moment is gone forever.

To cut the lyricism short, I was at the Dream Theater concert here in London yesterday and that's how I felt ... while I was very exuberant at seeing DT live, I felt let down by these glitches. Ok ok, some of them are inherent to any live concert, there's nothing you can do about them, but others ... For instance, during guitar solos, I felt that Petrucci didn't push the volume a bit higher ... he did only once ... so usually the solos got lost in the noise. That's something very disappointing for me. Another disappointment in a way was the absence of a "Petrucci moment" how I call them. It's when Petrucci soloes completely alone, no other instruments and he just manages to subjugate everyone into a state of utter bedazzlement that involuntarily opens your mouth wider and wider and manages to hold back your breath for minutes.

It was a bit unexpected when, in the second part, they started to play Pink Floyd songs, about 4-5 of them and they wouldn't stop. It was an interesting diversion reminding you they can do whatever they want on the stage, especially in rock progressive. It was different and although being different hurts some of the fans, risking alienating them, it surely was an interesting intermezzo.

The participants were almost as exuberant as I was after the concert - to be honest I wasn't exactly sure if my exuberance comes from the live performance, from remembering my days of yore when I used to be a rocker, from the beer I have ingurgitated or from a combination of all these. I think the strongest of them was my connection with my past, a memorabilia of my school days with other names like Metallica, Guns'n'Roses, Pink Floyd, Manowar, Coroner and others being mentioned briefly, but soon forgotten as the background of the participants was in a wide spectrum, only tangentially touching at carefully chosen points (sheesh, I talk like a mathematician here).