That was the phrase uttered by the guy sitting behind me at the Prog Nation concert last night once Dream Theater had wrapped up their initial performance. This guy came to see Zappa Plays Zappa and had never really heard of DT before. Needless to say, he was blown away!
It was a great show. FIVE hours of music. The first band, Scale the Summit, was not ½ bad and I’d check them out again given the opportunity. I only caught the last two or three songs, though.
Next came Big Elf. I wasn’t real impressed. I certainly wouldn’t consider them progressive. Take Deep Purple and combine it with Alice Cooper and then make the lyrics less than interesting. It just wasn’t my thing.
But then Zappa Plays Zappa took the stage and things really turned around. I didn’t know what to expect from Dweezil, but he’s a pretty rad guitar player. They covered some classic Zappa with a great ensemble of musicians. The original progressive band – Zappa. They basically laid waste to the place and I don’t feel that many bands could have topped the performance.
But it’s Dream Theater we are talking about and sure enough, they brought the house down in no short order. Those guys are just amazing to watch. The hard part is figuring out which one of them to watch, and the guys doing the video presentation must have figured this out at some point because they were splitting the large screen and showing two or even four of them at one time – just their hands mind you.
One thing interesting is that Jordan Rudess was smoking on the keyboards and I noticed he was using an iPhone of all things for one of his effects. It’s a little application called Bebot. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFG7-Q0WI7Q
But it was an awesome show. Made even more awesome by the fact that they aren’t playing in Texas this year and my trip to CA just happened to coincide with them playing here.
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