30 posts tagged “dream theater”
This one's going to be a short post since the activities of the day were pretty much limited just to a concert and a little bit of wandering.
But first an addium to the last post since I forgot to mention it. I believe I mentioned that we didn't bring milk thinking we could find it in the hotel store area. But we were mistaken. So we had planned to stop on the way back from the crab eating to grab some from a CVS we knew existed near the national zoo. However, I decided to trek out once we got back from the fountain wandering in the afternoon. As it turns out, there's a whole bunch of stuff just up the street from the hotel which we didn't know about. Which really sucks because if we knew about this stuff last year, we wouldn't have had to make a death march to a safeway in order to pick up subs. There was a 24 hour CVS, a Wendy's, as well as a bunch of other places to eat. Grrrr....noted for next time.
So Day 3 consisted of us mostly just hanging out waiting for the concert to happen. We went out for lunch at Wendy's and then because we needed to vacate the room in order to give it time to get cleaned we decided to head out to the navy memorial to hang out since they had fountans and it was cool just hanging out by the water.
When we arrived though, we found they were going to have a wreath laying ceremony followed by a concert, so we hung out for that. And we got to see some actual secret service agents! The ceremony was pretty cool to watch, as was the beginning of the concert. However, we were starting to get a little hot because of the sun (very bright and sunny weather we've been having all trip long) so we went back to the hotel and hung out for a couple of hours before we had to leave for the show. Metro cards in tow, we headed out for the last outing of the trip.
We arrived at the venue pretty early since we had wanted to grab food from a street vendor near the venue. Which we did. It was actually pretty good, although somewhat expensive. Makes sense though since it was right on the parade route.
Then we went to the show which was simply awesome. We ended up using the floor tickets which were MUCH closer than we had thought they would be. Dead center, right on the floor...very good stuff.
All three bands we went to see played awesomely. I also managed to meet a couple of the members of 3 and have a CD signed by everyone.
Dream theater blew the doors off though. The crowd was so into it and the band was obviously feeling that energy and they put on a stunning show. We ended up making the last metro train back, which I was worried about and then falling into bed at the hotel room.
My next post will be back home in New York, as we're just about ready to head out the door. It's been a good vacation so far.
Yesterday was quite a day. If you would recall, I've been planning on attending the Progressive Nation 08 tour which consists of 3 of my favorite bands (3, Opeth and Dream Theater) and one band I don't care for (Between the Burried And Me). And, as you may also recall, I had intended on going to the Washington DC show because, although Albany was closer, it was a general admission venue and I prefer seated venues to standing room only.
We had originally intended to go out to albany yesterday anyway to attend a Mike Portnoy in-store meet and greet appearance. Then Wassy was contacted by a member of the mikeportnoy.com forums. He had purchased a platnium package but couldn't make use of it because, it seems, his brother was going to the show and he didn't want to leave him hanging, so he gave it to us. $300...per ticket. We were pretty nervous that things weren't going to work out because the logistics of the situation were very unsure. We wouldn't know until after the show for sure. I had originally intended to bring a poster to have the band signed, but I was worried that it wouldn't make it through security. Which it didn't. Oh well, it would have been cool, but it wasn't the end of the world. I threw it back in my car and went in without.
Once we got in, our friend handed us his laminate back stage pass, told us where to go and it seemed like we were all set. The actual concert was very awesome. 3, the band was very cool live, as always. The sound started off pretty bad but got a lot better as it went onwards and they have a huge stage presense. It was really cool watching the number of people in the crowd cheering them on increase dramatically as the set went on. I'm glad they're getting a lot of exposure out of this show.
After their set we hightailed it over to the merch tables so that I could purchase my backup plan for signing (a paperback copy of Lifting Shadows, the official Dream Theater biography book) as well as get some 3 swag, I bought a nice t-shirt. We also hung around and Wassy bought a copy of Wake Pig and had it signed by the band. I'm planning on picking up a physical copy of The End Is Begun next week and getting that cover signed. as well.
We went back up to the tiered seating to stake out a good place for Opeth while listening to Between The Burried And Me. I really like them musically, but their screaming vocals really turn me off. Needless to say, I was happy when they had left the stage.
Next up was Opeth which was a band I had always wanted to see live. And they rocked the house. The sound was a little muddy to start with where I was at but it was adjusted pretty good by the middle of the first song. They're a really awesome live band as well, with lots of energy. Mikael Akerfeldt, their front man/main creative force is also very funny on stage between songs. I can see why his banter is considered to be stuff of legends. I liked it just as much as I liked the actual songs. They played a new song off their upcoming album which sounded really cool.
After Opeth, the wait for Dream Theater began. I was starting to get excited about the meet and greet. And getting tired because there had been much rocking out that was going on for the past couple hours and it was starting to catch up with me. But DT hit the stage and it all went away. We had a really awesome setlist, including Strange Deja Vu, Though My Words and Fatal Tragedy, the new version of Surrounded and Take The Time. Even though we had already seen about half of it at the last tour, the new stuff was very awesome.
And then came the moment of truth...the meet and greet. Would we be allowed in? Would everything run smoothly? We grabbed our stuff and headed to the meeting point while the crew was disassembling the stage. Jenny, the meet and greet rep came out and grabbed all of the VIP people and took us backstage, to a very scary looking hallway that appeared as though might have been used as a secluded hallway in the past for "taking care of" people who you never wanted to hear from again. It was also where they kept the fallout shelter.
It was at this point we realized that this was actually going to happen. Jenny started handing out DT swag, including a DT bandana and a guitar pick. We then got some snacks and candy to hold us over while the band was eating their cheesecake factory supplied food (We saw the guy walk through with a bunch of cheesecake factory bags. Somebody yelled out "They get cheesecake factory??" and he said "You already got your stuff!" and kept right on going). Jenny went over the rules. No grabbing the crotches of the band members was the one that stood out.
Then we waited some more, and while we were waiting, we got another surprise. The members of Opeth appeared and walked through our little gathering, so we got to say hi and I happened to be in the right spot to shake Mikeal Akerfeldt's hand. Then the guys appeared. We started taking pictures with them, with Wassy and myself doing ours together. She stood by James LaBrie and was all excited when he put his arm on her shoulder. She's a James LaBrie fangirl, you see.
We went back in line to get ready to do the meet and greet. Wassy had brought some art of hers to gift to the band as a thank you for the music and such (pictured to the right there), so she did that and got a copy signed for herself. I didn't really have much to say as I was kinda in awe being 3 feet away from the guys that really launched all of my current musical taste. I basically just did a lot of "Really awesome show, thanks for the music" stuff. I thanked Mike Portnoy for doing all the stuff he does for the fans, and told James LaBrie that I really loved his voice.
As we walked through, Wassy got some attention from the meet and greet manager who wanted to know more about the art and what she had done to make it. And then after that there was a manager of a production company hanging out who wanted to see it and gave her his card and told her to send him an e-mail with some more contact information.
All in all it was a very awesome night. Spoiled slightly because of the fact that we had some massive vending machine troubles on the Thruway during the return trip. We needed something to drink and first the vending machine wasn't taking dollars...then it gave me back my change in nickels, then another machine took 2 of Wassy's dollars when everything was sold out and only gave her back one...but eventually we semi-sorted it out..except for that lost dollar.
I'm still coming down off the high of meeting the band, and Opeth and everything going as well as it could have gone. And now the pressure is off for the DC show to be perfect. We're just going to go relax and have a good time that weekend, get out of town for a little while and decompress.
I leave you with a shot of my signed copy of Lifting Shadows.
As you may reall, I'll be heading down to Washington DC in a couple weeks to catch Progressive Nation '08 which consists of Dream Theater, Opeth and Three. Well, there's another band, but I don't particularly care for them. Anyway, what I didn't plan on was heading out to Albany to catch another show of the same tour the weekend before. But here we are.
The story starts last monday. I returned home from work to a message from Wassy simply stating "!!!!". I asked what was up and she quickly informed me that she had just recieved a message from a guy that's a regular on the Mike Portnoy.com forums that I visit often. He bought platnium tickets for the show, which means he spent $300 per ticket to get let in early to get up front, as well as get backstage passes to meet the band, get stuff signed and take a picture with them. However, it seems he doesn't want to do the meet and greet thing...so he's offering his two backstage passes to us, for free.
We had originally intended to go to Albany that day anyway because the drummer (Mike Portnoy) was going to be having an in-store apperance and we wanted to go. But now we're going to the show too. Can't pass this opportunity up, that's for sure as I don't think I'd ever be able to justify spending $300 per ticket to go backstage.
So needless to say, I'm extremely excited at the chance to meet the band that pretty much opened my eyes to all the good stuff that's out there underground, even if they're not my favorite band anymore.
However, it turns out the venue in albany was probably going to be General Admission and that the venue was more of a basketball arena that can also hold concerts. But by the time I got home, she had scouted out the other dates and determined that Washington DC was the way to go.
So off to DC we go. At the moment we're (myself and Wassy that is) planning on going down on Saturday, May 24th a couple days before the show, so that we have part of that saturday and sunday to do some sight seeing. The concert is on the 26th, which also happens to be memorial day. The venue is the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, right down near the white house so it'll be easy to find when the time comes. Hopefully all of the memorial day parade activities will be cleared out by the time we need to go through. The parade runs close but not exactly near the venue.
The plan is to head home on the 27th, tired and happy. Now all we need is tickets to the show which haven't gone on sale yet. This wait until the end of May is going to kill me.
I probably should have posted this yesterday but I wasn't feeling terribly motivated to do any writing. But you're going to be getting it today so...deal with it! Anyway, I went over to my friends place on Saturday to hang out. We watched Robot Chicken, some MST3K Then Wassy made some strawberry daiquiris with an awful lot of rum. Then, we did the only thing we could do while we were a bit tipsy...played trivial pursuit. Yes, I know we're freaks. I also know that the game gets about 100x more interesting when there's some type of drinking involved.
I was also over there to watch the new Dream Theater video on MTV2. I'm not a huge fan of music videos honestly, but this time I was interested. The video (at the right) was done in a very stylistically cool way, with some great animation.
It also follows the story of the song pretty well. Except for the vampire spaceship thing...that's kinda weird. But overall I was pretty happy with the end result.
I wasn't really happy about having the listen to what passes for "metal" these days though. Ugh, I really hate screaming vocals. REALLY hate them. The video was on about an hour into the show and was almost the first one without entire screamed vocals (Skid Row was #1)
I'm exhausted. Last night Wassy and myself went out to the University of Buffalo to see Dream Theater live. This was my 5th Dream Theater concert and her first concert ever, so there was much anticipation.
We left from my place at around 1:30 and started the 3 hour drive out to Buffalo. The plan was for me to drive out there and for her to drive back after the show. It turned out to be pretty easy to get to the venue, but we had some problems finding the on campus burger king we were going to grab some dinner at before the show. The GPS we were using didn't have it in it's database and we got stuck on some kind of a little traffic loop thingy. We got there eventually...the campus is huge. They have their own parkways running through it!
Anyway, we ate and headed back over to the venue. The first thing we saw was an RV in the parking lot with a banner that said "Rule 15" on it. This would be the people from the mikeportnoy.com forums. The banner joke is really funny...you're just going to have to take my word for it if you don't frequent the MP.com forums.
We checked with the box office to make sure our tickets would be OK considering the little accident they had...They said everything was fine, and it turned out to be correct, as we got in with no problems. After a brief stop at the merchandise stand where I picked up a tour book and my friend picked up a t-shirt for herself, we headed into the theaterOur seats were really, really nice. We were right in front of the sound board which meant awesome sound (for Dream Theater at least, Redemption was kinda muddy sounding) and we could see everything perfectly.
As soon as we saw where our seats were though, we fled the area because the first opening band, Into Eternity was going to be playing soon. Just before the set started an older usher type guy came out and yelled "The program is starting soon! 5 minutes until the program starts!" which I thought was funny. Program really isn't an appropriate word for this...
As soon as we heard Into Eternity's set start, we knew we made the right decision. They were...not my cup of tea to put it mildly. No melody at all, all shrieking and death metal grunts... Ugh. We took refuge in the lobby where they had a bunch of chairs set up and trying to ignore the horrible sounds coming from the theater. It soon became apparent that we weren't the only ones that had this idea. There were an awful lot of people hanging out in the lobby, just waiting for the crappy death metal to go away.
Finally, that finished and we went into the theater for the real show. Redemption was pretty good, although their sound was kinda blah. Ray Alder's vocals were really nice though, even though he had a cold. The crowd took a while to get into them, but by the end of their set there were a lot of people standing up. A lot of that was probably due to the fact that it was Ray Alder's birthday and Mike Portnoy and some of the other members of DT and Into Eternity came out with a cake that ended up being thrown around the stage. That was pretty cool.
After Redemption, the main event began to take shape. The stage hands started to clear the sage of Redemption's gear, DT's equipment came out and the ant was placed at the front of the stage. I wasn't able to take any more pictures at this point because the venue employees were swarming all over the area I was in...oh well.
The show itself was incredible. Easily the best show I've ever been to at this point. The setlist was awesome and hit almost all the songs I was hoping they would play. Strange Deja Vu, Surrounded, specifically were my two hopes. Other highlights included I Walk Beside You, and The Dark Eternal Night, and the Medley in the encore. TDEN was really a surprise hit with me. The song is sooo much better live than it is on the album, especially with the animation they had running in the background. The light show was also really awesome. It doesn't compare to say, Trans-siberian orchestra, but...what does really? They've really dialed in their stage show over the past few tours.
Much like the Score review I did, James LaBrie deserves his own paragraph here. James was ON FIRE. He sounded the best that I've ever heard him sound live and he nailed practically everything. He had to go a little lower on some points in Surrounded, but I can't really blame him... I'm just really happy he was having a really good night last night because my friend really wanted to see him to hit the high notes in some of the older stuff, and he didn't disappoint. I was really glad she enjoyed the show too.
Another high note about the show was they the band member's kids were seated on stage, off to the right hand side near the monitor board. Mike's kids also came up on stage and played some percussion during the Trial of Tears intro which was really, really cool and made the show pretty special to see the guys and their families spending time together like that.
After the show we started to head back home, with my friend driving. We stopped at the first rest stop on the Thruway to get some gas and some food because we were both pretty hungry. It was hugely entertaining for me to see all the people with Dream Theater shirts walk in. The people at Tim Hortons (the only food place open at the time) must have been very confused as to why there were so many people coming in at 11:30pm on a Monday night.
We made it home safely (although I slept for probably an hour in case I needed to take over the driving if she got too tired) We arrived back at my place at around 2am and she crashed on my couch until the morning since she wasn't in any condition to be driving home alone.
Ok, I think I've said quite enough on the subject. It was definitely an awesome show and we're going to try very, very hard to go again when they come back to the US in the spring.
As of the writing of this sentence, there's only 4 days, 11 hours and 19 minutes until the Dream Theater concert in Buffalo.
I'm starting to get within the excitement threshold of seeing possibly my favorite band play live again, even if it is with two openers this time. That's also combined with the fact that I got a 4 day weekend out of it. Well, really 4 and a half because of the fact that I have a company picnic to attend friday afternoon which, to me really doesn't count as "work" exactly. Hey, at least it's outdoors.
Another bit of concert news...I just realized that our second row seats at the Porcupine Tree show (63 days, 11 hrs, 59 mins...) are actually front row. Let me explain...we're sitting in the orchestra pit right below the stage which is oval shaped. We're sitting on the edge of the pit, which, due to the oval shape of the pit itself...we're like...right up next to the stage.
Oh, and other concert news! Trans-Siberian Orchestra just announced their tour dates. Hopefully I'll be able to go see them January 4th. It's a little after when I would normally like to see them perform, but...it's good enough for me to see that awesome stage show again.
Which friend or acquaintance most influenced your taste in music?
Submitted by Rev Stan.
To be honest, nobody really did. At least nobody that I know of.
It all started back when an internet radio station called Echo was around. This was before the days of broadband (mostly) in the dark days of the internet. Well...they were kinda like Pandora is now, where they would match up your tastes with other artists and songs that were similar. Occasionally they would throw in a random track, just in case you might like it and start you off on a completely new musical genre.
Well, one day, Echo spit out Dream Theater - Fatal Tragedy, which I liked. I downloaded it from napster (Bad!) and forgot about the band for a while. One day, a couple years later, I listened to it again and really "got" it. After that, I stumbled onto the Mike Portnoy forums and learned about all of this music that I didn't know about before from the forum-goers there. And the rest...is history.
So no one person really influenced my musical taste. It was done by group consensus.
Redemption, however, is a different story. I'm a casual Fates Warning fan, so I'm familiar with the vocal styling of Ray Alder. His vocals are often hit or miss to me. Sometimes he's really awesome, sometimes I feel his style is a little out of place. Redemption is the former. I think he's a perfect fit on all of these songs, which tend to lean into the heavy, progressive metal genre. There are also some more melodic sections as well.
I've had this CD in my player (or in my iPod) nonstop since Monday, and now I'm really excited that they're opening for Dream Theater on the 20th. Now the 20th just has to get here...
I have a couple of things here related to concert tickets. One good, one bad. First up...the bad.
The Dream Theater tickets I was holding on to for the August 20th show had a bit of an accident. They got a tad bit wet and stuck together, kinda ripping slightly and obscuring some of the ticket information. I noticed yesterday morning and was in almost a near panic because of it (since one of the tickets isn't mine). I called up the venue though and described the damage and they said it should be fine, and if it isn't we could visit the box office and they would straighten things out for us. Looking at the tickets now, the damage isn't that bad. You can still see all the relevant information on both tickets...just not in all the spots it was printed ;)
Second story, the good. The tickets went on sale for the October 18th Porcupine Tree show at The Egg in Albany. Second row. Woo! First time I've ever been in the first couple rows. I've been 8th row before, but second row is something else.
