kiya

Starting out the day with a sort of . . . like the junior offspring of a stress breakdown and a panic attack was not auspicious. Basically, my current mental state is such that, under any form of pressure, the entirety of reality breaks down like a word repeated too many times stops making sense. Wingwingwingwing. It's just squiggles. It's like running reality on scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel adequate system -- it runs, but a bit slowly and jerkily, and every so often I need to stop for ten minutes and spin my disks.

What set that one off was the realization that, if I was going to catch the 3:30 train, I needed to plan for leaving more like three than . . . three-thirty. Which meant that my time to get my brain in order suddenly was reduced by over half, at the point at which I had the realization. I got my act together after a brief breakdown, and caught the train just fine.

It's acorn season. The trip to the train was paved with brown acorns in several colours, green acorns in several colours, and crushed acorns in several colours. I'd just found our copy of Useful Music, so I listened to that on the walk, on the train ride, and the walk up to Kevin's office from Kendall. I realized I'd forgotten my mobile, I failed to be able to figure out how to make the 'Call people in the building' phones work, but I had fifty cents (fifty cents!) in my pocket to blow on the pay phone, so I called up to Kevin's office to tell him I was downstairs and sat down to read Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.

He showed up. After minor mishaps, we hiked to Mary's, because . . . well. Because. Best damn hot and sour soup I have ever met in my brief sojourn upon this planet. As I write this I'm munching leftovers. Well, "munching" is probably the wrong word for chicken velvet, but anyway. We ate. We packed up our leftovers. We took the T to South Station, tracked down the shuttle bus, and took that to the Pavilion. There was a pat-down check at the entry, which I found slightly disconcerting. We found our seats; Kevin went wandering, I sat and read more book. (My legs hurt like hell.)

The opening band was . . . you know the style of music that essentially has the sort of bassline that causes some portion of your anatomy to vibrate? For me, it's the breastbone that goes, which makes breathing an interesting experience.

This was one of those bands. It hit me in the sternum like a fist, and kept hitting me there. I was sort of planning on vegging out through their performance, because being repeatedly thwacked in the chest musically is not my favorite form of entertainment, but my attention was caught by one of their song lyrics. I think it's the only lyric I found comprehensible in their entire set, which lasted about a half-hour.

"Give me a book, give me something to read."

Give me a book, give me something to read? From a chest-kicking metal band? The incongruity made me ask Kevin for a pen to start taking notes on the experience, so I could report on it in full detail.

The band had three guys in it, and was from Texas. I think its name was 'King X' or some such. Bass, guitar, drummer. The drummer was, like, Standard Drummer Issue #3, Brunette Version: stringy hair in a mop, about shoulder length, falling into his eyes, wearing a black muscle shirt. The bass and lead singer had a red muscle shirt, jeans hanging down over his hips so that the top of his underwear showed (white), and his guitar dangling down about as far as his knees -- I actually noticed the guitar first and said to myself, "What, is this the musical equivalent of that pants-falling-off style?" He was also wearing a cowboy hat that had its brim folded up on either side, so that his head looked like a very strange wedge. The guitarist was . . . a geek. Geek Model #7. Skin that had not seen sun, jeans, buttoned shirt with sleeves reaching about to his elbows, scraggly facial hair, and blue John Lennon glasses. And a tremendously long neck, though that may have just been that when he was doing backup vocals that first or second song, he was leaning up to the mike or something.

I spent much of the first act pondering the phallic nature of the bassist's guitar position. The thing was slung in such a way that the neck of the guitar appeared to be originating at his crotch. (He also had tremendously long arms, well-muscled in the forearm and . . . noticeably narrow in the upper arm. And a tendency to walk around with the bass in a manner that reminded me of nothing but Colin Mockery's dinosaur impressions on Whose Line. Give Colin's dinosaur a bass.)

The guitarist was cool, though. He sounded like Frampton might if he were mainlining debased essence of Malmsteen. A lot of the same womp-wah feel to the guitar, with occasional bits of liquid speed. The wall next to the stage occasionally had live camera shots of what was going on, and they did a lot of closeups of his hands.

oneironaut, you would love those hands. Graceful, long-fingered, skilled, beautiful hands. Wow. He was doing a solo, and I said into Kevin's ear (I was sitting on his lap at the time, which made this easier), "That sort of skill requires years of monomaniacal obsession. It's good to know geeks can get guitars and be cool too." He really did strike me that way. His guitar was black and purple -- sort of the black faded in around the edges. He also, in each of the times he had an extended solo, seemed to be so focused on his hands that his face was no longer actually under his conscious control, and went through a set of contortions weirdly resembling what might be expected of some people's orgasm responses.

I would like to open this section with a comment.

Joe Satriani has pants.

Now, this may not be particularly surprising to contemplate.

They had stripes.

Except when they were marbled.

Thank you for your time.

He started out with the concert with a plain white guitar, very simple, as if to say, "I'm Joe Satriani. I don't need to have a purple guitar." Some of his stuff had intermittent strobes. This irked me. (I've seen comments that some migraines are related in some way to epilepsy; I just know that strobes can give me incredibly severe headaches.)

He did a sort of jazzy call and response thing as maybe his third number -- riff and echo from the crowd. It was fun. It's sometimes hard to sing along with an instrumentalist. After doing some stuff, he swapped the guitar for a seven-string one with a wooden face.

Intermittently through this I was getting whiffs of marijuana smoke. I have no idea if this is correlated with some of my leg and hip pain going away, though. One of the times I was sitting down, I was watching the effects of the light show on the shadows of the rigging that supported some of the spots, because I could see that. (There were chairs there. So why the fuck did everyone stand up? I know why I stood up. It was because the idiots in front of me were blocking my view.) Anyway, I was reminded of how . . . I suppose it's often a music video effect or some such . . . a single object is shown in flickering timestop over the course of some period of time. I don't know how to describe it, but the shadow of the scaffolding was doing that for real on the ceiling.

There were bits of this show that had lime green spotlights. My immediate theory as to why they didn't use these for the opening band was that they'd have made the guitarist look like a corpse. I noticed that the four spotlights on the platform at our end of the pavilion were tinted four different colours, and pointed it out to Kevin.

Satriani swapped back to the white guitar after two songs and sat down for a while (at this point about half the audience took the hint and sat down, or maybe they were tired), and played some stuff that felt influenced by a guitar style that's filed in my head as 'Spanish'. Lovely stuff.

Then he went and got another guitar. This one was painted and stuff -- at first I wasn't sure if it was the seven-string or something else, but I saw it on one of the filmed shots. And he played with that one for a while. One of the pieces he was doing had a bit at the end where he was coaxing strange, wailing noises out of the guitar, which sounded for all the world like he was trying to induce orgasm in it. Eventually it screamed and fell silent.

Speaking of orgasms, more funny guitarist faces -- when Satriani's playing, he sometimes seems to adopt the facial expressions of someone who would probably be terribly embarassed to have his coital gesticulations chronicled on a public journal. He also seems to open his mouth in different ways depending on some of the notes he's playing; I wonder if it has an effect on his personal resonance.

I never noticed the R&B-flavored riff at the beginning of Summer Song before. Probably because I was always distracted by Summer Song . . . . There was, I think, a fourth guitar involved by this point, a purple one(! so much for that idea), which just goes to show that the man kept wearing the poor things out.

Another break, and the various bits were taken offstage and a new drum set came out. Little people in mostly black (and bluejeans, making my old stage crew wiring glitch) wandered around, adjusting things, including an insane number of spotlights. I said to Kevin, "It's a drum and gong set," which it was; there was this . . . gong . . . on the thing they rolled out, on the part that wasn't draped over with a black cloth. Kevin added, a while later, "There's a set of chimes next to that."

When Dream Theater came out, one of them was armed with . . . what looked like the neck of a guitar, family size. It looked like an electric sitar. Hell, it sounded a bit like an electric sitar. Maybe it was an electric sitar. George Harrison, what have you wrought?

The lead singer was armed with A Lot Of Hair and leather pants. And a microphone. Apparently, he's an adept and highly skilled in some secret martial art focused on combat usage of a microphone stand. Base position: one leg straight, one bent, the microphone stand aligned with the straight leg. From this pose, whip the microphone stand around violently, use it as additional leverage for snap kicks, and occasionally hold it straight over your head like Lion-O trying to summon help.

Eventually the fellow with the hypothetical electric sitar swapped it for a guitar. He was also armed with A Lot Of Hair, and knew how to use it.

I would say that a drummer who has, accompanying him on the drum platform, a larged stuffed Animal doll, is truly speaking to the experience of my g-generation.

After a few gyrations, they went into 6:00, which required me to say, "I know all about the honor of God, Mary Jane", several times, to Kevin, one or two of them even in the appropriate place in the music. It's much easier for me to get high off music with words, because I can sing along. Participatory stuff. If I'm a mage, music is definitely my focus for prime.

The drummer had fun with his drumsticks all through the show. The prosaic flipping them around in his hands and occasionally tossing them in the air is one thing, but at least once he pegged one at a roadie. (Who threw it back.)

There were three fast guitarists in that show, and only one of them was not trying to shake his head off.

There . . . isn't that much to say. See the text of the lj-cut for explanation. ;) They finished out their set (they did a two-song encore, but this was the set) with something like ten or fifteen minutes of straight instrumentals, one flowing into the other. There was a moment of extreme surreality where they flowed smoothly into and out of the keyboardist doing some very strange honky-tonk saloon piano work, which was only surpassed by the extreme surreality of a similar segue into a remarkably plinky version of "Heart and Soul". Oh, right, and since the vocalist didn't have anything to do during the instrumental bits, he occasionally zipped around on the stage on a scooter.

Thing I forgot to include in the original draft:

In other news, I may have found the capacity to forgive Paul of Tarsus. Blame Bishop Spong.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Date: 2002-09-13 12:10 am (UTC)

From:

pir-anha.livejournal.com

"Give me a book, give me something to read"

yup, that's "dogman" by king's x, off the album with the same title (which i happen to own). they've been around for quite a while; i remembering hearing about them first in the mid 90's. their lyrics are in general a cut above the metal tripe, i think, pretty thoughtful. the guitarist is ty tabor, and he's very good as you've noticed. so they're touring with satriani and dream theater, eh? *sigh*. well, good for them!

I may have found the capacity to forgive Paul of Tarsus

oy.

Date: 2002-09-13 12:14 am (UTC)

kiya

Re: "Give me a book, give me something to read"

Oh, you know who they are! Damn fine coolness. The partner wanted to know. So now I can tell him.

Date: 2002-09-13 05:19 am (UTC)

tendyl.livejournal.com

=)

I thought I saw you there....but wasn't sure! Neato! And that's a good analysis of DT, Satriani, and Kings X. Glad you enjoyed yourself!

Date: 2002-09-13 11:56 am (UTC)

Re: =)

Hee!

Date: 2002-09-13 10:57 am (UTC)

sinboy.livejournal.com

no subject

Next time I go to a concert, I'm going to ask that this get read by the band:

"I'd like anyone here considering getting stoned also please also consider that there are those in the audience who are allergic to pot or tobacco smoke.

If you smoke something, it's possible that you'll ruin the concert for them. So ask yourself, "is my getting stoned or having a cigarette so important that I'd force someone I'd never met before to have to leave?"