This show was amazing. Kings-X opened. I never really heard their stuff, and I told everyone I knew that they sucked. They were apparently suffering from the 'opening band/shitty sound so the title act sounds good' syndrome....or so it seemed. Maybe they were good...maybe not. I'll never know. If they had control over their sound, their sound man should fine another line of work.

Joe, on the other hand...was truly amazing. The show opened with a wash of blue light and FLYING IN A BLUE DREAM opened his set. Great choice. The whole show mixed up old and new, just how I like it. I hate when bands ONLY play their new sutff. Joe knows how to do it. He played with all the precision of a machine, but, with a level of feeling that only an artist as accomplished as Joe can pull off. He showed once again that he's a master of his domain. I can't wait for his next gig near me.

Cheers

The show was FANTASTIC! Joe was so ON, even Matt was telling Galen "man, he's hot!" and he would look over at Joe as Joe would be tearing it up. Somebody said they thought Joe was in the best physical shape - lawd, lawd, lawd ~ can I get a witness!! He looked great (that's an understatement). Man, when Joe played AWM,AWY, I said a prayer and thanked God for putting this man on this earth at the same time as me. This was the best I've heard Joe play this one (although he's never played it badly). It was sooo beautiful! Mindstorm was totally kickass! I had my sights on Jeff the whole song (except for the wiggidy-wiggidy-wack guitar part). He was kicking the crap out of his kit during that song! The strobelights were cool (I thought they would blind me being so close to the stage). The whole set blew me away! I've never seen King's X before. They were great, but I'm not going to run out and buy any c.d.'s. I needed earplugs for their set. They seemed louder than JS & DT. They had pretty many fans up front where we were, and they made sure to make eye contact & point them out, which sent the guys (fans) into fits of insanity. LOL! The singer later came out to sing a song with DT. That was pretty cool. I'd say catch them if you can. Some ppl. are missing the first act, but I thought they were good. Joe's set was awesome!! Every song, every note. Matt & Galen fit in well. When Joe sat on his stool, somebody in the audience yelled FREEBIRD! Joe raised his fist and acknowledged he heard it with a "yeah!". As they all sat on there stools and started to play, Matt was playing Joe's song, but singing the lyrics to Freebird!! lol! How the hell can you play one song & sing another? lol! Mad skillz! It was great! I wanted to stand for Joe's whole set, but my side of the audience all sat, while the other side all stood (Joe's side of the stage). I would be the only one standing, and my husband would bang on my leg to sit down Nooooobody behind me was standing up, so to be courteous, I sat down...BUT I did not sit still!! lol!

After Joe's set I left my husband sit with my purse and I made a B-line up the see if I could catch Mike M. I got his attention and said "Hey, nice shirt" as I held the JS up on my shirt. He smiled and said "yeah". Then I asked him if I could please have one of Joe's pick, to which he stood up, reached in his pocket, & tossed me one. YEAH!! I thanked him and let him go about his job. THANKS AGAIN MIKE!! DT came out, and when they uncovered MP's kit....lawd, I thought I died & went to heaven. THREE bass drums! They did a few songs I wasn't to familiar with, did some that I knew, and a big-ass smedley! JP was on my side of the stage, which was very cool! The 2 youngin's I sat next to were cool. The guy was about 5' tall & he said he was a guitar player. The girl said she was a drummer. COOL!! They both said Joe was their favorite, but man, when DT came out, they girl knew every word to every song, and when I knew it to, we went wild. Now THAT was fun! lol! I hated sitting for Joe's set! Joe needs to find out what sort of mojo DT has to get their peeps to stay on their feet from beginning to end. The best part of a DT show, besides the band, is the singing from the audience. I think it's the coolest thing! It's like a big blanket of love back to the band. All in all, I give the night 3 thumbs up. Not a single complaint ~ oh wait, maybe that $4.00 bottle of water...and the woman took off the lid! I asked her if I could have the lid and she said they're not allowed to give them to the customers. I slammed my hand on the counter and laughed and said "for 4 f*in dollars I should get a lid with my bottle!!" Geez man, this same bottle of water costs .98 at the grocery store. I HOPE YOUR KICKING THEIR BUTTS UP IN BOSTON TONIGHT JOE!

STRANGE, ETHEREALLY BEAUTIFUL MUSIC

There’s the kidnaper who complained about the weight of the ransom money bags he’d collected (or, better still, the Austrian emperor/neophyte music critic Joseph II doing the scene in the film adaptation of Amadeus where he criticizes a new Mozart opera) by exclaiming, "Too many notes!" This has been a familiar refrain throughout the career of Joe Satriani, the San Franciscan guitar guru currently on tour to promote his new album, Strange Beautiful Music. At the other end of the spectrum, there are folks like my friend RB who are waiting to tell me, "See, he’s selling out to the pseudo-intellectual music critics, getting all jazzy and shit. He’s stopped shredding like in the ‘Surfing…’ days, man." (Mind you, this was before he’d actually listened to the new album, so he’s excused.) And then there's Satriani himself, who cares not a false note for how people classify him or his music or how critics dismiss his playing style as merely flashy. He just picks up his JS 1000, comes up on stage, does his thing, occasionally stunning a screaming, young audience into gaping, wide-eyed silence (like he did on Sunday night at Tweeter, right across the Delaware) and then goes back home to chill with Rubina and ZZ.

He’s one of the mellowest live performers on guitar, seeming to effortlessly waltz through solos that would challenge any guitarist in rock music. But every now and then, something seems to get him all fired up and then his performance gets a level of intensity and edginess that is worth far more than the price of admission. Being on the road for over 2 months, traveling around half the globe on the Strange Beautiful Tour 2002, and recovering from the recent loss of "Pearly," his favorite guitar that was stolen mid-August at a gig in Florida, Satriani seemed pissed off—enough to be shredding like a maniac on the evening, even on usually mellow numbers like Love Thing and Starry Night.

My lasting memory of the night: Satch improvising a solo on Raspberry Jam Delta-V after his band thought the song was over. He was going wild on the whammy pedal, literally manhandling the life out of his Chromeboy XXX and almost falling down backwards in the process. But I'm jumping ahead, so let's instead start at the top, when the promising young rock band from the west coast, King's X (a band that Joe rates very highly) kicked off proceedings. Right off the bat, my first reaction was, X needs to fire their soundman, since all we could hear was the drums and a rather muted guitar. The vocalist/bassist Doug Pinnick sounded a tad weary from all the touring, but overall, their angst-ridden sound reminded me of a very young Pearl Jam, except that the sound mixing sucked big time, with Ty Tabor sounding more like Robbie Robertson. After just four songs in a 25-minute set (two of which I failed to spot as separate tunes), they turned the stage over to Joe's roadies. The crowd that had just started building up, comprised mostly of teenage rock fans, some of who, inexplicably, even screamed "Ozzy!! You rock!" towards the end of the set. And all the T-shirts (barring a handful of Satriani tour shirts) on view were Dream Theater T-shirts.

It took less than 20 minutes for Joe's band to be set up. And just as fans were trickling back in from the break between sets, the whole stage was bathed in an eerie blue neon strobe, with the band barely discernible, except for Joe’s bald pate that reflected some of the blue incandescence. A spot slowly centered on Joe’s all-black Ibanez as he began strumming the opening chords of "Flying In a Blue Dream". As soon as the drums kicked in, there was a mad rush to get to the front, until the security guys caught up. Amidst all this, Satch boogied, shredded and wound his way to the end of the song and immediately broke into Crushing Day. He introduced the band (Matt Bisonette on bass, Galen Hansen on rhythm guitar and Jeff Campitelli on drums) after a feedback-laden, screaming crescendo that ended a devilish version of Devil's Slide and then tried to get the crowd to sing along to his guitar--"I'd like a little help from you guys on this one: it's a tune called Cool #9." The crowd sucked, probably because they didn't expect to sing along to Satriani. He changed guitars (to a 7-string) for Mind Storm and Seven String from the new album. There followed a small pause of a minute while the lights dimmed and the roadies set up a few stools for the band to begin a little acoustic set, which is when the jaws began to drop and the crowd got silenced. Joe started with a blistering solo, Midnight, (a surprise he pulled out of the box, since it didn’t figure on his set list for the Tour) that featured some unbelievable tapping and then proceeded to perform a superbly improvised version of Starry Night with the band, which segued smoothly into Love Thing.

After that, it was back to the regular sound, with Satch going full tilt into Raspberry Jam Delta-V and Satch Boogie (which even featured a bit of the riff from Luminous Flesh Giants in the middle!). He changed guitars before playing Always… and Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing. After a rousing version of Summer Song, they finished the set with a rousing 8-minute version of Friends that had all the Satriani fans in the crowd screaming for more while the band took a bow. Like at most Satriani shows featuring multiple bands, the die-hard fans felt there should have been more than a set that lasted an hour and quarter. John Hunter, who had driven down all the way from Pittsburgh for the show, lamented the absence of Surfin', Belly Dancer and I Believe, all of which were part of the set list during the European leg of the Strange Beautiful Tour (or at least, were part of the streamed show from Heineken Hall, Amsterdam).

Unfortunately (for Satriani fans), Dream Theater had to follow his performance (Satriani closed all the shows west of the Mississippi, while DT closed the shows on the east coast) and appeared to suffer in comparison. The crowd, with a huge number of DT fans, gave them a rousing welcome despite their starting the set with a rather listless version of Pull Me Under. A couple of songs in, they seemed to warm up: once they hit Misunderstood (from their new album Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence), Dream Theater began to sound like Metallica on performance-enhacing drugs.

I've seen an earlier live performance of Dream Theater on videotape, when they had covered the entire Master of Puppets album and I also saw G3 last year, so this show was, sort of, like my third time seeing Petrucci live. He is amazingly fluent, technically flawless and very, very loud, but his guitar seemed to be bothering him midway through the set since he kept fiddling with the tuning knobs on it and didn’t seem too happy the rest of the night, unlike at G3, where he rocked the house. I've heard that Dream Theater varies their set list for every show—in that sense, they are very much like a jam band. The crowd sang along with every song, and eventually the energy was there, they were all completely into it and having a great time. Doug Pinnick came out from backstage to join Labrie during The Spirit Carries On. In the instrumental medley, they even teased a Rush tune (I think it was Working Man, I'm not sure, but it was sweet). Somewhere in the middle of it, drummer Portnoy grabbed a mike and screamed, "The World Cup may be over, but it's come back to Camden, NJ, folks!" At which point, Petrucci and Myung started kicking a soccer ball around even as they played on, without missing a single note. It was kind of cheesy, but really funny. I did miss DT playing Metropolis and they didn't do any Pink Floyd covers.

Overall, it was a fabulous, hi-octane evening of rock music, although I was kind of put off that Satriani—whom I'd really come to see—played a short set. It was my understanding that Joe and Dream Theatre were co-headlining, meaning they both would be playing full sets. So, needless to say, I was rather disappointed when the house lights came on by 11.15 and I was thinking that there should have definitely been an encore/jam at the end of the show with Joe and Petrucci (like at G3 where Vai, Petrucci and Joe jammed on a 10 minute version of Voodoo Chile). Compared to his performance at the G3 show last year, though, this was definitely an edgier, angrier performance from Joe, with a real nice mix of tunes, new and old. Unfortunately, because of logistical issues (changing to a 7-string; the acoustic section and so on) he couldn't play too many songs from his new album while balancing them out with a selection from his old favorites. Galen lent admirable support and Jeff was precise and perfect as always. The new bassist Matt Bisonette seems to have fit right into the band, although a few fans out there did shout for “Stuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu”. Can't wait to see ya back in Philly, Joe.

Hey all,

Well lets just say that Joe is with out any question,the man.He totally rocked and was on top of his game the whole time.Band was tight and the people really enjoyed his workmanship.I do have one problem thought..the last 2 times I saw Joe he has been with G3 and now with dream theatre..a total of about 2 and a half hours of joe for both shows together.Now,before those shows,I saw him by himself and he played for longer then both those shows combined! We need you to tour solo next time ,we can;t get enough!!King's X was ok.Joe was on next and rocked the place.Then Dream Theatre,and don't get me wrong,I love john Petrucci but the singer always doesn't do it for me.If they would play without any singing,it would be great! There musci is excellent.All in all,a good show by the other bands but joe was as always,the king.Thanks Joe,come next time by yourself and play the Tower or Kesick!! Bob