When tak­ing a sam­ple of pro­gres­sive met­al fans, one will find that the sub­set is almost entire­ly com­prised of males, most of which are much taller than the aver­age Asian guy. This makes it extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for the aver­age Asian guy to see the band dur­ing pro­gres­sive met­al con­certs, which was the case dur­ing the Dreamtheater show on Wednesday. As can be seen from the pic­ture, I went up to most of the oth­er peo­ples necks. Although there was the chance to go straight up front since there was no mosh pit (cause who can mosh to music that changes time sig­na­tures every oth­er bar?), the area was too dense­ly packed to get any­where.

At first I thought that the crowd was most­ly made up of the same “type” of peo­ple, but Trolley point­ed out that he’s nev­er been to a show that was more diverse. All I saw were lots of blond, Caucasian males, but he only saw lots of dif­fer­ent­ly aged peo­ple. And it was true…while there were an extreme­ly lim­it­ed num­ber of females in atten­dance (although I’m sure that Anj was there), there were also peo­ple from my age to twice my age. It was odd to see a lot of guys old enough to be my father at the same con­cert as me.

There was no open­er because their set went for almost three hours. They first per­formed for an hour and a half, and came back for three encores. One of the encores was the entire 45 minute long track on their Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulance album with no paus­es. I’ve also nev­er seen a band mea­sure time like they do when per­form­ing live: some­how they man­age to count their rests with per­fect tim­ing when the lights go out. Even though this is done on the album ver­sion of Endless Sacrifice, the impres­sive thing is that they have dif­fer­ent tem­pos for their shows. Most oth­er bands need a cym­bol hit to keep time (like what Manson does dur­ing Antichrist Superstar at the Hartford show), and it’s always a dis­s­a­point­ment to find out that a band can’t count notes in their heads.

Portnoy’s drum­set owned half the fuck­ing stage.

There’s a run­ning joke between the mem­bers of DT, where they replace lyrics of their songs with “you can eat my ass and balls”. I first found out from the Metropolis 2000 DVD, when they all jok­ing­ly sing it instead of “there can be no peace of mind” dur­ing behind-the-scenes the com­men­tary. At one point dur­ing the Wednesday’s con­cert, LaBrie replaces “take me as I am” with “eat my ass and balls” and I had to burst out laugh­ing. Then I noticed that no one else was laugh­ing.