Great Minds Think Different

It must be difficult to be a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. The entire rest of the world knows you’re not going to repeat your success and it’s only downhill from here, but you have to pretend that’s not the situation. You’re a bunch of guys in your 40s at least, trying to pretend you’re still the wild, hedonistic youths you became famous as. There may be groupies at your concerts, but that doesn’t even do you any good because you’re married and have kids. The worst part is, the groupies suffer from the same problem as you: they’re in their 40s and failing miserably to be 20 years old again.

I have to say, it’s also difficult to be fan of a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. You have to constantly worry that the band’s lead singer is going to fall over and break a hip on stage, or otherwise make some other embarrassing concession to his advanced age. You feel slightly embarrassed for their antics: they’re close to half a century old and they’re still running around on stage wearing ridiculous clothes and hairstyles and asking the audience to pour some sugar on them. One might say their refusal to succumb to the boring, humdrum life of most midlifers makes them brave or even heroic, but to me it looks self-delusional. Worst of all, when you go to their concerts (which you are pretty much obliged to do — when you’re dealing with this kind of band, any tour could be their last, and as a fan, no matter how embarrassingly old the band has become, it’s still a thrill to see them live), you have to deal with the other fans. The aforementioned groupies are among them: women who are in their 40s and who have apparently not been informed that they are no longer 19 and as such they should not attempt to dress like the hot, skinny 19-year-old they may once have been. There are also the male partners of said groupies: generally dudes in their 40s or 50s wearing mullets and ridiculous moustaches, with bad teeth and grating voices. Aging metalheads like this fill me with a mixture of fear and pity for some reason.

That said, the fellow-concert-goer situation wasn’t all bad. I saw a surprising number of people wearing Rush t-shirts; I’d always thought the fanbases of Def Leppard and Rush were disjoint sets except for me. I also saw Metallica, AC/DC, Dream Theater and Queensrÿche shirts. And my seat was on the end of a row, so I was only next to one person, who was not a scary aging metalhead but an unusually attractive girl in her 20s. Her boyfriend, next to her, distinguished himself by acting like a spectacular ass (mainly shouting and waving his arms around in something with only a passing resemblance to rhythm) but the girl did not, acting more like me instead (mainly swaying and foot-tapping most of the time, in rhythm, with occasionally more pronounced rocking-out during higher-energy moments, and only singing along when appropriate*). She also exchanged judgmental quips with me when, between Poison’s and Def Leppard’s sets, an extravagantly drunk Scary Aging Metalhead lady stumbled up to me, grabbed my leg and asked if the seat next to me was taken (which it clearly was). After Scary Aging Metalhead left, Unusually Attractive Girl said to me, “She just wants to sneak into a better seat! I thought you were going to get lucky!” I raised an eyebrow, glanced at Scary Aging Metalhead’s departing figure and said, “Well…” Unusually Attractive Girl looked too, curled her lip and said, “I guess that wouldn’t really have been lucky, huh?” See? Reasonable people can go to Def Leppard concerts too.

Regardless, it is still difficult to be a fan of an ’80s band. Which makes my life rather a series of difficulties, since essentially all of the bands I like saw their greatest success before I was born (in the ’80s). Hell, the next concert I’m going to is by a band in exactly the same stage of downfall as Def Leppard: Metallica.

And you may be thinking, based on the preceding griping, that I did not enjoy the Def Leppard show. On the contrary, it was great. I was just musing on how much better of a person I am than everyone else there.

As I mentioned in my post about the Rush concert I went to, Shoreline Amphitheatre is a very pleasant concert venue; in fact, it’s probably the best concert venue I’ve been to. It’s arrestingly attractive in the evenings, and there’s something about its grand scale and park-like atmosphere that makes rock music seem that much better. I think Def Leppard are more of an arena band, though. The amphitheatre setting suits Rush to a tee, and probably other progressive, wanky bands like Queensrÿche and Dream Theater, but a band more focused on the rocking than the artistry is really more suited to the arena.

Poison and Cheap Trick were OK. I wasn’t there to see them, though. (I’ve already written about the trials of being an opener for a much more popular act, so I won’t do it again.) They were largely unremarkable, except that I have to say that Poison’s guitarist C.C. DeVille has a lot of talent that is being put to waste. He did an improvised solo that sounded an awful lot like Yngwie Malmsteen. The general sense that I got was that he pretty much carries Poison.

Now finally, let’s talk about Def Leppard. Not only do they have to deal with the difficulty of being an ’80s band in 2009, but they are also a band who produced three astronomically popular songs and a huge quantity of other material that almost nobody cares about. So most of the audience is just going to be bored until they play “Photograph”, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” or “Rock of Ages”. They did play all of those, in a row, and in that order. “Rock of Ages” was the last song before the encore. If you ask me, they should have played “Sugar” as the encore. This is classic psychological manipulation. Everyone knows that at some point in the concert, they must play that song. So by leaving it till the very end, they’d have been building anticipation for it all along, and they could walk off the stage with the audience shrieking in joy. Rush did this: they played “YYZ” as the encore.

To be honest, there were parts of the concert where I got bored. Def Leppard’s hard-rocking songs are hit-or-miss. They tend to be either fantastic (“Rock of Ages”, “Gods of War”) or completely forgettable filler. They played some of the filler-y ones towards the beginning. They have two other general types of songs: medium-speed power ballads (“Hysteria”) or full-on slow acoustic songs (“Two Steps Behind”). Both of the latter types can be OK, and they generally played good ones. Part of Def Leppard’s distinctiveness comes from their unusually strong ability to do those types of songs, so it makes sense that they devoted about a third of the show to those.

And when it comes to pure hard-rocking fun, few bands do it better than Def Leppard, however old they may be. They can make a crowd sound as if they earnestly want Def Leppard to pour some sugar on them.

It occurs to me that Def Leppard is the first British band I’ve seen live. All the rest are American or Rush. And Def Leppard is almost amusingly British. Rick Savage had a bass with the Union Jack on the body. Phil Collen had a guitar with the English flag on it. The giant video screen behind them occasionally flashed images of Britishness. I don’t know if all British bands do this, but it definitely stood out. “By Jove, we are British and we think that is capital, old chap” was the impression I got. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see one of them bust out a pot of tea onstage.

A couple last musical things to call out. You do have to give Rick Allen a lot of credit for not reducing the complexity of Def Leppard’s drum parts after losing his arm. Plus in live shows he has to play pre-amputation drum parts anyway, so it’s moot. Def Leppard’s drum parts are definitely of nontrivial complexity, and he plays them adroitly. (If you’re an etymology aficionado like me, you’ll see the pun there.)

Until now I’d always wondered why neither of Def Leppard’s guitarists seemed to be more famous than the other, or at least famous in a different way. Turns out it’s because they alternate lead and rhythm roles. They do have slightly different soloing styles (Collen’s solos are more shreddy) but neither of them takes any kind of primacy over the other. It’s interesting. Most of the other bands I like have either (a) one guitarist or (b) one clear lead guitarist and one clear rhythm. Then there’s Iron “the more the merrier” Maiden, whose three guitarists are knocking on redundancy’s door.

I’m glad I saw Def Leppard. I wouldn’t have lost any sleep if I hadn’t seen them (if, for example, I’d gone to the AC/DC show happening in San Jose at the same time) but I’m glad I did before they, and their groupies, get any older. It was a good show, but it’ll probably only be downhill from here (in their shows, and their albums). But they’ll always have Hysteria, one of the best albums of the ’80s as far as I’m concerned, and they’ll always be British. Good enough for me.

* ROCKET! YEAH!

Well, I just bought a ticket for a concert that will complete the “bands I want to see live at some point” set.

The part of the set that I’ve already seen:

• Rush
• Dream Theater
• Tool
• Queensrÿche
• Yngwie Malmsteen

The two I’m seeing in the remainder of 2009, to complete the set:

• Def Leppard
• Metallica (just bought)

Yes, I’m finally seeing Metallica. I don’t know what I’ll do after I complete the set. Actually, I have a couple of other bands that weren’t in my original goal set, but I would definitely go see: ZZ Top and Journey.

And I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing Rush again, if they don’t die of old age before they can go on tour again. Plus I plan on seeing Trans-Siberian Orchestra every year until I leave the country.

After the Metallica show, I’ll have seen basically all the bands I listen to regularly, except for ones that are impossible to see live anymore: Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses (I know they still exist, but their lineup is so not even close to what it was in their heyday that it’s a stretch to even call them GNR anymore).

Well, there. Metallica, bitches. Now I need to figure out how to dress for a Metallica concert before December 12.

So Metallica’s new album is out, after a few years of being rumored to come out “real soon”.

I should explain something first. I’ve learned (and you all should feel free to take this wisdom to heart as well) that if you’re going to try to appreciate some music you’ve never heard before, it’s a bad idea to listen to Led Zeppelin immediately before you do so. Honestly, just listen to them for a few minutes and you wonder why anyone’s bothered making music since 1980. Anything I listen to immediately after a Zeppelin song makes me think (even if under other circumstances I really like it): “Why am I wasting my ear-mileage on this when I could be listening to some real music instead?”

Anyway, I made that mistake with “Death Magnetic”. I first listened to it right after a few tracks from Led Zeppelin’s Box Set, which is what a band too classy to release a best-of compilation calls a best-of compilation. Keep that in mind as you consider my opinion of Death Magnetic and ponder whether to share it.

I should note that Death Magnetic’s pre-release hype had less to do with my opinion of it than the Led Zeppelin preflight. “St. Anger” had made me a Metallica skeptic, and the uncomfortably reminiscent chatter involving a “return to roots” resulted in me going in with expectations set at zero. That means it would be pretty bad news if Death Magnetic failed to “live up to my expectations”, since I had none.

It seems like nothing so much as a mix of characteristics from every album since “…And Justice For All”. Technically, it’s the most complex music since Justice, maybe even more complex. The production sounds like “Load”. Hetfield’s voice (I’m so over it) sounds like it did on “Reload” and sometimes (unfortunately) “St. Anger”. Musically, it’s reminiscent of Justice. Thematically, it’s almost reminiscent of “Ride the Lightning”.

Death Magnetic was hyped as a return to Metallica’s roots, and I suppose in a few small ways it is. More than that, though, it’s just continuing evolution of their style. It’s no rival to “Master of Puppets”. I feel like the era of thrash metal is over, and I don’t know if Metallica realizes that or not, but even if they don’t, it didn’t hurt them with Death Magnetic because it’s not thrash. I’m not sure how to classify it other than that sort of generic heavy metal that seems popular these days (I’m no expert, though; the vast majority of the music I consider worthwhile is older than I am), although it may even be technical enough to be classified as progressive. The point is that they whether they were trying to write some sort of missing link between Puppets and Justice or not, they landed in a position that’s pretty comfortable for this decade – a result of a combination of things: they’ve forgotten what thrash is, and they weren’t trying too hard.

Upon first listen, it’s a relief to see they realized that St. Anger was a bad idea. They abandoned the “raw, garage” sound in favor of actual production. Some of the songs wander around in Mediocreville with vague notions of leaving for a better place, but the majority of them are comfortably settled in the northern suburbs of Not Half Badland.

Another pleasing development is the increased role of the bass guitar, concomitant with Robert Trujillo’s arrival. He seems to have understood what Metallica was trying to do, without trying too hard, and they seem to have recognized his merits in production, letting the bass float relatively high in the mix, countering the mostly flat Justice-esque guitar sound.

More from the department of pre-release hype: Death Magnetic was supposed to herald the re-emergence of Kirk Hammett, once again offering up blazing guitar solos like the Metallica of old. Well, it certainly has guitar solos, but most of them seem to be exercises in random but speedy flailing. There’s none of the slow, melodic soloing à la “Fade to Black” or “The Unforgiven”, or the speedy but perfectly appropriate soloing à la “Sanitarium” or “One”.

Let’s talk about riffs now. I seem to recall reading somewhere about the writing process behind Death Magnetic, and its involvement of “hundreds” of riffs that had to be cut down to just a few. That doesn’t speak well of these riffs’ punchiness. The only way you can get hundreds of riffs is for them to be wildly complicated, and wildly complicated riffs don’t help a song in any way, unless your goal is to be as much of an obstruction as possible to cover bands. This is definitely the Led Zeppelin aftereffects coming through again – just listen to the first few seconds of “Immigrant Song” and tell me complicated riffs are better than simple ones. And it turned out that Death Magnetic is in fact overflowing with the complexity of its riffs. This is a major problem: complex riffs aren’t memorable (at least to my non-musical brain) and since the songs aren’t memorable, they all sound essentially the same. Sure, some of them begin with superfluous instrumental intros (including, in a few baffling cases, a piano) and some of them begin with a neo-thrash auditory assault, but once they get to the point they all start to sound like complexity for its own sake, which combines with the 7+ minute length of most tracks to make almost every song tedious by the end.

There are few standouts; the only one I’ve found so far is “The Unforgiven III”. I wish they’d stop doing this; they’re never going to match the quality of the original “Unforgiven” so why call things sequels to it? It’s a good song in its own right. Honestly, it doesn’t sound like Metallica, but I like it on its own terms.

I’d call Death Magnetic something every sometime fan of Metallica should at least give a try, if only to find out if this combination of past and present they’ve concocted is appealing. I wouldn’t give anyone a guarantee of liking Death Magnetic; I’m relatively unimpressed and I can’t figure out what my tastes would have to be like for me to really enjoy it. Probably the best strategy is to go in with zero expectations, as I did, and above all stay away from the Led Zeppelin for at least 24 hours prior.

They played the song “Subdivisions” in the live show. I just looked up the lyrics and realized what the song is about, and what the title refers to.

I really like this song now. Before I thought it was some random Rush thing with cool keyboard parts in the middle. It also reminds me that Neil Peart has talents other than drumming.

After seeing Rush in concert, I have gained even greated appreciation for them. I did not think that was possible.

ting t-ting ting ting t-ting ting ting ting t-t-ting t-ting ting ting

Last Saturday, I went to a Dream Theater concert. I have some things to say about it.

There’s a Wikipedia article rather humorously entitled Metallica’s ninth studio album. It is full of good things to say, including: presence of guitar solos, “Lars remembered to set his snare drum properly this time”, it sounds different from St. Anger “in a good way”, “getting James and Lars to step back in time”, “James’ voice sounds more like it did in the 80s than it did in the 90s”, and so on.

I seem to recall writing about Metallica in the past, discussing what this next album means for them. The ever-authoritative Wikipedia gives me hope for good things. I shall be on tenterhooks as the album’s release draws nearer.

I know I haven’t been posting much, by the way. I’ve been quite busy. I just posted this because I’m bored and I would also like to remind y’all that even though code has taken over my life, and even after all these years of progressive rock and video game music, I still like Metallica.

Dude I just ordered tickets to see Dream Theater in Berkeley. The concert’s like 4 days before Rush. I think my head might explode. My ears won’t even have a chance to recover.

I have bought my tickets to the Rush show in California this summer, so that can be checked off my list of things to do, which includes a lot of important things like packing up all my stuff so I can GO to California. I’m sorry; I managed to lose my attention span in the middle of that sentence. There are now two bands left that I want to see before they die of old age: Dream Theater and Metallica. Metallica is a definite possibility, since they’re supposed to be coming out with a new album sometime this year. I have no idea about Dream Theater.

In any case, I’ve now listened to some of Rush’s new album, Snakes & Arrows. From what I’ve heard, the opener, “Far Cry”, is definitely the best. It has the signature Rush bizarre time signatures and melodies that are catchy without being annoying. The lyrics are a bit uninspired but still OK. Geddy’s singing is the same as it was on Vapor Trails (that is: good), except they’ve indulged themselves a bit more in vocal arrangements on S&A. The bass sounds a bit like it did on Feedback, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Neil has not slowed with age. In general, Snakes & Arrows sounds like Vapor Trails, but Vapor Trails was all DARK ANGSTY ANGST! and Snakes & Arrows’ lyrics are more similar to those of Roll The Bones. The music itself is sort of a mix of the structure of really old Rush (Fly By Night-era) and the style of 2000s rock. It almost seems like they’ve been inspired, at least a little bit, by the style of Tool and such bands.

One thing I can’t really figure out is how it is that Rush’s style changes so drastically over time, yet they still manage to sound unmistakably “like Rush”. Part of it is Geddy’s voice, I’m sure, but it’s not just that. I suppose it’s a mark of their skill. Or my ignorance with regard to all matters musical. Or both.

Holy shit Rush is going on tour this summer! They will be in San Francisco on August 1. I am going to see them. This is non-negotiable.