An Evening with Iron Maiden

To say this year has been horrible for me attending concerts is an understatement. I've been sick, had no money,show cancellations and rescheduled on my son's birthday to name a few reasons. But luckily Draeden has the uncanny knack of being able to win tickets out from radio stations and came through again. So last night with my wife as my date I was able to go see Iron Maiden with special guest Dream Theater. I've wanted to see DT for quite some time now and it finally arrived. And Iron Maiden always delivers. So being free and all was it worth it? Let's find out after the jump.



Well the evening started by just making sure we got to the Concord Pavilion on time(I refuse to call it my it's corporate name now. Since these tickets were won through a radio promotion I knew we would have to hike to the box office and then possibly stand in line forever so I wanted to get there in time for Dream Theater. I have never been to a DT show and I didn't want to miss this.

Well all things considering we got to our spots a few minutes before the opening track " As I am" finished so it was sort of a victory though the song started 10 minutes early. Overall I'd have to say Dream Theater's performance was a let down. I knew that the set was only going to be 50 minutes or so and that there was only going to be 6 songs. So you would think that Dream Theater would have ramped up their show seeing as Iron Maiden was one of their heroes and a larger audience was going to be present to check them out. Nope. It turned into a glorified medley with only twice did James Labrie acknowledging the crowd. The first time was to say hello three songs in and the second time was to try and get the crowd pumped up for the final number "Pull Me Under". Not even a mention or thank you to Iron Maiden (which my friend Martin pointed out and I realized..hey..you're right).

The other thing I noticed and it may have been because of where we were sitting but Labries vocals were ok through most of their set but fell flat during Pull Me Under, in fact the whole band seemed to slow down on that tune like it was a grind to play.Musically they sounded great and I had no problems with that it's just their performance up there just seemed kind of flat. This fact was further amplified when Maiden took the stage.
Dream Theater's setlist in all of it's brief glory is:

Edit this setlist | More Dream Theater setlists

Here is clip from my wife's much superior Iphone to any thing I had(more on that later) just before it died of Pull Me Under.





This was my third time seeing IM and my wife's first time. And each time they never fail to deliver. The set mostly comprised of newer stuff over the past 10 years which I was ok with because I'd seen the classics performed on the Somewhere Back in Time tour 2 years ago. In fact here is the setlist from the show.

Edit this setlist | More Iron Maiden setlists

As you can see they did mix in 3 pre-Dickinson tracks in there and a few classic Dickinson era tunes so there was a balance of sorts. I heard a lot of complaining about the set list with a lot of unknown tunes but honestly, that's not really the bands fault that people have chosen to not follow them throughout their career or get familiar with newer stuff.They still put on a kick ass show with Bruce running all over and engaging the crowd in banter and getting them pumped as usual. The rest of the band sounded great as usual.

One interesting side note and a touch of irony is that it looked like there were more people there this time then the last tour. And the last tour is where all of the classics were played. In fact Bruce pointed out more then once how many people were there so you know it was something if he noticed it out of all the places they've been too.

Here is my lame phones attempt to record some of the show.I swear this phone is the biggest piece of shit when it comes to picture taking or video making. It's my work phone also but still.



So we stayed until Eddie popped up during the last song and had to bail before the encore but if my wife who has never really listened to Iron Maiden can make comments like" I don't know why I've never listened to these guys before" and "How old is he?" in reference to Dickinson running all over the place then it has to be a good show.

Thanks again to Draeden for coming through with the tickets and thanks to Martin for bailing me out with better pics then what I came up with.