After the 1988 release of Operation: Mindcrime, Queensryche weren’t in a position to put on a lavish stage show or three-hour headlining concert yet; in fact, they spent their time opening for Metallica on the epic …And Justice For All tour. (Unfortunately, they were only on the first leg of this tour; by the time I got to see Metallica supporting this album in the summer of 1989, we had to endure The Cult as an opener.) But after the huge success of 1990’s Empire, the band had enough clout to book an extensive headlining tour, which included all of the video screens needed to produce a show that could feature the rock-opera album in its entirety.

In October 1991, EMI released this limited-edition box set containing a CD (or cassette - remember those?) and VHS video of the entire Mindcrime album, performed live, along with a booklet and a box, of the “long” sort (for those of you old enough to remember CDs sold in long boxes.) This limited edition release could both be seen as a nice tribute to the fans, or a “why did they do that?” misstep, depending on how you look at it.

As far as the CD goes, it’s the entire Mindcrime album, exactly. Exactly. No extras, no bonus, no covers, just the album, and that’s it. The performance is pretty good, and it’s upbeat and doesn’t drag, plus Geoff Tate’s vocals are pretty good and aren’t scratched or busted, as they were on the latter half of this monstrously long tour. There are some issues with levels in places; sometimes, a sample from the album is too quiet or muddled, or a guitar isn’t as up-front as it may be on the album. I’m sure part of that problem is that I listened to Mindcrime about 20,000 times before I heard this album, so I tend to notice all of the little bits here and there.

The video is also exactly what’s on the album. They did a good job of having lots of cameras and many angles and stuff moving, which is decent. They also captured a lot of the video projection screens, and showed clips of the story as it’s going on. It’s not as good as watching all of the actual videos back-to-back, which are compiled together in another release, but it’s much more than just watching the band play live.

The problem? The band just came off their biggest tour ever, with all of these new songs on Empire, and all of the classic stuff from the older albums, and this box set captures only those exact songs on Mindcrime. No “Silent Lucidity,” no “Queen of the Reich,” no other tracks are added to the CD, either from the same massive 3-hour set from which this live album was removed, or from their b-sides or other catalogue. (If you were lucky enough to find the Japanese release, it came with “The Lady Wore Black” and “Roads to Madness” as bonus tracks.) If I was a new fan of the band, this would be a pretty bad purchase to make, unless I bought it specifically to find out more about the prior album. It also means there’s no real reason to listen to this CD when one can just listen to the far superior studio version. In fact, I don’t think, prior to this review, I’ve even cracked the case on my copy for a good six or seven years.

There’s also a big disconnect here as far as formats. The old version was a VHS and a CD (or tape). I never, ever watch old VHS anymore, so this thing sits in the case gathering dust. But if I wanted to listen to the CD or rip it to my iPod, it’s there. This was the only version available, and despite the fact that this was a “limited edition,” you could occasionally find a new copy in the back of a music store, five years later. (I think I got mine at a Wherehouse in 1997.) But they were hard to find, and in that pre-eBay world, it meant you either had to buy a boot, pay someone a hundred bucks for a used copy, or try every record store in a thousand-mile radius.

In 2001, when their record label was performing necrophilia on their back-catalogue, Capitol re-released this box set as a regular DVD. This means you don’t have a CD, which might not work in your car or when ripping the audio to your MP3 player. (Actually, they released the CD as a standalone also - but if you buy that, you don’t get the video.) But you have everything on a DVD, and they also added some bonus features, like an interview, some graphics and fan photos, and a few crumbs of nebulous information that might help you figure out the story, if you’re still struggling with who really killed Mary. I don’t know what the packaging or liner notes are like on this version, but if they are anything like the other reissues and box sets Capitol put out for the band’s other material, I’m guessing “shitty.”

But, I have the BOX SET which makes me more elite than you wankers who first got into the band in like 1999. Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. It’s a good collection, and a good intention, but I wish they would have released a 3-CD live album of the 1991 tour instead.

Rating: 7

Everyone remembers Joe Satriani’s third studio album as “the one where he started singing”, and it’s true. The guitar genius, for whatever reason, decided to add his vocals to some of the tracks of his otherwise instrumental discography, and it stuck out like a sore thumb at the time.  It’s also true that he released many more later albums without singing, and the people who stopped listening to his musical output in 1989  solely because “he sings now” are largely stupid, much like the people who claim Seattle grunge bands singlehandedly killed glam metal bands, even though most glam metal bands were a fad, and conversely, MTV was still kissing Guns N’ Roses’ collective asses and the Metallica black album was selling about 50,000 copies a day well after Kurt Cobain’s headless body had gone room temp. Satriani tried something, it didn’t work, he went on with other things. Right?

Anyway, this 18-track album covers a pretty wide area of sonic terrain. It’s a lot less straightforward than his previous two albums, but the guitar sound matured and progressed much more. I’m not saying he didn’t have a handle on his general tone before this, but his Ibanez-based notemaking is much more refined and deep on this album. Mix that with a bunch of new writing, and you have about an hour of pretty diverse listening ahead of you.

First, we start out with the title track. It starts off with a weird radio voice and the strumming of an acoustic guitar. The voice actually came from a time Joe fired up his practice amp in the studio and some weird radio interference crossed over with a radio or a cordless phone or something, and he immediately grabbed a mic and recorded it for the song. The guitar goes into a gentle, controlled feedback line with some very laid-back drum and bass behind it, to produce an extremely smooth melody. It builds up, as Satriani lays into it a bit more and does some shredding, mixed with more sustained notes and feedback. He’s often used this song as an opener live, and it still sounds as incredible as it did back when I first got this disc.

There are almost “groupings” of songs interleaved through this album. They would be loosely categorized as “songs like Surfing With the Alien”, “ballady laid-back stuff”, “bluesy stuff”, and “total experiments”. And that is roughly the order, from best to worst, I’d use to categorize them. So maybe I should just talk about each of them and why they did or didn’t work.

“Stuff like Surfing…” would include “The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing”, which is a slightly quirky but incredibly fun instrumental piece. “One Big Rush” is better known from the movie Say Anything, which basically means three billion people have heard Joe Satriani, but have no idea who he is. The more ballady stuff includes “I Believe”, in which he sings, and it’s incredibly sappy, but it probably found its’ way onto many mix tapes for girlfriends back when people made mix tapes (as opposed to just stealing music and burning CDs). As far as bluesy stuff, there’s “Big Bad Moon”, another singing track, but it’s not bad.

And the experiments. Some work, like a distorted harmonica bit in “Headless”, or the funky “Strange”. There’s a banjo piece in “The Feeling” that’s actually pretty interesting. (Of course, I also like Adrian Legg.) “The Phone Call” is probably one of the worst tracks he’s done. It’s a sort of four-bar blues thing, with all of the lyrics sung over a phone. George Thorogood is going to be forced to write songs like this in hell. “Ride” takes a close second in the worst song department. It’s a repeating ZZ Top-ripoff song with a really inept chorus that makes me wonder if this album should have been trimmed down to a solid 45 minutes, with an armload of really bad b-sides waiting in the wings.

I feel like I’ve only mentioned about half of the songs on this album. I really do like “Day at the Beach,” which is an entirely guitar thing, just him playing an intricate tune with two hands, and then halfway through, he goes back and repeats the whole melody at double speed. There are two two-part songs, “The Forgotten,” and “The Bells of Lal,” which both start with solos and then have a song as the second part, and they work well.

Like I said, overall this is a really uneven album. It’s the kind of thing I can’t listen to from start to finish without skipping tracks, but then I also find a great need to repeat some tracks over and over. This album seems to be a weird transition for Joe, because before this, he was really reigned in to record a typical “rock album” that was 40 minutes long, with 4 songs per side, and 2 tracks that are breakout singles. It seems like this time he was given total control, and he went over the line a little too much. He’s released many other great albums (some with no singing, too, if you’re still stuck on that), so we have this learning experience to show for it. But, it’s a great album, and I still find myself going back to it a lot. And the opening title track alone is worth the price of admission, so I’ll always love this.

Rating: 8

While their self-titled EP sounded like some kind of generic heavy metal, this Seattle once-covers band started down the path of prog-metal with their first full-length release. This nine-song album features some great long-form metal pieces, excellent sound, and the beginning of the formula the band grew with over their career.

The band headed to London to record their album, and hired James Guthrie as producer. He’s best known for his engineering and producing work on pretty much every Pink Floyd album that matters, plus producer credits on Judas Priest’s Hell Bent For Leather. Mix those two bands together, and you’ve pretty much got Queensryche; it explains how he captured the mystical, ethereal quality of the band, without losing the metal edge. Also add in arranger and conductor Michael Kamen, who wasn’t a super-soundtrack-ultrastar like we know him today, but he did work with everyone from ‘Floyd to Johnny Cougar to Jim Croche to the Eurythmics to David Bowie, and it seems odd that he picked this little-known metal band to work with. But you can find his symphonic touch on the album, which is a cool feature with the songs here.

The album starts with “Warning,” which seems to trod a bit, without really bringing things up to pace. It’s a much thicker texture than the EP, and ties in with the album artwork, a mystical hand selecting a tarot card with a titular reference. (The press kit uses the tarot as a theme, showing a very cool one for each song on the album.) But the slow pale of the album is immediately brought to speed with “En Force,” a more conceptual piece about surviving an apocalypse and fighting for the survival of a future. It begins with these Kaman-esuque chimes that follow the song, like gothic church bells, then hands it over to the guitars. The song doesn’t have much as far as actual meaning or context, but it does have a lot of guitar hooks that take it at a gallop and show that Queensryche can mix a longer song like this and still make it rock. “Deliverance” follows this theme with a slightly more straightforward guitar-oriented song. It’s worth mentioning that Tate’s operatic lyrics are used to full effect, and he’s hitting high notes and using excellent vibrato and sustain all over the place.

“No Sanctuary” slows the tempo down considerably. It’s almost a ballad, but not the hair band sort of arena rock ballad, but more of a clean, acoustic guitar sound, finishing with a bit of an up tempo melody. It’s a great demonstration of Tate’s lyrics, and it shows that the band doesn’t just need to play faster-faster-faster. It’s very well done, although at just over six minutes long, it does drag a bit.

One of my favorite songs on the album is next, “NM 156”. It’s sort of an Orwellian, anti-technology piece like something Rush would do, but with much more of an epic metal edge. It starts with some computer-type sound effects and some synth sound and vocoder work, and breaks into a faster number, with some great guitar solo work. The only real complaints I have with this song is that 1) it’s only 4

long, and by the time you tack on the digital intro/outros, it’s too short for me, and 2) there’s not another song on the album that has this kind of raw energy and futuristic vibe, although some songs have brief bits in them that are this cool. “NM 156” is one of my favorite old Queensryche songs, and I must not be the only one, because the band still brings this one out for their live shows. In fact, the Live Evolution double CD from 2001 opens with it. And  this album was supposed to open with it too, but EMI changed the track order against the wishes of the band, putting the title track first. Oh, and a trivia hint for fans born after 1985 or so: the sound effect at the end of the song is called a “dot-matrix printer.” Old people used to use them before laserprinters were invented.

The next track (first song on side B for those who remember tapes and LPs) is also the only single from the album, “Take Hold of the Flame”, a sort of power-ballady song that both features Tate’s swooning vocals, plus had enough of a rock edge behind it to sound cool. There are two more songs after this, “Before the Storm”, and “Child of Fire,” that are mid-paced and longish songs similar to “En Force” or “Deliverance.” Both are good, but nothing special. The only unique thing here is that the first song pretty much stops about 45 seconds from the end, and then leads up in this dredge bit that goes right into the next song. The album ends with the almost-ten-minute “Roads to Madness”, which trudges on at a very slow speed, and builds a bit, but at about five minutes in, it all but ends. But some haunting string synth pulls the music on a bit as the drums start up and keep the theme going. With about two minutes left, the whole band suddenly picks up again, Geoff Tate screams out an impossible note, and then the whole thing picks up in this total balls-out refrain that rips through the album at the very end. It’s an unexpected ending, and very rewarding if you stuck with everything up until then.

A lot of this album is like that. This is probably the first album I ever got into in which the phrase “rewards repeated listens” was completely true. Individually, not many of these songs (with the exception of “NM 156”) are that interesting on their own. But if you invest the 50 minutes to really go through this album, and spend the dozens of listens to let it really grow on you, it brings out a sum greater than the parts. And this seriously showed me that a band besides Rush or Yes could take on this progressive rock label and do it in such a way that was so non-Rush or non-Yes-like. This album isn’t for everyone, and by their next release, they were doing similar stuff but in a more accessible way, but it’s an excellent first shot for the band.

Rating: 8

I have moved. Well, mostly. As of Saturday, the place in Playa Del Rey is stripped bare, the shelves wiped clean, and the keys turned in. With the help of Sarah’s dad, we drove the two-car convoy up to San Francisco with no major incidents, feline or otherwise. The new place, which bears a strong resemblance to the old place, now has a new Ikea mattress, a new Ikea computer cabinet, and a bunch of clothes, minor kitchenware, and other crap that came up in a total of four carloads, plus the usual Target and Costco ventures. Tomorrow or the day after, we are supposed to get the big truckload of everything else, which will be great fun.

I got a new job. As per the normal drill, I won’t mention it here, but if you are curious, you can email me. It’s going to be an interesting venture, which means I might not post again for another six months. And it’s 45 minutes away, so even if it was banker’s hours, that’s a huge hit. But I am excited about it, so we’ll see.

Right before we left LA, I reached lifetime status at Weight Watchers. That means I stayed under my goal for long enough, and now I don’t have to pay. (I posted about this in LiveJournal.) I have not eaten as well since, because I have either been on the road or have not had a kitchen available to me. But I think I am still maintaining, and now need to get in the groove of eating correctly in the new office situation. I still don’t feel thin. And I am afraid to go buy new clothes, even though my current ones are hanging off of me.

There are two new phones in the family. Sarah got an iPhone, and I got a Samsung Blackjack 2, which is a Windows Mobile phone. They both have interesting features to me, but the 3G speed is a huge wonder to me. It’s strange to hold a tiny device that’s smaller than a box of cough drops that can download files twice as fast as my first DSL connection. I’m still working on using a Windows Mobile computer while syncing to a Mac, but I have that almost figured out with Missing Sync. I’m almost at the “so what do I do with it?” phase, and I will need to adjust my data hoarding accordingly. The iPhone is neat, and I like the Mac-centric interface, but I can’t type at all on the virtual keyboard. If it had a slide-out, it might be more viable for me. Oh well.

Time to go install more crap I don’t need on the phone. I have almost two weeks off until work starts, and it starts with me flying to Dallas for training. Maybe I should buy a memory card and fill it with ripped and shrunk DVDs for the trip.

Well, I am moving again. This time I will be going up to San Francisco, and in short order - with luck, we will be out of our LA place by the end of this month. Because we are transferring apartments within our current company’s system, it is going faster than usual, and there were no deposits or background checks or whatever else. I looked at places last week, found one, signed a piece of paper, and we are now underway.

My mission as of late is to further compress my life into fewer boxes and shelves. My office has six bookshelves, and my goal has been to eliminate the tallest one, which I got made for me when I lived in Astoria. It is falling apart, looks like hell, and is always in danger of falling over. I also would like to free up that space and reduce my bookcase footprint. A huge pile of books have gone to Amazon for resale, and a bunch more have been recycled or wait to be donated. I also moved a bunch of DVD box sets off of one shelf and into plastic tubs for storage in a closet. I don’t need immediate access to every single DVD I own, and although at one time I felt some need to have every spine displayed of every DVD in my collection, I’d now rather have every single thing hidden in a storage unit of some sort. With that shift, there are now no longer any books on that shelf, and it will go to the chipper soon.

I also have a bunch of “misc” boxes that have followed me across the country ten times over, at least since college. When I got to LA, I had this down to two printer paper boxes and six smaller plastic tubs. I managed to eliminate one of the paper boxes yesterday, which was a major triumph. One of the problems, aside from that I’m wasting entire days trying to eliminate half a cubic foot of storage, is the nostalgia aspect of the whole thing, and how hard it is for me to let go of some things that meant so much to me at one time.

Some of this isn’t hard. I have ten copies of every death metal zine that passed through my hands in 1993, and I really don’t give a shit about any of them anymore, so they all went to the recycler, unless I wrote something in them. I have a lot of zines and papers in which I had a review or short piece in a column, and it was easier for me to tear out that page and chuck the rest than it was to keep hauling around the whole thing. But there were other things. I found this shirt in a box, a polo shirt that I wore a lot in 1992, and I mentioned in Summer Rain frequently. I don’t know why I kept it, except that in 1999 when I was writing the book, it was easy to pull out this shirt and think of 1992. Now, I can pitch it. It’s hard to do, but sometimes keeping just the memory is better than keeping the associated hardware.

I also went through all of my photos yesterday, meaning that every single analog photo I’ve taken from 1982 to 2000 passed through my hands. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pitch, like pictures of blackness or a flash against a glass window. I eliminated doubles when I could. I threw out photos of people I never met in person. All of the blurry artistic stuff went in the garbage. All of these decisions were helped by the fact that I scanned in all of my negatives a year ago, and all of this old stuff was in iPhoto. I managed to remove about 25% of the space in my photo storage area, which is huge.

It was also weird. I am an overly nostalgic person sometimes, so to look at all of these photos from 1983 and 1988 and 1993 and 1996 made me feel weird. I had some severly negative feelings about my prom in 1989, but I found dozens of photos from it. In all of them, I looked the same, this deer-in-headlights look, like someone at a blackjack table who just bet too much and watched the dealer with a ten showing turn over an ace. I found pictures I took in 1983 with my Kodak 110 camera of the state Future Problem Solver’s competition, on the big giant metro campus of IU-Purdue at Fort Wayne. Twenty years later, I’d be standing on a beach in Hawaii, trying to shake a long plane ride out of my head, but at that moment, 90 minutes in a stationwagon was like a trip to the moon. And there’s a stack of pictures (and doubles) from a trip to Canada in 1988, my first, in which it looks like I spent the whole trip saying “wow, they have 7-Eleven in Canada! Let me take 100 pictures of it! I wonder if Geddy Lee ever shops here?”

Another task as of late is rating or re-rating thousands of songs in iTunes. I figure I have at least a couple of six-hour drives ahead of me, so it would be good to get some playlists and podcasts and new ratings in my iPod for that. So if you see anything weird in my playlist to the right, that’s why.

Back to work…