Thanks for the review, Bob. Always a pleasure to read! I like all of the personal stuff in addition to the music reviews. The 3 CDs you bought represent my 3 favorite bands from the weekend - iNFiNiEN, Hedersleben, and Shylock.
Thanks for the review, Bob. Always a pleasure to read! I like all of the personal stuff in addition to the music reviews. The 3 CDs you bought represent my 3 favorite bands from the weekend - iNFiNiEN, Hedersleben, and Shylock.
I personally thought this year was among the best. Came for Sonar (who were unbelievable), but enjoyed almost all of the bands. I'd heard iNFiNiEN prior, and had even recommended they contact Progday back in January or so, but I didn't give their disc a lot of airtime, owing to my preoccupation with finishing my own work at the start of the year. Anyhow, like many others, they genuinely surprised me with their mutating time signatures and stellar vocals and guitar work. I swore I was hearing FZ during one of Matt's solos!
Wasn't sure how Sonar's intricate tapestry would fair with a soloist, but Torn is a master. He got even better after his music had blown away! Can't wait to pick up their new disc. Stellar guys too.
Ephemeral Sun were fun and heavy, good Prog church band and it was good to see our own Battema up there. He was truly having a blast. I dug Sonus Umbra's dopplety dopplety dopplety rhythms and, as a college flutist, found a lot to enjoy with this band. Also really got a kick out of Bubblemath's energy but they got the worst of the sun. Poor guys!
Great review as always Bob!Originally Posted by Ground and Sky's Ghost
That #3 slot can be a killer. It is always the hottest part of the day (Kerzner faced the same thing on Sunday), and because of that, people tend to hang out under their canopies or back by the pavilion. There have been some great #3 performances over the years, but it is not always the best slot to play when that sun is beating down.
Someone should do a partial Zep cover at Progday in that slot. "Oh let the sun beat down upon my face..."
neil
Someone did. Well, sort of. Woodenhead played "Kashmir" in 2006 and then their guitarist Jimmy Robinson played it again when he did a solo sets in 2009 and 2011. All three were instrumental versions though, so no "let the sun beat down".
Other Led Zep covers at ProgDay - Azigza played "Friends" in 2001, Mike Keneally played "Immigrant Song" in 2005 and that 2011 Jimmy Robinson set also included "When the Levee Breaks".
And no, I didn't know all the details from memory. I just have a crap ton of ProgDay audience recordings on my iPod.
I agree with you, Roy. I just went back and read some of the parts I'd skipped before when I was so anxious to get to the downloads. Fun stuff to read - in reading festival reviews in Expose and such I always like reading about how people got there, who they were with, where they slept and ate, etc. Somehow that evokes the feeling of attending the festival even more than reading about the bands! I liked the part about Monday morning, and would even read about that hotel in Ocean City if Bob actually writes it up for another blog!
Thanks again, Bob!
I doubt I'll write up the beach trip but a quick summary - when we got there, the hotel we were staying in was so short staffed (the manager told us that most of his employees are foreign exchange students and they all went home over Labor Day weekend) that there were no rooms ready. So the manager took us out to the pool bar and said everything was on the house until our room was ready. But I was coming off 4 hours of sleep and was still powerfully hung over from the Sunday night pool party, so I passed. My wife got some sort of mixed drink called the "dirty banana" which the bartenderess made completely wrong (the only ingredient she got right was the banana). There was only one other customer in the bar, a woman who was completely sloshed at 5pm and kept trying to engage us in incoherent conversation. Then the bartender asked what music we like, because the bar had a sound system that was hooked into some sort of internet service that could play basically anything. I told her we had just come from a progressive rock festival and gave her the band Yes as an example of prog. Next thing we knew, these WAY TOO BIG speakers blared to life and played Owner of a Lonely Heart at deafening volume. Fortunately the manager came back just after that to say our room was ready.
The room was decent but kind of run down (for instance the floor tiles in the kitchenette area were cracked and broken), and it was clear that they were renovating because the trim over the door to the balcony had "RE-NAIL WITH 2" NAILS" hand-written on it in black marker. But the crowning touch of the room was a shower that was apparently designed by a sadist. It only had one knob. When turned to the left, it turned on the hot water. The further you turned it, the more powerful and hotter it got. To the right it did the same with the cold water. So our choices were either an uncomfortably hot light trickle of water, a powerful stream hot enough to boil a lobster under, a light trickle of chilly water or a stream of water cold enough for cryogenics.
I was desperately trying to play down my hangover, but I think my wife was on to me. That first evening she suggested a walk down the beach...which ended up being a couple mile slog to the other end of the boardwalk. So the next day my hangover was replaced by calf cramps so bad I could barely walk.
But the highlight of the weekend was when I walked all the way down the boardwalk to go to a nice little oceanfront brewpub that I knew of...only to find out that they were closed. No idea why, since the sign on the door said they were supposed to be open until 9pm that night and it was only around 7 or so, but the front door was locked. If I'd known that was going to be the case, I would have spent more money on CDs at ProgDay instead of saving it for the beach. Oh well.
--
The internet was better before Berners-Lee let the riff-raff in.
^ Thanks! Not as much fun to read as the ProgDay stuff because you were disappointed (and hung over). Oh well, that was your wife's vacation anyway!
For some reason the Ephemeral Sun set isn't finding any peers when I try to download from Dime. Looks like there should be enough seeders, but it won't budge at all. Anyone else have this problem. Maybe it's because of John's enormous head?
Actually, the same seems to be happening with Sonus Umbra. All the others went fast.
They finally went through - not sure what the problem was.
Jed, it might be your "connectability." I sometimes have this problem because I do not port forward any longer. Since I stopped port forwarding to Dime, I show up on their peer list as not connectable. However, that does not prevent me from actually connecting. Most of the time I connect immediately. However, once in a while it takes a little time for the connection to happen. I'm not a network guy, so I can't tell you exactly why that happens. If you don't port forward, then you might be having that problem.
Progday Trivia: The only band who was never introduced. I was walking to the mic and they exploded....I just turned on my heel and backed away.
What a set that was.
I think that everyone figured it out without the intro. ;-) Fun fact though!
For sure! In the case of a band of their stature, an intro would have been nice to let those who did not know, that incredibly, after 30 years or however long, that it was the first time they had EVER played in the US....but I think that was a bigger deal to those of us who never even entertained a dream of seeing them live, and 'marking the moment in history', and all those conditioned rituals...to "do" from the stage end, and "expect" on the audience end...that's how it's sposed to work!
They didn't give a shit about the pomp....they were there to scorch earth!
And take a whiz on it, right after stepping out of the van.
And play with a small dog onstage.
And have a conversation between the drummer and keyboardist on a tin-cans-and-string telephone.
....all referring to Lars Hollmer...one of my favorite musicians on the planet. And for the record he walked up the dirt road and pissed on the wall of one of the Storybook Farm worksheds, a good 100 yards away from the fest proper.....he most certainly didn't hop out of a van and piss anywhere near the stage area.
Dogs wandering onstage at Progday was a normal occurrence for many years (A Piedi Nudi is the first one I remember)....former regular attendee Drew Smith's dogs were regular stage visitors (his cocker spaniel Fran was the first official "Progdog", and if I am not mistaken his passing was noted in one of the programs).
His successor Frank (Drew was not known for his dog-name imagination), was a cool little weiner dog, known for two events....I was holding him like a baby at stage left during The Muffins set in 2001, and at the end of one song he started screaming...not whining or howling, but screaming. NO idea why. Dave Newhouse gave me a "what the hell are you doing to that dog" look. Nothing....I swear.
#2: Frank purposefully walked up and pissed on the front of the stage, in front of everyone. It's just as well I don't remember what band it was.
About 38% of my brain is devoted to storage of useless Progday trivia; feel free to access it at any time.
I never get to these festivals so it was nice to see this popping up in my Facebook feed
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
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