Back from the Tool shows in Vegas. I think I have now seen 10 Tool concerts. I rank the first show as the worst Tool show I've seen, but that still makes it better than about 95% of all other concerts I've ever been to. The second night I would rank about number 4 all time.
There were a couple of sound problems the first night and Maynard was kind of stiff. The second night, all the sound problems were fixed and Maynard was really into it.
The second night we were also on the floor center. I'd say we were about 25 feet from the band. I was really able to appreciate the musicians from that close.
I was a disappointed that the band played almost the same playlist on both nights. And then I always appreciated how Tool never plays an encore. I think the encore is such a cliche and is frankly an egotistical thing for a band to do. You walk off stage and listen to the crowd chant for you to come back and play again? Then when the chanting starts to die off, you come back for a couple more songs. That's pretty weak. Tool has never done this, but now they do something almost worse. Halfway through their show, they stop playing and just sit down on the stage together and watch the fans cheer for them. This is new to the last 3 shows I've seen. I think they understandably need a break from rocking, but it seems strange the way their doing it. In the past, they used to let one guy just go on some really long solo while the other guys would walk off stage. That was much better.
So anyway, the playlist. It was a good choice of songs with the most powerful being "Wings for Marie" and "10,000 days" from 10,000 days. I never made it to Tool's newest album in my studying of the lyrics over the last month. But if I had, I probably would only have talked about these two songs. They are basically one song that was separated into two sort of like Parabol and Parabola on the Lateralus album. The whole song is about Maynard's mother, Judith, who died a couple of months before the album came out. Judith was a devout catholic who despite having a stroke that left half her body paralyzed some 10,000 days previous to her death, never lost faith and apparently lived a righteous life. This song is really powerful with Maynard telling her to demand her wings from God when she gets to heaven. There is some thunder sound effects during the song that fit really well.
Overall some good shows and I feel like I got my money's worth. Now I just hope they come back through Boise before we go to Holland.
