We (6 people) arrived at the Warfield around 7 p.m. We had pretty good seats in the balcony section. Our seats were on the right side but pretty up toward the front. We could see everything very clearly.

Dream Theater started about 15 minutes before the actual starting time on the ticket. I heard that they really wanted to play a longer set. This is the only way they could play more songs.

Setlist for DT:

• New Millennium (John Myung came out with his 10-string Chapman stick ... so cool!!
• 6:00 (from Awake). Mike Portnoy "ruled" during this song. His drum set was really huge. Myung played his 6-string bass for this song.
• Pull Me Under (from Images And Words)
• Peruvian Skies (from FII) with medley of Hey You (Pink Floyd) and Enter Sandman (Metallica). I think Myung played a 7-string bass for this song.
• Anna Lee (too sweet for me!) They should have played another song instead of Anna Lee. Oh well...
• Metropolis Part I (from Images and Words). We couldn't miss hearing this song! They always play this song live.

It was funny to see the crowd in the front of the main floor switch back-and-forth when each band played, depending on whose favorite band was playing. There were a bunch of headbangers there. A lot of Dream Theater fans left after DT finished playing. I still don't understand why. Why wouldn't they want to listen or see ELP or DP?

DT was in good shape. The only problem for me was that I thought their songs were lagging or something. They seemed to play slower than on the albums. But I MUST say that this's the shortest DT show I have ever been too. They should have played about 1:30 hours though. There was no encore for DT at all. :(

We waited for quite a long time for the crew to set the stage for ELP. They had to redo the stage for Emerson's grand piano.

ELP came out with....

• Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends....(What can I say...I love this song very much!)
• Tarkus (Can you believe this? The entire Tarkus. Greg's guitar solo on the second part of Tarkus is so sweet to me.)
• C'est La Vie
• Lucky Man (Greg got the crowd to sing along with him. They always played this song in almost every show I guess.)
• Knife Edge

• First intro of Hoedown and 21st Century Schizoid Man (what else do you want?) But they played just the first part of 21st CSM and then Carl Palmer did a drum solo. I like the way he held the drumsticks.

Greg Lake's voice still kicked butt for me. His voice is still deep. Oh...I think we were used to seeing our show man, Keith Emerson soloing on his keyboard backwards and some insert fireworks on his small keyboards. He jumped up on the grand piano and played a song from Paganini (I guess). That's really cool!

For me, I think that at this show, ELP played WAY better than at their own show last time in September 1997 at the Concord Pavilion.

Then, it's time for Deep Purple.

They had 2 sets of Resley speakers on stages. This was my first time seeing Steve Morse live since I missed the Steve Morse Band show many months ago in San Francisco. He's really good! I used to see Deep Purple with Joe Lyn Turner many years ago and saw the Ian Gillan band. I'm glad I was able to see DP with Ian Gillan...but it was without Blackmore on guitars. It's okay, Morse's good enough for me.

DP's setlist from what I recognized but mostly I forgot:

• Perfect Stranger (Ian tried to scream and hit the high notes. He did a pretty good job even though he lost his voice during this song. It was acceptable for me, though.)
• Some songs from Abandon (new album)
• Smoke on the Water
• Space Truckin'
• and some other new songs that I'm not up-to-date on anymore.

What I can tell you is DP can still rock!

There was a little fight in the audience on the balcony. So silly! But I had a great time there. I still can't believe that these three bands played together on this tour!

There were some merchandises for all 3 bands at the show (t-shirts, tour books, pins, etc) but mostly olf stuff.

AE

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