Dweezil Zappa in Concert

A few months back my brother Big Mike informed me that Dweezil Zappa (the late Frank Zappa's son) was on tour and playing Frank's music.  The tour was landing in Columbus in March, and I was going.

I know - pictures or it didn't happen.  Keep reading, oh ye of little faith.

My Ticket from TicketBastards

I know, everyone has a right to make a living, and you can just go somewhere else, and on and on.  I don't care.  These people are class A dicks.

And now for the concert pictures, some of which are a good deal better than others.

Click on any photo for a better view!

The Crowd at the Lincoln Theater

Note the Average Age

I took these two to show the average age of the crowd, which I found both reassuring on one hand and disquieting on the other.  The good news is that everyone is too old to take a bunch of recreational drugs and experiment with new combinations of same while watching a concert, which practically guarantees the rest of us won't have any weird behavior.  Also, if someone is feeling sick, they'll stay home rather than inflict themselves on everyone else.  The bad news is that virtually everyone is my age or older, and is going to see a band who is faithfully reproducing music from the late 1960s which defined the terms avant-garde and psychedelic.  How old am I, anyway?

The Band as Seen From Our Seats

We had great seats, in my mind anyway.  I didn't care to get too close to the band, as I'm already partially deaf from years of shooting without ear or eye protection.  The theater has been given a great renovation, and the lighting around the stage highlights the Egyptian look.

The Band with Different Lighting

The Vocalist

The Vocalist, Dweezil (right of center), and Hidden Musician

Just behind the curly haired vocalist, whose name I can't remember and don't feel like looking up just now, is another musician.  He played keyboards and guitar, but otherwise remained in hiding.

Vocals and Keyboard

The vocalist played keyboards, guitar, and percussion.  You can just make out a stray tom-tom and several nondescript percussion instruments behind him.

Lady on the Right

She's very versatile, playing flute, keyboard, percussion, clarinet, and saxophone.  I think that's a bass saxophone she's got next to her; she played it several times during the concert and had a nice tone with it.

And now... Dweezil!

Dweezil Zappa

Dweezil Playing a Solo

Dweezil Trading Guitar Licks

If you look at all three of these, you'll note that Dweezil has really changed much, if at all.  This is what you'll see when Dweezil is in concert.  He just stands there and plays without any animation at all.  It isn't that he's bored, it's just the way things are.

The concert was a truly excellent show - if you like Zappa.  If you don't like Zappa, you shouldn't be here.  You won't enjoy yourself, and you're sucking up space and oxygen that someone else would dearly love to have.  While the venue isn't a stadium, it was sold out.  Since neither Mike nor I had ever been to the Lincoln Theater, we didn't know what to expect.  The acoustics are not the greatest; the mid-range is fuzzy and the upper range gets somewhat distorted.  The bass comes through nicely, but you don't notice this until you hear the bass sax played.  I blame part of this on the theater construction, and a large part on the mental midgets playing with the sound board.  The sound board people will never be the sharpest knives in the rack, and these idiots were no exception.

The theater has balcony seating, which is really worth getting in the case of a concert.  About halfway through the concert I put my ear plugs in, which helped considerably.  The sound level started out just fine, but it kept increasing as the show neared completion, and ended at a skull splitting level that did nothing to enhance the music.

I was tired by the end of it, and passed up the offer of a nightcap at Big Mike's place.  This is rare for me, but the traffic on the beltway has more than its share of crazy people, drunks, and unbelievably bad drivers.  The cops are getting serious about this drunk driving business, and they'll pull you over on speculation - doing 67 in a 65, or weaving back and forth, line to line - then demand you take a breathalyzer when you fail to recite the English alphabet in reverse order, omitting every third letter - a task none of them is capable of.  Then there's always the chance of getting hit, and just try explaining to any cop that you're tired, not drunk.

So I took a pass on the drink, got home safely and fell into bed. 

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.