47. Liquid Tension Experiment – I
For every music freak, there’s always some Great Awakening. You can pinpoint it, look back and say, I’m where I am now because of that, because of this one specific doorway that led to a whole other world you only half-knew you wanted to be in. I listen to what I listen to today because of what I was listening to yesterday, which I came to because of what was playing the day before that, etc., etc….
I guess it’s like that with everything in life.
But musically, there’s always a turning point—a “gateway band” that opens your eyes to the fact that radio isn’t the last word in sound discovery at all, but actually the first, and a pretty hollow one. Cue Liquid Tension Experiment.
I don’t think I ever realized just what LTE meant to me until I was sitting with my friend Sadiq out by the pool one night, smoking hookah, drinking beer and looking out at the blackness fallen over the lake in my backyard. It was muggy and our feet were blue and slowly pruning underwater; ripples; the faint scent of chlorine and summer. Across the lake we watched cars go by in blurs of metal and headlights through a break in the trees, the glow from a lighted hotel sign, the moon’s reflection off the water. And we talked about nothing in particular as music played softly in the background.
When Liquid Tension’s “Universal Mind” came up on the stereo’s shuffle, I’d almost forgotten it was on there. This is not a band I listen to often, and even when I first discovered it, it wasn’t exactly go-to. You’ve got to understand, LTE is insane*. It’s fast “progressive” non-accessible instrumental freakout, put together by a group of guys who love to push just how over-the-top their talents can take them.
*The band is a “side project” of Dream Theater, with every member from DT except the bassist (who’s replaced by Tony Levin from King Crimson/Peter Gabriel) and the frontman.
When I first got into progressive rock, I wanted freakout because of how polar opposite it was from what I was used to. These prog musicians, they knew and mastered their craft. They weren’t just playing basic chords like mainstream artists do—these guys were showmen. I craved the culture-shock. Over time tastes would change and meet somewhere closer to the middle, but in the beginning bands like Dream Theater were king, early Rush, Yes. So it was only natural that LTE would also be in that group.
Liquid Tension’s life in my everyday spin cycle was pretty short-lived but ridiculously dense, giving it an extremely specific time period to represent in my musical yearbook: the summer of 2006. That summer, I listened to Liquid Tension like crazy—in the car, at work, on my laptop. None of my friends had “real” jobs yet or “real” problems. We played Wiffle ball almost every night and chased it with matches of Age of Empires on our computers. Almost every night. We had girlfriends and were young enough to think they’d be around forever. We looked forward to “Festa Italian,” a yearly celebration across the lake at the Italian-American Club that we’d walk to from my house to buy sausage and peppers and pizza and zeppolis, to laugh at the broken down carnival rides and listen to the Frank Saffi Band play all the New York/Italian songs you’d expect them to play.
Only 4 years ago, those days are so close I can almost touch them if I stretch. But listening to the showy virtuoso freakout that is Liquid Tension Experiment, it’s funny, I’m both brought into that time and pushed out of it, taken back to realize just how long 4 years can be when you’re 19, or 21, and having birthdays, and going to college, and growing up, and for the first time in your life earning the right to look back, to sit quietly out by the pool just to think.
The summer months of 2006 stand as the very last days of a childhood I thought would last as long I cared to keep it—back when I thought you could control those things. After it, all of a sudden life happened and we all were different, still us but not “kids” anymore and not “adults.” We were “us,” a concept that was simple and complicated at the same time, one that for the first time I think we realized would always be in flux.
For me, Liquid Tension Experiment is the gateway band; it’s the break in the trees that holds festivals and Ferris wheels and innocence on one side, and everything else on the other. It’s the decision to move forward, away from what you know and into something else. And so it has a bittersweet reverb about it.
Out by the pool, I didn’t even have to close my eyes. “Universal Mind” sped out of the stereo and, presented in the hookah smoke, I saw that summer, all of it, finished with soft edges and starlight casted through the patio screen. And it’s funny–think about any summer from your own childhood; aren’t they kind of all like that?
Listen/Watch:
CHECK OUT THE REST OF THIS WEEK’S REVIEWS HERE
This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 12:07 pm and is filed under cd reviews, prog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
