REALLY cool DT experience today in the Target parking lot. I'm sitting in my van checking my e-mail, about to pull out. I'm blasting the instrumental section of BAI so loud the windshield is shaking. An elderly black woman knocks on the passenger side window. Now, when I say elderly, I mean probably in her mid to late 70's (I park in handicap because I have a heart disease). I'm thinking, "Uh-oh, she's about to scold me for damaging my ear drums." So I roll the window down.
"Is that Yanni?" she asks.
So I explain that no, it's Dream Theater, and a little about them being Berkely students, etc. She tells me how she loves what she calls "layered" music - where there's a lot going on with the instrumentation, odd time signatures, etc. Her son turned her on to Yes several years ago and Yanni is the closest thing she can find to that. She'd never heard the term "prog," so I explained that to her too. She was asking A LOT of questions about how long DT had been around, if they had long songs, if they were on the radio, etc. Then the vocals started back in on that last chorus and she says, "Well, now they sound like Iron Maiden."
That's when I shat myself.
So I'm sitting in the Target parking lot, parsing the Iron Maiden catalogue with this 70-something year old black lady, in Central Arkansas of all places. And she KNEW her Maiden - she starts telling me that they were good up until Seventh Son and they've never quite been the same since then (!!!!!!!!). I asked if she'd heard the new stuff since Bruce came back, but she only tried Brave New World and didn't like it. She also said that since listening to Yes a lot, she gets bored with Maiden. We talked about Stevie Wonder for a bit (I'm a HUGE Wonder fan) and how he used to experiment with instrumentation a lot back in the 70's. She ended up writing down the band name and asked me to recommend 2-3 albums to start with (So of course, I&W, ADOTE, and SFAM), and I also recommended she check out Transatlantic and Rush.
So two things here:
1) Never ever assume someone won't like DT or prog just because of their age or color (I mean, really, how many black DT fans are there out there? Not trying to do racial profiling, it's just that I don't see a huge black demographic in the prog scene). This woman was AWESOME and by all stereotypes, should have only enjoyed black gospel and motown (genres which I actually happen to enjoy immensely). But a true music lover isn't bound to those cultural stereotypes and her palate was very broad. May I have that same spirit when I'm her age.
2) How awesome is it that you can meet a total stranger who you would have nothing else in common with, and walk away feeling a kinship because you both recognize the artistic value of a song or artist? I enjoyed this conversation more than any other in recent memory with close friends. We were both genuinely excited to be sharing/discovering a new thing for her. She was so compelled by the music that she knocked on a stranger's car window in a parking lot.
I LOVE the universality of music, and I'm so grateful for a band like DT that speaks to the soul and mind without regard to what's popular or conventional.
Topic: Is that Yanni? (Read 2691 times)
