My personal recollections on this period were mostly positive. Fresh off meeting the band twice and seeing them twice on the HITNF tour, I remember being crushed by the news. I was in college at the time, and I remember seeing the notice on Queensryche.com that Chris had left. I remember trying to put a positive spin on it, saying how someone new could really get them back on a heavier direction.
At the time, I really didn't have a full grasp of DeGarmo's impact on the band -- how he was responsible for a lot of what we loved, and how vital he was to the band. So, I pretty much took the news as a way for Queensryche to push forward and embraced the change. All throughout 1998, myself and a couple close friends I made on campus (and attended the HITNF shows with) were excited to hear what would come next.
When .com started doing the pictures of the guitarist, I thought for a brief instant it was James Byrd (formerly of Fifth Angel). He had the hair, and Byrd had history in the Seattle scene. Kelly Gray wasn't even on my radar. But once Kelly was announced, Brett Miller (a fellow Northwest metal historian and high school friend of the band) noted that Kelly's style was very Blackmore-inspired. Of course, he changed that once he heard what he sounded like in 1999, he was going on what Kelly sounded like in 1981. Anyway, we (my friends and I) were excited to see what Kelly would bring to the band.
Queensryche held a fan club event, Seattle 1998. The band didn't play, but new music was played over the PA system at the event, which was a meet and greet. The descriptions of the songs whet the appetite of all of us online fans at the time that were on .com's old message board. My friends and I decided not to go to Seattle 1998, but said if they did another one, we'd do it. Well, they announced "Seattle '99" and we made plans to attend.
That was my Christmas present to myself -- paying for a roundtrip to Seattle from New York, attending the show, spending a weekend in Seattle (the first of many, many times), etc. A few days prior to the event, friends on .com from Seattle recorded the KISW premier of the songs that would be on Q2k and the interview. If memory serves, they didn't surface on the Internet until the weekend of the fan club event (remember, this was almost 20 years ago). So, we were heading to Seattle not having heard anything new from the band. Just descriptions from people.
A snowstorm hit the day before I was scheduled to fly out. In fact, when I flew out of LaGuardia Airport, my flight was literally the last one allowed to leave. My friend Marshal was on a different flight, and his was canceled and he ultimately didn't make it. What was supposed to be a 10-hour flight with a change over ended up being 18 hours. I got into Seattle without any clothes (they lost my bag), at something like 11 p.m. Pacific time. It was horrendous. Thankfully, I met up with a few online folks (Hutch and others) and my bag was found and made its way to me.
The Seattle '99 show was cool. NAF Studios is simply rehearsal space from what I recall, on the outskirts of Seattle. i remember Susan Tate being there and checking our IDs and issuing us badges (if you check the link to the show page in the write-up, you'll see a scan of mine). Once we got in, I went up to the front. The stage area was separated from a drinking area by a high chainlink fence. The stage was decorated with an Empire tri-ryche, but the whole area had the Mindcrime cover motif of the crowd. It was cool, it was raw, and I was frankly, ridiculously excited.
The band walked up on stage, and I remember Tate:
"Welcome, welcome, welcome. I guess this is Seattle...'99, isn't it? So glad you could be here. Ready boys?" And then they kicked into Empire. Good memories. Edit -- that quoted stuff I think was from Seattle 2001...lol. Hey, I'm getting old, it gets jumbled.
The new songs fit right in from what I could tell, and the band sounded good. Kelly sounded really good, although like I think I mentioned in the write-up, that was probably because he was mostly playing rhythm guitar, not lead, so you couldn't really get a feel for it. But at the time, I didn't know, and didn't care. The band had a darker, more metal image again, Tate was commanding and sounded killer, and I was in full-on fanboy mode.
Once it ended, and eventually, when I got home, I was buzzing for weeks. I ended up getting the KISW broadcast from a friend, and later, a really poor quality partial recording of the fan club show. But they were gold for me for those next eight months.
Once Q2k was released, I was, at the time, fully on board with the record. I remember arguing back and forth with "purists" over the quality of the album. Ironically, I'd become one of those purists later. But simply put, I liked Q2k then, and I still do now. More on that later.
Tour-wise, I went to 7 shows on the Q2k tour, including the Seattle '99 fan club event (stopping June 2000). They were:
Queensryche 1/16/99 Seattle, Wash. NAF Studios None
Queensryche 10/29/99 Las Vegas, Nev. The Joint None
Queensryche 10/30/99 Las Vegas, Nev. The Joint None
Queensryche 11/26/99 Chicago, Ill. The Riviera missed dD
Queensryche 11/27/99 Milwaukee, Wis. Riverside Theatre doubleDrive
Queensryche 12/4/99 Wallingford, Conn. Oakdale Theater Caroline’s Spine
Queensryche 3/1/00 Washington, D.C. 9:30 Club Jesse Jms Dupree
Ironically, although I had tickets to the NYC show at the Beacon Theater, I was unable to attend do to not getting back in time for a work event. I had a blast going to all these gigs, honestly. The worst one was the first Vegas gig. There apparently was a curfew the band was not privy to the first night, and they only played 75 minutes, which almost initiated a riot (seriously). The next night, they played more than two hours to make up for it (and I guess they negotiated something with the venue).
Simply put, the tour was fun. I have positive memories of it all. Yeah, Kelly Gray's playing didn't gel. Even then, I had a hard time defending that position. He wasn't the right fit in comparison to DeGarmo. Some fans called Queensryche "Nu-Ryche" back then because of the muddier sound. In retrospect, the name was pretty much on-par with some of the nu-metal band sounds of that time period.
For me personally, it was a wonderful experience traveling around to the gigs and enjoying the band live. I enjoyed the Q2k material then, and still do. I've said repeatedly, and still do, that I would have loved to see where Queensryche would have went next with Kelly Gray. When I interviewed Kelly in June 2001 (I'll try and find that Q&A I did for the next entry), he basically admitted that Q2k was a good record, but they could do better. He indicated that it was about feeling each other out musically, and then healing a bit for them, and moving forward. He was pretty confident a second record together would have been much better. And I agree.
My favorites from Q2k are Howl, When the Rain Comes, Liquid Sky, Right Side of My Mind, Falling Down, and Breakdown. And I have a bit of a soft spot for Sacred Ground because I love the music, along with Burning Man because of those cool guitar licks/harmonics. I also dig Wot Kinda Man. So if you count those, there are eight songs on Q2k out of 13 (counting the two studio tracks released on the 2006 version) that I like. That's a pretty good percentage of tunes. They just didn't...sound like classic Queensryche. It sounded like something new, and I was into it. I still am, it just never got fleshed out further, which I find to be a shame. Seriously.
It was different, but I honestly believe the band's initial excitement was genuine about the material. You could see it in Whip's manner on stage and how they talked about the record. They were a band in those early months of writing, recording and first touring, before things happen with Kelly (as Tate alluded to in the write-up). And I embraced that vibe they had and still do.
Looking back on it now, I separate this era very easily, for obvious reasons. It was a short era, and very distinct. I can put things in "boxes" and it makes me appreciate them more for what they are. Was Q2k a classic Queensryche record? No. Was it even a progressive-tinged hard rock record? Nope. But it was a new generation of hard rock by a band very much united at the time on their direction, and being a fan of bands from this era (Disturbed, Sevendust, etc.) I really dug it and still very much enjoy it. The solo in "Falling Down" is a favorite of mine in particular.
Edit- listening to it today, it looks like Jon Plum and Kelly did the channeling thing with the trade-off solos. In Falling Down, Wilton appears in the left channel, and Kelly in the right. Although curiously, they don't do it on Right Side, which if I remember correctly, is a trade off with Gray first, then Wilton. Weird. Gray and Wilton are both playing lead parts underneath each other, so maybe that's why.
Topic: The Queensr˙che Discography Thread (Read 109042 times)
