What a great show. Matt absolutely owned the jam in May Fly; one of the best ever. To me, Rush was nondescript in the sense that it was as good as usual, but not any better or any worse. Metropolis is quickly becoming one of my favorite songs. Chris was absolutely on fire starting with the song; a trend that wouldn\'t let up for the rest of the night. The Late and the Great for LeRoi Moore was a nice touch, and following it up with Tripping Billies was more than I expected. We all have our opinions on Dave Matthews, but if you were there, I\'m sure you have no complaints about Tripping Billies; the band absolutely tore it up.
Funny story, Ellis blew a fuse in the lights and the stage went dark right before the segue into Tripping Billies. The fun part is that Tim was going to be reading the lyrics, which he couldn\'t see. I wonder how close the band was to bailing on Tripping Billies and seguing into something else.
The bass jam started as a Space City Affair-like adventure with just Chris on stage. Once the rest of the band joined him, in turned into a solid funk that led into Tribal. Tribal has always been overrated in my book, but that doesn\'t mean it\'s not an excellent song. The segue into Merge felt spontaneous, but I may be wrong about that.
The Chase bust-out had the crowd more excited than anyone has ever been to hear The Chase before. I was misled into thinking we were going to hear Wild Pack (the clue I was given was "Neither Chris or Matt have played this song before", which is false if we\'re talking about The Chase), but I definitely wasn\'t disappointed. Question was the second cover of the night that the band played better than the original. The song has a funny way of popping up very infrequently, but at the perfect time.
After Question, Puppetry was more than I expected for the rest of the evening. The jam started strong but began to peter out, and, in my opinion, the song was saved by what I believe was the manager telling them that they were running out of time. This stopped momentum from dying too much, and Tripping Billies callback > Puppetry ending was a great end to the night.
Between the time (after 1:30) and my experience with Massachusetts bars, I really didn\'t expect an encore. Inner Glimpse isn\'t a bad song if you can separate it from the days of hearing every show in 2004, and it was fine for me as an encore.
This is probably the first show where I can say that Tim was the least impressive. Not that he didn\'t shred, but he was definitely a strong 4th out of 4. It\'s like all of those Olympic swimming races that ended with the top four people breaking the world record. Tim "swam" better than anyone ever before, but was still fourth on this particular night. MVP honors go to Chris, who really commanded the tempo and style of a lot of the jamming and also dominated vocally.
A great night in Southbridge, Mass. I hope everybody escaped the wrath of the Southbridge PD (who really needed to find some real crime going on somewhere) and made it home OK.
