It's been three and a half years since I was privileged to see Porcupine Tree play at The Fillmore in San Francisco (See my blog post about it. They've never played anywhere in Utah and may never play anywhere in Utah, so my only option is to travel to see them. I was very lucky to be in Pittsburgh on business at the same time PT was playing a show!

First, the venue. Mr. Smalls Theater is much smaller than the Fillmore, and quite a different place. The building itself is a renovated 18th century catholic church. The inside has a cathedral-like shape with a tall, 40-foot arched ceiling. A small stage elevated three feet off the rest of the floor is at one end. A couple bars for food and drink line the exterior walls in the rear of the room. The stated capacity of the room is 650 people and I'm pretty sure it was close to full. Standing room only.

Porcupine Tree was preceded by Bigelf, a band I'd never heard of. I was impressed with lead-man Damon Fox's showmanship and his ability to multitask between four or five ancient keyboarding instruments and singing, but I didn't find the music itself very interesting.

Bigelf looked like they either walked in through a time portal from a midwest heavy metal show circa 1971 or from the set of a Geico "caveman" TV commercial. The long, unkempt hair and the beards were... too much.

The music itself was not terribly complex. It was, if nothing else and especially compared to Porcupine Tree, analog. That's one word that can, in my opinion, summarize Bigelf. The guitarist and the bassist both played through a tube stack. According to the Bigelf website, Fox's rig consists of some of the following: Hammond C3 & Leslie 122, Mellotron MKII & M400, EMS Synthi AKS, Chamberlin M-1D, Moog 3C & 2P Modulars, Minimoog, Memorymoog, Korg MS-20 & MS-50, Arp 2600, Freeman String Machine, Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, and Hohner Pianet. Basically, old, analog stuff... amplified and sometimes distorted.

It was so loud that many in the audience were plugging their ears when Bigelf started playing. Fox said, "Oh, is it too loud? (Expletive) you! It's a rock show!" and started another song.

The following photo, not from this show, is a good representation of what Fox was doing for most of their performance (and is a good look at his rig.)

And then, Porcupine Tree. They started the show by playing the entire album The Incident, taking a 10 minute break, and then coming back to play older pieces.

I've listened to The Incident a lot, but I still enjoy just about every album before it more. After this concert, however, I have a lot more appreciation for The Incident. One thing that won me over was the harmonies sung by John Wesley and Steven Wilson. They were perfect and beautiful.

I just ran a half-marathon a couple of weeks ago and I listened to songs by Porcupine Tree the whole 13.1 miles. I wondered how many of those songs I would hear live. They played "The Sound Of Muzak," "Blackest Eyes," and "Trains" in the second set, all of which I had in my running playlist. Unfortunately, they didn't play anything from the Deadwing album. That was a bit of a dissapointment to me.

The second set went like this:

• Hatesong
• Russia On Ice - Anesthetize
• Stars Die
• Way Out Of Here
• Blackest Eyes

Then, the encore:

• The Sound of Muzak
• Trains

The band started playing Hatesong without John Wesley on stage. He walked out in the middle to sing harmonies with Steven and then walked offstage again. When a part for a second guitar was needed, a pre-recorded track was used.

I was a little bummed that they didn't finish playing Russia On Ice. Instead, after the second chorus, they went into Anesthetize after the guitar solo performed on the album by Alex Lifeson. Steven Wilson noodled on the keyboard at the front of the stage for a bit before going back to playing guitar and then singing "The dust in my soul..."

Stars Die was an interesting move. There were definitely some hardcore fans there as they erupted with cheers as soon as John Wesley played the opening bit for it.

When the video for Way Out Of Here started, I became very emotional, probably because I've been repeatedly watching the video on YouTube of the song that's appearing on the Anesthetize DVD coming out in the next month and because I learned of the band dedicating the song to Arielle Daniel, a young fan who was killed by a train in 2005 (read about it here). It was an awesome performance of an awesome song. John Wesley and Gavin Harrison (drums) are simply fantastic during the song.

At one point during the show, Steven Wilson surprisingly remarked that he could see lots of "chicks" in the audience. It's true, there were a lot more women in the audience than you'd expect at a Porcupine Tree show. That being said, the audience was 90% guys in their 20s to 50s. A lot of us seemed out of the mainstream, socially, which also wasn't surprising.

All in all, great show, as always. I picked up almost $100 in merchandise while I was there too.