Heaven & Hell! :D

I really let the switching venues from San Jose to San Francisco almost make me not go, but I did and I'm really glad I did. I took BART to the Powell Station in San Francisco and only had to walk a couple of blocks to get to the line. I went all by myself and I really wanted to join in the conversation of the group that was behind me. I texted a couple of my good friends, including Baeleron who lives in Irvine and is my Metal concerts partner too, even though we haven't been to one since like 2005 (the Irvine Maiden show).

They let us in shortly after 7:00. I kind of wanted to see if I could upgrade my ticket, but decided against it seeing the way they were herding people in like sheep. When I went in, I remembered that I had been to the Warfield already back in 2002. Bael and I had tickets for the Judas Priest / Iced Earth show in September 2001, and well, everyone knows what happened then so the bands couldn't travel and the show got postponed. It got rescheduled for like February 2002, but by this time Anthrax had taken Iced Earth's opening spot and Bael had moved to Southern CA. Nothing against Anthrax, but I really wanted to see Iced Earth. Anyway, I had an extra ticket and I almost didn't go because no one wanted to go with me. Finally I convinced my Bryan Adams-loving friend and roomate to come with me, so we got there just as Anthrax had ended their set and were literally walking away from the stage. I really liked the show with Ripper... but anyway, back to H&H.

I went into the general admission area and took a spot in the third section from the stage right in front of a barricade over on the right (if you're looking at the stage). It was a good spot and that's where I stayed for the whole thing.

First off was Coheed and Cambria. Their set started at 8:00 sharp! They were pretty good and there were a few songs that I enjoyed a lot. I'm not very familiar with their work although I do have one of their CD's. It's clearly Claudio Sanchez's band and he's really good. They played a shortened version of maiden's The Trooper. I had my ancient Nikon Coolpix camera handy so I took some video:



I thought the second guitarist was going to take the second solo and you can see I went his direction, but didn't play it. Some peopple in various forums complained about the opening act, but I thought C&C were great and enjoyed their set very much.

Heaven & Hell came on about a half hour after C&C, and their set smoked! I'm not going to go into detail since I took some video! I was there mostly to see Tony Iommi, but Dio, Geezer and Vinny were all great. It was cool to see Geezer in his element (I had seen his metal core band open for Bruce Dickinson back in '97). It's hard to believe Dio is 67 years old. The set was 90 minutes long and, in my opinion, just right. Here is some video I took.

My camera is old and crappy, but for me this is a nice way of keeping memories of some of the shows I've gone to.

The Mob Rules (opening song):


Time Machine (including part of Vinny's drum solo):


Falling Off The Edge Of The World:


I have a couple more that I haven't uploaded, but I had problems with those. For Die Young I had probelms with the camera's zoom, and for Neon Knights I ran out of memory before the song ended. Maybe I'll upload them anyway. No one looks at my stuff anyway! :)

By the way, I've been in a pretty sour mood since last night, but listening to Grace Under Pressure this afternoon put me back in a good mood!