Provinssirock Festival
Seinäjoki, Finland
14.6.2002 - 15.6.2002
Review By Arto Lehtinen and Marko Syrjala
Photos by Marko Syrjala
The 1st day "Friday"
Provinssirock is definitely the longest and oldest running rock
festival arranged here in Finland every year. The festival's purpose is
to cover all kinds of music form from one side to the other and
everything between. The bill this year appeared to be more interesting
from the point of view of several metal freaks as Dream Theater, Slayer
and Rammstein had been managed to get booked for the three day festival
event and of course a few bearable Finnish names such as Timo Rautiainen
ja Trio Niskalaukaus and 69 Eyes. But unfortunately the whole bright
line of the Finnish metal bands weren't booked instead a number of
disgusting rap names which can be left out of the whole article.
But before going any deeper to take a glance at bands it may be
obvious to describe a little bit about the festival. When arriving at
the festival area at 4 p.m it was kind of a shocking moment to see all
those ridiculous rap "Limp Bizkit wanna be" kids vomiting,
screaming and being drunk all over the whole town by lying on the street
and in people's gardens after enjoying the wonderful weekend in the
Sweden Rock festival where none of kids didn't throw up nor slept in the
nearest bush with shit in their pants. Being deadly drunk and passed out
in festivals definitely and unfortunately belongs to the Finnish way of
having fun in the most obnoxious way anyway.
After booking our sleeping place, there is no way to get us to sleep
to tents nearby all kinds of drunk jackasses, we went to the downtown of
Seinajoki and to the hotel to wait for our turn to have a small chat
with the Dream Theater vocalist James La Brie. But of course some
wiseguy managed to steal our mini disc player as well as some other
properties and we bitterly realized the interview was gone, but however
this is a short abridgement from the interview:
Dream
Theater has always had quite a decent followings during the last ten
years and you have visited Finland quite often. Do you have any
"golden" memories from Finland? For example, some years back
when you played in Nummirock festival??
James LaBrie: Yeah that was Nummirock with lot's of drunken people
there.. heh.. And once we played in a place called Tavastia, that was
our first time here and then we came to Finland with using that huge
white boat .. isn't it sailing between you country and Sweden ? .. and
man … that was quite a experience also. The boat was like a huge
floating hotel in the middle of the sea and most of the people were very
drunk once again. It seems to be quite popular hobby here in Finland to
be drunk??
Well … it depends.. next question OK? All of you have several
side projects going on all the time beside Dream Theater and you're
releasing albums by own also. I'm curious to know IF Dream Theater is
still your priority number one for all members ?
James LaBrie: Definitely the answer is yes. DT is something special
and we all are doing our best to keep it that way
What about then if for example your own solo material would start
selling millions of copies, would you still find the priority ... ?
James LaBrie: Well .. yes I think so !!! (hehehe) Of course it would
be nice to sell a couple of million records by my own, but Dream Theater
would still be my priority.
In the beginning of this year you had a real special gig down in
Spain by doing the whole legendary Master Of Puppets album live. Where
the hell did you come up that kind of idea?
James
LaBrie: As you may know you're not the first person who is
asking about that one .. heh. Well Master Of Puppets is one of the best
metal albums ever made and it is also one of the favorite albums of all
of us so why not? We hardly even trained for that gig it actually just
happened and it really was lot of fun...don't you think so?
Yes it was very special one I have to say.
Speaking a little bit of ex-band members of Dream Theater.. Are
you still in touch of those guys and Do you follow what they are up now? For example, your former keyboard player Derek
Sherinian. As fas as I
know he now has teamed up with the Swedish guitar wizard Yngwie
Malmsteen and he's going to play his upcoming record also?
Well actually I did knew that Derek and Yngwie thing.
As you may have heard Derek wasn't the easiest of people in the world to
work with and… some time after the "Falling To Infinity" tour
we all knew that this it was our last tour with him. But he is
definitely a great player anyway.
Maybe those two guys have something in common in personality ..
Yep. There is no doubt about it .. heh...
Do you still remember your days in WINTER ROSE?
Well of course I remember those days. Lot's of memories
and hard work.
Is that true: the VoiVod manager back then introduced you to
Dream Theater?
That's true. He recommended me for the guys.
Unfortunately that was all we remembered from the interview
afterwards.
After enjoying a few classes of bloody cold beer it was getting about
time to return to the festival area to witness the prog metal virtues in
action. Dream Theater's stuff has been always kind of difficult to adopt
from albums, whereas in the live situation the band is usually damn
tight and the stuff is definitely an enjoyable listen. This performance
made no exception to that. The band played very tightly and the vocals were
clean but to be honest during some parts of this show when the band
seemed to forget that they were playing in the front of more than 20.000
people there and besides the great performance they just seemed to be
somewhere else and just played overlong solos for each other. The gig
was mostly enjoyable show even though they didn't play "Pull Me
Under" at all, which was a real shame indeed.
The set list consisted of following songs:
- Regression
- The Glass Prison
- 6:00
- Fatal Tragedy
- Surrounded
- Burning My Soul
- War Inside My Head/The Test That Stumped My All
- The Great Debate
- Home
- The Spirit Carries On
- Take The Time
We hung around the festival area for a while after the prog
metal masters and for the big surprise MTV was even there doing a
report of the Finnish so called rising stars.. Hmm it gotta be admitted
the Swedish dj Ulrika looks…nice…
Well the climate was getting a little bit colder and the day was getting
darker, it was about time to get to check out the Finnish gothic, or
whatever, dismal combo The 69 Eyes. Well the band's reputation has become
incredibly huge during the last few years. The whole area was entirely
packed and moving to the side or back turned out to be rather impossible. The
Finnish gothic rockers basically went through the set with the routine
grip by having the most well known tunes like: "Gothic Girl",
"Dance D'Amour" and "Brandon Lee."
The 2nd day "Saturday"
Before the kings of the whole thrash metal genre let the angel of death
out from "South of Heaven", the Finnish super successful Timo
Rautiainen and Trio Niskalaukaus, even though the combo ain't any known
besides the Finns and a couple of thousand of Germans, got the on stage.
We just arrived at the festival area just on time to witness at them in
action. This Finnish singing metal combo has gained and become extremely
popular during the last few years due to the "close to the
ground" based lyrics describing the dismal identity, life in the
cold north and the Finnish uncompromising attitude to get through even
the hard rock even though the life wouldn't be the same and even some
suicidal feelings. They definitely got the incredible respond from the
people singing the songs by heart and damn loud and a sea of fist in the
air was indescribable.
After the waiting the ass kicking set of Trio Niskalaukaus to get the
bloody aggression of what god definitely hates. The thrash metal kings
got on the stage by kicking the set off with the opening intro of God
Hates Us All followed up by the metallic blitzkrieg through one hour
causing a ballistic reaction in the audience raging in
several pits. Even though Slayer definitely is the well oiled war
machine with the axeman Hanneman/King, but unfortunately Araya's voice
didn't appear to be in the finest shape as the man suffered from a miserable flu which effected his voice quite badly. According to
rumour, their gig in Sweden had to be interrupted because the collapse of
Araya's voice. But the most interesting and remarkable point of the whole
gig was Dave Lombardo's working behind the drum artillery. Bloody hell, what a
machine gun!!! Slayer's set was without any doubts, murderous, even
though the basic tracks belonged to the mandatory routine set like South
Of Heaven, War Ensemble, but due to Lombardo's joining for Born Of Fire
had been added to the gig. It is obvious Slayer should consider adding other tracks to the set list,
because the good old tracks have
been played over 15 years, apart from a few new tunes have been added to
the gig, when a new album is out. But Slayer is Slayer and once
unleashed a great deal of immortal slayerized tunes for the whole
festival audience.
Then after the massive thrash assault, the German pyro masters
Rammstein conquered the stage. Well some of the readers may rip their
pants apart about this article, but let's have a few words about them
anyway. The set started with the spectacle burning heart in the hand of
the Rammstein vocalist. In general the whole show was like one big of
explosion because there were a couple of dozen of all kinds of
explosions throughout the gig and of course huge pyro guns with which
the bands kinds shot huge fire ball to each other. Of course the normal
gay eroticism belonged to the huge fire show.
These kinds of huge pyro shows are more or less suitable to big
organized festivals, but the last year's gig in the Icehall in Helsinki,
the whole Rammstein pyro/fire show definitely worked definitely giving
more a feeling as being grilled in the front of the stage. As for the
set list it featured Mutter, Buck Dich, and Rammstein.
The whole Provinssirock Festival 2002 was definitely successful in
every aspect as more than 20.000 people had entered to testify the more
metal oriented bill. This is only wishful thinking, but hopefully more
metal names will be booked for the next upcoming festival.