Yellow Matter Custard

Yellow Matter Custard is comprised of Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater, Transatlantic) on drums, Neal Morse ex-(Spock's Beard, Transatlantic) on keyboards and guitar, Paul Gilbert (Racer X, Mr. Big) on guitar, and Matt Bissonette, who has played with just about everybody including Joe Satriani, and Ringo Starr of late, on bass. They all sing pretty damn good too - well, maybe not Portnoy. These guys have taken their Beatles seriously and must have rehearsed considerably to play this 30 song set as brilliantly as they did. A funny quote from Portnoy just prior to "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey" says it all as to just how challenging some of these old tunes could be - "It's unbelievable, you have four guys here that play some pretty fucking complicated music in our day jobs with our other bands. We play like 19/16, swapping back and forth a million different time signatures, but this next song totally stumped all four of us, how to start this fucking thing."



This was not an effort to impersonate The Beatles, such as 1964 -The Tribute does, or to painstakingly duplicate every musical note with live instruments and no samples, such as The Fab Faux does. Sure Bissonette broke out his Hofner bass, and Morse finally got to use his Rickenbacker guitar, but these guys were just up their jamming, with a little help from their friend Bert Baldwin who added some extra keyboards, percussion, and samples from backstage. The most refreshing aspect of this performance is that they included many of the more obscure Beatles tracks such as "I Call Your Name" from The Beatle's Second Album, "When I Get Home" from A Hard Days Night, "Rain" the B-side to "Paperback Writer", "Baby's In Black" from Beatles For Sale, and "Think For Yourself from Rubber Soul."