Jason Bieler comments

While as a band and as individuals we have made a myriad of mistakes and mega blunders over the years, each of them more epically silly than the last. One rumor/truth that I wanted to address was the Dream Theater vs Saigon Kick kerfuffle of 1992 in the great city of San Francisco. The infamous battle was later renamed by history the ‘Who Were They And Why Do I Give A Shit Skirmish By The Wharf.’ Join me as we harken back to a gentler time...ok whatever here ya go.

What I believe to have happened was both bands were booked (or so we thought) to play the same club on the same night in SF. Needless to say when two of music’s most successful and artistically important legendary juggernauts get into a turf war it is tantamount to the Bloods and the Crips being asked to share a playground and divide the only existing popsicle, or more like a middle school version of West Side Story...or best case scenario an outtake from Anchor Man.

After much verbal jostling and jousting (to this day I am not really sure between who but lets blame it on over zealous crew people who shall remain nameless, management and of course...the bass players) I believe a co-headline was agreed to. As the doors opened and multiple tens of people flooded the venue, clearly devoted to one of us and not the other we discovered that alas we were not actually promoted or even technically booked (thanks ICM) to be there at all. So none of our 18 die hard San Fran Kick fans were there to counter balance the riff worship land sliding clearly in one direction. Nor was I able to enjoy any of the sharpie festooned tapestries hand crafted by one of our more corpulent fans proclaiming me as a riff lord...nor the allotment of cream filled pastries one gets used to being a holder of a song in the mid to upper teens on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Feeling slightly like Ben Stiller having zipped his schmekel in his pants...we decided to leave as the cacophonous chants of the audience demanding a 7th encore of the then new hit “Pull Me Under” was just too much for our bruised and battered egos to take.

In closing another unfortunate chapter in Kickstory...but we have never actually met Dream Theater although I have always been aware of Mike Portnoy’s musical brilliance...and personally felt he would have shredded ‘Love Is On The Way’.

That’s my story and I am sticking to it.