We made the trek down to B.B. King’s in Times Square yesterday to see Buckethead. Buckethead is a pretty amazing guitar player, I would say he could hold his own with the guitar greats. He wears a mask and a bucket on his head (think KFC chicken bucket, but during the show he just wore a plain white bucket). His style ranges from likes of Eric Johnson, to metal, to bizarre experimental. Some samples here and here. He can play very fast using lots of hammer-on / pull-off and exceptional picking. He experienced some technical difficulties near the beginning of the show but he hardly flinched. While his stage hands worked to solve the problems, he just took the time to do some of his odd dancing and demonstrate his nunchuk skills. About mid-concert he took a break to hand out toys from a plastic bag to the people at the front of the crowd and even took a few gifts from his fans.
All told, it was a really amazing concert, but it is odd that while he doesn’t have any sort of backup band, he doesn’t play alone. There was generally an accompanying audio track of drums and guitar which he played along with. Several times when he wanted to stop and dance, etc. he would just walk over to his iPod and play some music.
Unfortunately, the concert ended early because the technical difficulties came back and they weren’t able to resolve the issue, but he was on stage for about 90 minutes so it wasn’t too big a deal.