Dregs, Dream: The Fun and The Overdone

If the new albums by the Dixie Dregs and Dream Theater are any indication, the double bill at the 9:30 club next Monday will offer a mixture of high jinks and high drama.

Look for the Dregs to produce most of the wacked-out, guitar-driven fun. The recently reunited band is in freewheeling form on “California Screamin’ “ (Zebra), a collection of concert tracks spanning its on-and-off-and-on-again 25-year career. By including its most requested tunes on several “Best Of” collections and concert albums over the years, the Dregs had already managed to recycle more stuff than Goodwill prior to the release of this retrospective. This time around, though, the band actually sounds as if it’s having a terrific time rummaging through the past, especially when guitar hero Steve Morse and violinist Jerry Goodman (of Mahavishnu Orchestra fame) duel it out on “The Bash,” a turbo-charged medley of “Wabash Cannonball” and “Rocky Top.” Other familiar tracks, including “Sleeveless in Seattle,” “Ionized” and “Freefall,” allow the band to freely indulge its passion for a heady fusion of rock, jazz, pop, R&B, funk and metal sounds.

While the virtuosic Morse nearly always leads the way, he gets plenty of help from his band-mates, especially from Goodman and keyboardist T Lavitz on the jazzy “Wages of Weirdness,” the greasy “Refried Chicken” and the band’s spiraling, organ-fueled reprise of the Allman Brothers hit “Jessica.” Morse also briefly teams up with fellow guitarist Dweezil Zappa – the duo serves up Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia” – and punctuates the album with a subdued and lyrical reworking of “What If” that proves he’s not just another hotshot guitar slinger looking to flex his fingers.

Dream Theater also boasts a guitarist with plenty of skill and imagination – the band’s co-founder, John Petrucci. Unfortunately, the group’s latest release, a concept album titled “Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory” (Elektra), is nearly as ponderous as its title suggests.

The premise for this saga derives from “Metropolis Pt. 1: The Miracle and the Sleeper,” a track that appeared on Dream Theater’s 1994 album “Images and Words.” In the latest installment we meet a character who slowly unravels (through some form of hypnotic regression) the mystery of a young girl’s murder in 1924.

The plot’s modest twists hardly warrant a production as long and as elaborately orchestrated as this one. Despite Dream Theater’s progressive rock prowess – the influence of Pink Floyd, Yes, Queen, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer are unmistakable at times – nothing can save this tale from collapsing under its own weight, not even Petrucci’s blazing riffs or James LaBrie’s rock-operatic vocals.