| Jul. 19th, 2007 @ 12:02 pm Nobody Hates Chris |
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Don't mind me, I'm just:  hungry
Hey, that sounds like: Static-X -- I'm With Stupid
So the Chris Cornell show last night was, overall, pretty damn awesome. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but I had a hell of a time and feel like my money was well spent -- which is the least you should expect from a night out, right?
Firstly and foremostly, ear plugs are for the win. This was my inaugural attempt at wearing them to a show and they worked exactly as advertised -- they swallowed all the hurty stuff I didn't need to hear without obscuring the stuff I wanted to hear. I was left with nothing but a teeny bit of ringing after the show, which faded after a night's sleep, as opposed to the blown-speaker whistling and 48 hours of near-deafness following the last big show I went to. So count me in for earplugs at all future major concert events.
Secondly, the opening act, Juliette and The Licks -- well, they tried. I gotta give 'em that. But the odds were stacked pretty far against them with an early (7:00pm) start time and they were quite obviously not who anybody was there to see. I didn't recognize Juliette Lewis at all, and although she tried her hardest to cop a Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Pretenders vibe, and her stagecraft was all right, the voice and the songwriting just weren't there. As movie-star vanity bands go, they're no Dogstar or Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts.
Finally and most importantly, Chris Cornell rocked the hizzouse. The contrast between Lewis's performance -- which she worked just as hard as she could, and barely got a rise out of the crowd -- and Cornell, who had the whole place in thrall just by wandering peacefully from place to place on stage and an occasional lazy gesture with his right hand, could not have been starker. That's the difference between a rock star and an actress pretending to be a rock star, folks.
The band backing him up were competent but not particularly inspired. A pair of brothers (who look enough alike that they could've been twins) on guitar, a bearded bald guy on bass, and a drummer with emo bangs, all of whose names I was told and promptly forgot. The drummer kept the beat all right, but he was no Brad Wilk and certainly no Matt Cameron. The string section knew the songs and did their best, but covering two of the most distinctive and talented guitar players in the past twenty years of rock music, Tom Morello and Kim Thayil, is a task nobody should feel ashamed at not hitting out of the park. Which they didn't.
So Chris was clearly the star of the show, and clearly knew it, but it was cool. They played a tight, solid set of tracks, heavily mining Audioslave singles ("Show Me How to Live", "Out of Exile", "Be Yourself", "Like a Stone", etc.) and Superunknown. I didn't hear my favorite Audioslave tunes, but that was more than made up for by the inclusion of "Rusty Cage", "Outshined", and "Jesus Christ Pose" from Badmotorfinger. He also threw in some stuff off the new solo album, mostly ballads where his (amazing) voice is doing most of the work. I hadn't heard any of them before, but I liked what I heard -- especially "No Such Thing" and "Safe and Sound." "Finally Forever" is a sweet song which, he told us, he wrote for his wife and played for the first time at their wedding reception. Awww!
A couple of fun surprises: he dusted off "Say Hello To Heaven" from the Temple of the Dog album as the sixth song of the night and got a big response from the crowd; the lead guitarist was at his best covering Stone Gossard's licks, which didn't surprise me. Second fun surprise was a version of "Billie Jean" (yes, that "Billie Jean") done as a soulful acoustic ballad rather than a bouncy R&B groove. Another big response from the crowd -- apparently that one's on the new album too.
We had a fine thunderstorm with plenty of flashy lightning arcing across the sky on the drive home, but mercifully not too much rain as I walked the couple-three blocks back to my car. I was in the mood for a Baconator nightcap before I hit the sack (dinner had been small and rather rushed) but the line at the Wendy's was long enough that I didn't feel like missing a half hour's sleep to procure one. So instead I went to McDonald's for the first time in a long, long while -- I pretty much only eat McDisease at O'Hare, now that I think about it -- and got a chicken sandwich and extremely salty fries.
A fine evening all around. :)
--- Ajax. |
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pleased![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bored
rushed
busy
thirsty