Chris Cornell

I took the night off of work to see Chris Cornell. For those unfamiliar with Chris, he was the lead singer and songwriter for Soundgarden, Audioslave, and Temple of the Dog, and now he has a solo career alongside current projects with Audioslave. In other words, he's a busy busy musician. The concert was at the Warfield which is pretty much the center of the Tenderloin (ie. San Francisco's rough neighborhood) but my friend Cheryl's boyfriend dropped us off at the beginning. Unfortunatley he had to be at work early and Cheryl underestimated the longevity of the concert... concert not over at 11pm and she leaves... yes I could have gone with them but I figured I would just clamp myself onto a group of people walking to BART and ask them to pretend that I was with them... which I did and it worked out just fine. I was not about to miss "Blackhole Sun" or "Can't Change Me" because I was afraid I couldn't tough it out a couple blocks with concert going strangers...
This is one of my favorite Soundgarden songs;

The band was amazing. It was Chris plus three guitar players and a drummer, which amounted to a thick rich ROCK sound and Chris' live vocal was at least as good live as it is in recordings if not a little better. The spot ops, however, I wanted to throttle (warning;Technical jargon ahead) because they were bleeding when they had their shudders closed, they had sloppy gel changes and couldn't hold still... I think that the real spot ops must have had the night off and had been replaced by poorly trained monkeys.
The crowd was mostly 25-30 year old white people (I'm not used to being in the majority at concerts I attend, so that was odd) and sadly they confirmed that many white people have no rythm. Chris Cornell actually has some complicated rythm structures where the guitar, the drums and the vocals are all on different counts so that may be a difficulty, but really you can just follow the bass player's head and you'll be fine. It's like a big bald conductor's baton. It also struck me tonight that the lyrics to these songs are unusually unrepetitive. Some of the older songs have chorus(es) but all the new stuff threw the chorus-verse-chorus format out the window... I love this guy!
Next time I think I may actually try being a groundling because being up in the balcony for anything but a U2 concert seems to be pretty lame. At U2, every last person in the auditorium is standing and dancing and singing along, even if they are in the very farthest obstructed view seat... in this venue especially it's all people who mostly want to sit down in these uncomfortably close seats and kind of tap their feet... Lame! But despite lame people... I still had a great time.