Tuesday, March 31. 2009
When I was first introduced to Soundgardens music, the subpop Screaming Life EP in 1987, I wasn't very impressed and dismissed them at first as trying to be Zep clones. I kept listening though and as they matured, their releases got better, and they started to find their way. It wasn't until 1991's Badmotorfinger that the wheels all clicked at once, they found their sound, and they really hit their stride. In fact that is still one of my favorite discs of all time, one of the few that I always seem to find room for.
I never got the chance to see Soundgarden live, our schedules never quite seemed to mesh. I had heard good and bad things about their live performance from friends and the track record of frontmen who go solo has been less than spectacular so I was ambivalent about what kind of show I might see. I loved Cornell with Soundgarden, hated him in Audioslave, and hadn't really heard enough of his solo releases to draw a conclusion.
It was definitely an older crowd that showed up for his sold out set, and they too were a Soundgarden crowd, looking to once again wrap themselves in that Seattle grunge metal blanket. I heard no calls for songs like "Cochise" or "Like A Stone", they were all shouting for "Black Hole Sun" and "Rusty Cage".
Click here to check out the rest of the pics. photos by Jeff Barringer - Staff Photographer
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What the crowd got was a healthy, respectable mix of all of the above (click here to see the set list) with Zeppelin's Immigrant Song as one of the treats during the encore. Cornell was incredibly clean in his vocals, and he was very interactive roaming the stage, climbing the amps, while his band soldiered on behind him, slogging through his hits one after another. I don't think either Soundgarden or Audioslave fans left unsated.
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