Long time coming, but life has been really busy since these shows…

We went to a pair of Soundgarden shows earlier this month.

Having seen Chris Cornell many times solo and having always loved it, these were shows we’d been waiting on for a long time.

The first night, at Prudential Center in Newark, we had GA tickets and got there early to get close to the stage.

Coheed and Cambria opened… they were Ok, but nothing special. Really jammy towards the end of their set and played mostly new stuff.

They also seemed to be playing at 80% speed.

I give them a B-

It took a long time (maybe an hour or even a little more) but finally SG came on stage at 9. We worked our way so we were only 1 person deep at Stage Right corner.

We forgot our earplugs and the crowd noise was deafening as they took the stage despite the place not being quite sold out.

At the angle we were at it was impossible to get a picture of the whole set, but as CC said, it is all about the old music on this tour.

Normally Chris does a lot of storytelling between every song. These 2 nights it was all about squeezing in all the hits and sprinkling in B sides. He had a little bit of banter with some crowd members but they mostly went from 1 song to the next.

They sounded really good. Matt Cameron (drums) played every beat flawlessly. The only miscue I caught was an early entry on guitars during 1 song.

Edit this setlist | More Soundgarden setlists

The second night, at Jones Beach, they came on stage a lot more quickly after Coheed (which we missed).

It was a little weird because it was still a light out… and me and Lethy were eating ice cream. I felt a bit like that middle aged guy trying to relive his youth but failing.

For this show, we were in the last row of the front section, dead center. For what we paid, fantastic seats (go fan club!).

During this show, Chris wandered out into the crowd for a few songs, just going around and shaking hands and stuff as he sang.

One guy held up a sign. “The night is ours, we can stay if we want to. Let’s stay!” Chris read it and kind of took off on a tangent about parenting and giving youth hope. Cool moment. Won’t be surprised if it ends up as a lyric on their new album.

Chris and Kim Thayil (guitars) definitely connected more this show. Kim actually spoke a few times. At one point just before the encore, Ben got pissed (at his guitar?) and throw his guitar down and stormed off as 4th of July wasn’t quite finished.

Setlists were largely the same, mostly because they have so many hits to cover. It was also interesting to see how dynamics within the band are different each day.

Seattle trip coming up this weekend, can’t wait!

Tickets said 7PM.

We arrived at 7:45 expecting to miss the opener and be just on time.

Turns out, 7PM is doors, show starts at 9. Well at least we are front row!

The venue is tiny, but that’s good when you’re front row. The bleacher seating in back is nice had we chosen that route.

8:45 “The Dirty Pearls” go on. They’re fine musically, but the variety in clothing style among the band is hilarious. Vocalist = Emo. Lead guitar = Lenny Kravitz clone. Bassist = Metalhead. Drummer = S+M. 2nd lead guitar = Tee + Jeans. Rhythm guitar = Hipster.

They play their 30 minutes and I expect a long delay, because the stage is quite cramped, they’ll need a lot of setup for Weiland. 9:30 comes and goes. Stage is setup. Some “Scott-y” chants. Nothing.

Around 10PM some VIPs show up. One guy named Mark and I chat quite a bit, he owns a few bars and is here with the travel coordinator for Weiland. He tells me, in a whisper, Weiland is not in the building, he’s across the street in his hotel having an episode.

10:45PM and lots of disgruntled fans. A half dozen or so beers get tossed on stage. Me and Mark talk concerts and he gets me free VIP beer, so at least the time goes by a little more quickly.

11:15 Doug Green comes out and announces it will be another 15 minutes. Turns out it was more like another 45 minutes.

5 minutes to midnight Weiland finally goes on stage. He makes some excuses about taking a redeye that morning and then various press/book signing commitments. Plenty of booing, but nothing thrown at him or his band.

They open up with 3 or 4 “new songs” on a yet to even be announced album. It was super jam bandy.

From there he goes into a series of covers – his version of Fame, “Let Down” by Radiohead (this sounded great, but being so tired, it made us sleepy) and  “Francis Farmer” by Nirvana (also sounded very good).

Before the Stone Roses song he told a story about the first time he did LSD and heard that song. Someone in the crowd yelled a perfectly timed “COOL STORY BRO” which was hilarious to me.

They did an encore of Unglued, the only STP song of the night. All told they only played a dozen songs, and while they sounded good… the night as a whole was just frustrating.

He was literally within arms reach of us though, which was somewhat redeeming.

Edit this setlist | More Scott Weiland setlists

All pictures here.

Last week we got to see Chris Cornell on his current acoustic tour.

It’s a very different, extremely intimate feeling. Town Hall venue is essentially a tiny Broadway theater and we were really close to the stage. He spent a lot of time talking about the stories behind songs before playing them. He did quite a few requests, too. Kind of impressive because between Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave, solo stuff, and things he wrote for movie scores, there are several hundred songs.

His 5 year old son, who we could see playing air guitar and singing along off stage…. was invited out onto the stage for a couple of songs. It was really cute, even though he didn’t know the words to the second song … they had his mic pretty low though, could barely hear him.

Highlight of the show for me was “Sweet Euphoria.” He said he hasn’t played it in over 10 years (setlist.fm agrees!). While he stumbled through a couple chord progressions, vocally he sounded spot on.

For most of the show, everyone was in their seats. Lots of clapping and cheering and requesting, but all in all kinda weird sitting there. For the encore he had everyone stand and moved forward, had more of a rock show feel to it. I felt he rushed through the encore, while we did get a 25 song set, he seemed to want to get back to his family off stage at the end.

All said, still a great show. I should have gotten tickets for last night in Poughkeepsie too

All my pictures here.

A couple of weeks back, we finally got to see Rod.

Lethy has been wanting to see him forever – his shows sell out super fast and the resale market for his shows is insane!

Stevie Nicks opened and did a mix of her own stuff with quite a bit of Fleetwood Mac mixed in – Landslide, Gold Dust Woman, Go Your Own Way, White Winged bird, etc. Unable to find a set list.

She seemed genuinely excited to be there and really grateful for all the applause and sing-alongs. She also joined Rod for a few duets, which honestly didn’t sound so great, but it’s the best photo I have of her so…

Rod had exactly the sort of personality you’d expect. He spoke and it felt like he was talking to you, not you and thousands of other people. His voice was good and his set was nice.

The central floating video panel was jaw droppingly sharp.

Can’t find his set list either, which is weird. He sang 5 or 6 songs I knew, but he did some other stuff I had no clue what it was. He explained that he was trying to sing some of the songs from the first time he played MSG in the 60s as singer for Jeff Beck. It’s nice to get a unique performance, but honestly I’d have preferred more hits.

Still, all in all due almost completely to his charisma, an A+ show.

Up next for us, Chris Cornell acoustic!

Monmouth is a lot further than I expected.

Venue was essentially a basketball court sized area with some upper level bleachers around the outside.

For once we got there early and perched ourselves right up against the barriers, front row, far stage right.

Some band called In this Moment opened. Or something like that. Music was OK, but the female singer did lots of “growl” singing and she could only growl one note. It got old fast.

Sevendust was the second opener. Musically they were good, but they were just fairly vile people. Lead singer had lots of face piercings and tattoos. He gyrated pretty much constantly. Despite good energy, the band as a whole had an obsession with spitting on the ground. Constantly.

Korn was the highlight of the night. Jonathan Davis can sing like a mofo. Overall they sounded great. They did lots of medleys to get all their hits in and even included covers. They had lots of energy, led by Davis. The usual bag-piping was cool to see up close. You really get an appreciation for just how long he is holding a note.

The setlists I’ve found online are wrong. They opened with Blind (ARE you READY?!??!) which was awesome and closed with a huge medley.

Disturbed had the headline slot. Their performance would have been fine if they didn’t kill every ounce of energy by opening with 5 new songs in a row. Add to that, towards the end of the set, the singer began to strain to sustain notes. I do have to say though, that his evil laughs were pretty awesome. His outfit though, was definitely suspect – essentially a mechanic’s onesy lol. Musically they were spot on – the drumming and bass was impressive – never out of sync.