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.