With two free tickets to Chris Cornell at the Commodore, how could I resist? My friend Schmidty and I showed up late, yet didn’t miss any of the openers. What luck. The Crash Kings were first, and were alright, closing with a cover of War Pigs. No axeman, but the lead keyboardist compensated with enough phallic manoeuvres to fool any of us.
That’s it, one opener and then Cornell came on. He was excellent, I must admit I didn’t know anything new after 1996. I’d never liked Audioslave and I have no idea what he’s doing now, but he must be doing well to be touring.
Anyway, like the majority of people there, I was there for the Soundgarden songs. Here’s a brief setlist of the ‘Garden tunes he played:
- Fell on Black Days
- Blow Up the Outside World
- Outshined
- Rusty Cage
- Hunger Strike (Temple of the Dog, but who’s complaining)
- Black Hole Sun
- Like Suicide
The highlight of the night was Schmidty walking around with the N95 mask..
I lost count of how many people who came up to me, on Granville and elsewhere, asking me what was wrong with him. In the Commodore itself, people thought he was nuts. I patiently explained to everyone who asked that he’d just come back from Mexico and that he was feeling a bit under the weather (a blatant untruth). Schmidty often piped in with “It’s more for you than for me”. Apparently, the N95 really stinks after a few hours of use, but oh well. Schmidty did his bit to spread a bit of panic about the swine flu and a good time was had by all.
This makes the last two bands I’ve seen start with CC, Cannibal Corpse and Chris Cornell. All I need is for Cephalic Carnage to go on tour and my alliterative triplet is complete.
Thanks to Schmidty for the pictures.