Archive for July, 2011
Got in very late Thursday night, Friday morning up early.
Hoof it to Pike’s Market for breakfast:
Yummy stuff.
From there we headed south through Pioneer Square and International districts. To be honest, we must have missed all the points of interest, because it was all pretty boring stuff.
Then we headed back to the Puget and followed Alaska Way all the way north to the sculpture garden… Then headed over to the Space Needle…
Great visibility by Seattle standards, but still hazy enough to not see Rainier.
From there we went to EMP which is in a weird building designed by Gehry.
Its a weird mash up of music museum, music interactive displays (like rockband) and Sci Fi nostalgia stuff.
From there we completed our 8+ Mile walking tour by heading back to the hotel and then later out to “Etta’s” for a nice foody style seafood dinner.
Tomorrow… Off to Central WA for SOUNDGARDEN!
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.
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!