Review: Chris Cornell 2007 North America Tour

A few weeks ago, I decided to take a five minute break and visit rock-icon Chris Cornell's website. In July, I was lamenting the fact that I would be unable to attend any of his summer concerts, set up to promote his new solo album Carry On, because of a trip to India and South Africa. Actually, I wasn't lamenting it all that much since I was excited to go abroad and Carry On was pretty bad. Anyway, I had heard a rumor that Chris would be starting a new North America tour and wanted to get a sense of whether I would be able to go to any of the concerts.

To my surprise, Chris was set to play at Northern Lights in Clifton Park, NY, on Nov. 10th. The venue is literally 0.9 miles from my parents' place! Within five minutes, I had already bought my tickets and had told pretty much everyone I know that I would be going to the concert. According to the website, Cornell and his touring band would be playing hits from his 13 album career, spanning bands like Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Audioslave, as well as some of his solo work.

If that sounds incredible to you, get this: the concert surpassed my expectations on every level. The opening act, the multi-racial Earl Greyhound from New York City, brought in some hard, soul power to the proceedings. A nice little appetizer for ridiculously incredible stuff that was to come.

Cornell made a grand entrance with "Let Me Drown", from the Soundgarden album, Superunknown. Standing at 40+ years, mellowed out, and in the middle of a transition into an adult contemporary like-solo career, Cornell still came out and worked it like old times. A six song acoustic set (which I really enjoyed), including "Call me a Dog," "Like a Stone," "I am the Highway," and his now infamous rendition of "Billie Jean," along with "Arms Around Your Love" was the mellowest this show got. The rest of show featured Cornell screaming and slamming through vocally demanding selections like "Outshined," "Jesus Christ Pose," "Rusty Cage," "Ty Cobb," "Cochise," and "Show Me How to Live."

All in all, he ended up performing 28 songs, with a lot of Soundgarden and Audioslave for the (relatively) older and younger fans alike. I'm guessing its got to be hard to please everyone when sampling from your greatest hits spanning a 20+ year period. It's a testament to the quality, depth and variety of this concert that my only complaint was that Cornell did not perform "Burden in My Hand." No worries, though: the multi-song encore more than made that little point irrelevant.

I could go on all day praising this concert. Instead of doing that, though, I'm going to let the proceedings speak for themselves. Check out this snap and video clip. The sound quality on the latter is quite suspect, mainly because I was so close to the stage and, therefore, the speakers. I hope you can make out that this is a snippet from "Spoonman." Enjoy.