Audioslave Rocked!

Wowwwwwwwwwwwwww, man. There were a lot of wicked happy Audioslave fans at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco today. I am unbelievably pleased I saw this show. They started off with a rockin' version of "Your Time Has Come" from the Out of Exile album. They played a few songs and then turned on the wayback machine... they ripped into "Rusty Cage" from the first (?) Soundgarden album. This was followed by the high point of my evening: Spoonman. I never got to see Soundgarden live, so this is the closest I'll ever get to seeing them. Even more surprising, they followed that with "Hunger Strike" by Temple of the Dog. Since they did Soundgarden covers, it was only fair that a little later they did several Rage Against the Machine songs. They did an instrumental version of "Bulls On Parade", as well as "Testify", and "Sleep Now In the Fire." Later during the very long encore they also did a smoking "Killing In the Name"and Chris Cornell did a wonderful acoustic "Black Hole Sun." With a complement of their original songs, this was a killer, killer show, probably the best I've seen all year.

Chris Cornell's voice was awesome as usual. He does a very decent likeness of Zak de la Rocha for the Rage songs. The rhythm section was on as always too. The real treat for me was seeing Tom Morello play again. He is a superlative guitarist. A few times he did this thing I've never seen before where he was fretting the the e and B strings and then suddenly flipped his hand around the neck of the guitar to somehow fret the E and A strings. That was completely out of control!! Most of the time he was playing his "Soul Power" strat. The rest of the time he alternated between his telecaster and a Les Paul. For a few songs he played what looked like a Kramer or Ibanez with a silver finish.