I saw Soundgarden in Tel Aviv last night - great concert through and through with a great setlist and excellent musicianship on display - especially from Kim Thayil. Opener Gogol Bordello was really awesome too - they play Gypsy Punk music and have a crazy eclectic set of musicians and instruments on stage.
Last night was also filled with nostalgia and had me remember the time I almost saw Soundgarden in the 11th grade, back in 1996.
When I was in 10th and 11th grade, Soundgarden was easily one of my favorite bands. I knew 1994's Superunknown note for note and remember going out of my way to buy Down on the Upside with my brother Yaakov very soon after it came out - and both of us listening to that album over and over again.
I was supposed to see Soundgarden at NYC's Roseland Ballroom during the fall of 1996. I had gotten back from a 6-week teen tour in Israel and one of the girls I had become better friends with, Allison Ashenberg (who actually lives in Israel now), hooked up tickets for me, her and a couple of other people who now escape me to catch Soundgarden on the 3rd night of a 3 night run. From what I can remember, by night 2 of the run Chris Cornell's voice was totally shot to hell and they only played for like an hour and 15 minutes.
At this point in the story, I should point out was not allowed to see concerts at the Roseland, Irving Plaza, or any other place that had a mosh pit. My parents being good protective types had read in horror that some kid was stomped to death in the moshpit at a Smashing Pumpkins show at the Academy and that was the end of my chance to see most of the bands I was listening to live in concert.
I had no choice really - I did what any teenager that was even remotely independent would: I made up an elaborate alibi about some get together from my summer teen tour in the city that was going to end late and force me to sleep in the city. Thankfully people under 20 didn't own cell phones in 1996 so once I left my house in Riverdale, I didn't have to worry about being called by my parents and getting caught in my web of lies.
I headed downtown and went to hang out with this girl from my bus that summer who I kind of had a thing for, Aliza Finkle. Plus her apartment was right next to Washington Square Park in the West Village, which in high school seemed to be about as cool a place as anyone could live. And her parents were really interesting people - her mom used to be a model of some sort and they had really cool books and music and seemed incredibly worldly.
At about 5 Allison got a call that Soundgarden had cancelled the show because Chris Cornell had the flu. Fuckers! I had made up an elaborate alibi for no reason. They would reschedule the show at a later date they said. A couple months later, Soundgarden broke up and so I never got to see them. Until last night that is.
After hearing the show was cancelled, I hung out downtown for a few more hours and then made my way up to Jonathan Smith's house on the Upper East side where I was sleeping. I was supposed to catch a bus out to my school in New Jersey the next morning.
At roughly 10:30 p.m., I got a panicked call from my Dad. He had somehow tracked down Jonathan Smith's number. He had realized I had never left the number of where I was staying and called another kid from my summer tour's parents (AJ Stone) - and found out that there was no bus get-together that night.
Smith and I were sitting facing each other taking waterfall rips and blowing them through a laundry sheet stuffed into a cardboard paper towel roll in his bathroom (as if that's actually masked the smell of anything before) when his Dad knocked on the door and said I had an urgent phone call. I'm pretty sure the Smith's entire east side apartment smelled like the lawn at a Grateful Dead show - maybe his parents had an insanely bad sense of smell - but there didn't seem to be any parental issues on his end, only mine.
I had smoked marijuana only a handful of times at this point of my life - and I'd never had to actually talk to my parents before while high. Needless to say as paranoid as I was, my Dad was a lot more paranoid as he suspected that the reason I had made up an elaborate web of lies wasn't to see Soundgarden - which I had had to confess to when he found out there was no get-together - but to engage in the evils of teen soft drug use.
I somehow managed to eventually get off the phone with him - and when I got home from school the next night I had to endure a multi-hour interrogation from both him and my Mom, with the two of them playing good cop/bad cop.
The entire experience didn't stop me from occasionally getting high in high school - very rarely on school nights - I was a very responsible student with aspirations of attending a top college. The occasional toke is too damn fun - we'd generally spend hours acting goofy and giggling after a smoke - to believe all the stupidity adults feed you about how it will get you to try harder drugs, stop caring about anything and ruin your life.
Actually I can say based on my own personal experiences that in retrospect, the opposite of all those things is true. The occasional smoke in high school made me less constrained by standard modes of thinking and allowed me to take more mental risks that I think ultimately have made me a much more successful person - in both work and life. It turns out that in most fields and human interactions generally, the ability to step outside of your preconceived views and break down the doors of perception (to use an overquoted phrase) is highly valued and rewarded. I'm not saying you need a literal drug to achieve that - but very few people are born with the ability to step outside themselves and be truly creative. And so there's generally some out of body experience or trigger experience that allows the people that are truly creative to tap into an ability that we're all born with, a bit better and more deeply than the rest of us.
All of this was going through my mind as Soundgarden burned through 19 songs in a little over 2 hours - including half of Superunkown, which just had a special 20th anniversary release (that made me feel old!). My personal highlights were an especially hard-rocking Jesus Christ Pose (with Chris Cornell introducing the song as 'about a dude born not far from here, a craftsman, a carpenter and generally badass guy' which left most of the Israelis scratching their heads trying to figure out who he was talking about), pretty much everything from Superunknown including a slowed down, especially angsty 4th of July and great audience sing along on Blow up the Outside World, and Beyond the Wheel which was their final song and ended with Kim Thayil on stage alone in some sort of weird guitar worshiping ritual that created lots of cool distortion and ambient sounds.
And yes, I got to taste my first mosh pit, finally at age 34 ;-) The mainly tattooed and pierced dudes in the pit were all smiles whenever they collided with someone - all that angst that must have existed in mosh pits when the participants were 16 seems to have melted away now that they're in their 30s and early 40s. Seems like we all turned out pretty much ok in the end.
