38 years ago I say Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden, and Mother Love Bone for $4 at the Paramount

I was a recent transplant. I’d heard of all three bands by then, but had only heard Jane’s Addiction because they’d released Nothing’s Shocking and were already getting pushed so much by their label that they were already in the process of being the ‘only alternative band that frat boys were going to tolerate’.

Mother Love Bone opened the show and welp, I was a white suburban snot-nosed little wannabe punk who thought a ferry ride to Natacha’s in Bremerton(The ‘riot’ incident had happened before I had moved to the PNW) was the shit, so watching Andrew Wood didn’t really do anything for me.

He was wearing crushed red velvet bell-bottoms with metallic silver stars sewn onto them, and no shirt. His stage persona was something I just could not vibe with, the cheesy sex symbol rockstar persona just didn’t really land either as genuine or parody and the music I found forgettable.

Next came Soundgarden. I want to say I had heard only maybe one song by them before, and they fuckin’ blew me away. This was when they were still in their ‘Acid Punk/Zen Metal’ phase, and the glorious harmonic droning of Thayil’s guitar mixed with Cornell’s incredible vocals made me go out and save money to buy a vinyl copy of the Screaming Life EP, sadly long ago sold to Amoeba in LA during a time of economic uncertainty. Cornell also had on so of the most gloriously ripped/faded jeans I had ever seen worn by a musician until less than a year later I saw some the lead singer of some band playing in the small living room of those Evergreen State College communal ‘Quad’ dorms, who I would later find out was named Cobain, the band being Nirvana.

Finally, Jane’s Addiction put on a good show. tight, good lighting and sound, played most of their new album. But it was seriously anticlimactic after Soundgarden. It reminded me of the passage in No One Here Gets Out Alive detailing how an unknown Led Zeppelin opened for a sold out show for The Doors, and after Zeppelin played, half the stadium left rather than tolerate Ray Mazarek’s Boomer noodling and Morrison’s pretentious poetry.

Less than a year later I would get a job with FA, the Fallen Angels, the black-clad venue security team and worked as a bouncer and occasional stagehand mostly at the Moore for the next five years. This means that I have no ticket stubs for 95% of the shows I attended. So glad I still have this one.

But this was one of my first shows in Seattle, and while I never really clicked with Soundgarden’s evolving into more Metal than Zen Metal or Acid Punk, goddamn did their set at the Paramount absolutely 187 the audience.

I now live in Los Angeles. You can name any country in the world and their largest expatriate population will be in LA. Just as the Sufis say that all the religions of the world are the colored panes of glass in a lamp with God being the light that shines through all of them, so Los Angeles is a city filled with the different peoples and races who are the different colored panes of glass with humanity the light that shines through it. It makes it the crown jewel of this American experiment, and the reason why Los Angeles was attacked by Trump and his NeoConfederate trash first.

But I am never leaving Seattle.

At least, not in spirit anyways..