To be honest, I was never a huge Soundgarden fan. I only saw them live once, but amazingly I found a review online of that show.
http://buffalonews.com/2013/12/25/tuned-in-2/The year was 1986. The venue, the QE2, located in downtown Albany. Home for the summer from Fredonia State College, I joined a few friends and my girlfriend at the time to head for the now-closed alternative music haunt ? QE2 was the Albany equivalent of Buffalo?s much-missed Continental ? to catch a buzzed-about heavy rock/funk hybrid from New York City known as Living Colour.
The place was packed, and we were unaware that an opener was on the bill that evening. So it was with a significant degree of shock that I encountered Seattle?s Soundgarden for the first time. Singer Chris Cornell arrived shirtless, and did these guys ever raise a ruckus. The paint appeared to be peeling off the walls as the band played a bunch of what I later learned was the ?Screaming Life EP,? as well as a few tunes from what would be released as ?Louder Than Love.? I recall Cornell jumping up on the QE2 bar, and screaming holy murder from a vantage point a mere few feet in front of me and my group of friends. It was pretty incredible. Soundgarden ended up being one of my favorite bands of the following decade. There?s a photo somewhere of me leaving the QE2 that night with my eyes wide, an emerging scream obfuscated by the Soundgarden sticker my friend Trevor had affixed to my mouth. Good times.
Times made even better, in fact, by the headliner. Living Colour was one of the more interesting bands of the later ?80s. There weren?t a whole lot of legitimately gritty, aggressive funk bands around at the time. Living Colour took a bit from Bad Brains, a bit from Ornette Coleman, a bit from classic heavy metal, and a lot from Defunkt, the band that founder Vernon Reid was a member of for a short time.
Soundgarden would go on to claim the ?grunge? mantle, and then to move into a heavy progressive psychedelia that, happily, brought the band surprising commercial popularity despite its density. Living Colour would have significant success with the debut effort ?Vivid,? but would fold back into cult-level status almost immediately thereafter, releasing a stream of funk-metal masterpieces that continues to this day but enjoying little of the commercial spotlight.
Note: This writer wrote another article about this show, saying it happened in 1989. I'm not sure which is right, I'm actually going to guess 1988.
