Soundgarden Comes Home To An Adoring, Raucous Crowd

Soundgarden, with the Melvins, last night and tonight at the Paramount Theatre. --------------------------------------------------------------- It was sonic carnage, but it was so damn clean.

Like the Bolshoi with chainsaws, Soundgarden and a fair portion of the Paramount audience danced, dove and generally ran amok last night for the opener of the band's two-night stand - it plays again tonight.

The band was obviously glad to be back home, and the months it spent on the road opening for the likes of Skid Row and Guns N' Roses had the group returning tremendously polished and perfectly at ease with what is now for it a smaller house. Lead singer Chris Cornell treated the Paramount like a night club, only louder and grander. Headlining larger venues next is the only conceivable step.

If things got off to a slow start with The Melvins - the trio gives new meaning to the word dirge - the pace picked up in a hurry after the break when J.P. Patches took the stage to introduce Soundgarden. It was old home week in an almost Fellini-esque sense. "Quiet it down," Patches said to the audience, most of whom he'd at one time had some oversized hand in raising. "What are you guys doing here? Come to think of it what am I doing here?"

With that the barnyard audit opening of "Searching with My Good Eye Closed" played across the sound system and the band was up, Cornell striding to his post up front, Kim Thayil a stoic second banana on guitar, bassist Ben Shepherd speed-staggering across the stage like a drunken crab and drummer Matt Cameron sitting pat and holding tight.

The balcony literally began to bounce under the weight and movement of the audience and a never-ending parade of stage divers took and exited the stage. Security's ranks were split by the crowd, the line of monitor speakers at the apron of the stage were a tactical nightmare.

Cornell didn't even blink. While singing "out of my way," he cheerfully shouldered one invader back into the mosh pit. When another audience member took a stance directly in front of the singer, Cornell expertly placed his foot on the young man's chest and sent him sailing backwards. There was no malice on either side. It was simply a rock-'n'-roll show with the homies and everyone was going to get in their 15 nano-seconds of fame and glory. Even Cornell got into it, somersaulting into the crowd before the third song, loosing his shirt and almost getting back to the stage pantless.

But one of the most striking visual moments of the performance was when the lithe singer scaled a ladder over the black cyclone fence that guarded the amplifiers, scampered across a catwalk and perched above the stage on a center-speaker stack. Haunched down with a single spot casting a full-moon-like shadow on the backscrim?, Cornell howled in the night like a junkyard dog. It was good.

The 90-plus-minute set was fairly balanced between "BadMotorfinger," the band's latest release, and its predecessors "Louder Than Love" and "Ultramega OK." Still the emphasis was on the new. "Searching . . . ," "Holy Water" and "Room a Thousand Years Wide" were quickly dispensed. "Outshined" and "Jesus Christ Pose" were worked in later.

Cornell alternated between straight vocalizing and playing second guitar, which he did for nearly half the set. The arrangements were stretched out and polished up, but never so severely that the band couldn't take four left turns at once.

Thayil was in a particularly playful mood all night, and at one point drummer Cameron went from leading the audience in a swaying side wave to a quasi-aerobics exercise.

J.P. Patches made a quick return, there was a grammar lesson we can't get into, a brief gold-record ceremony and by the end of the encore's third and final song, "Slaves & Bulldozers," the tiring stage divers' relentless forward motion was reduced to the slow clutching crawl of desperate pilgrims, reaching helplessly to Cornell as he raised his microphone in a final benediction, before chucking it into the sea of damp flesh.

It took the roadies a couple of minutes before they could fish the thing back out. It screamed the whole time.