A Paramount Affair

[L-R: Tosh, Nancy, Heidi, Laurie, Dolly and Lydia. All photos by Steph. Thanks, Steph!]

Experiencing Chris Cornell’s show from the front row of the pit at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre was a testament to the resilience of a forty-one year old body. Ever since living in Seattle in the early 90’s during a time when I couldn’t afford a Soundgarden poster, much less a concert, I yearned for more than watching Matt Dillon channel Chris Cornell for his role in the movie, Singles, or running into Eddie Vedder at the local grocery store, or spying Layne Staley picking up a copy of his latest CD at the Fred Meyers on Capitol Hill. I wanted to hear them sing so clear and loud it made the floor beneath me tremble.

In Seattle on Wednesday night, it trembled.

After weeks of intense e-mail planning, eight like-minded female fans and I from across the country conspired to descend upon the Emerald City on October 3 with one goal in mind—to see Cornell from the rail. This might not be so noteworthy had we all been in our early twenties, as one or two of our group was, but most of our group fell between the ages of 37 and 48. At 41, I represented the mean. I was the perfect study model for this experiment.

I flew in first and staked a place in line around 1 p.m. as the other gals made their way down from the previous evening’s Vancouver show. Vancouver, while reporting an amazing 2 ½ hour set, had been a rather genteel affair—at least from the standpoint of the audience. It was reserved seating on the floor and the balcony. Seattle would be general admission and, generally speaking, it would be mayhem.

Life in the pit during any rock concert is interesting and fraught with peril. I have ducked teenagers before at Rage Against the Machine, Godsmack and Foo Fighters’ concerts, and I know how quickly someone else’s Doc Martens can find the back of your head. Life on the rail, I quickly learned, is another beast altogether.

The operative word here is pressure. You have the length of the opening act in which to breathe; once the center of everyone’s attention enters the room, breathing becomes a luxury not to be experienced until the show and all of its encores have finished.


Speaking of the main attraction… Chris entered the stage wearing black low-rise (emphasis on low) jeans and dark lace-up boots. He wore a ¾ sleeve T-shirt with horizontal blue and white stripes that for some reason looked like something one might purchase in France. A black double-breasted jacket topped it off. His hair was long, wild and full of curls, dyed a deep, almost black-brown. From ten feet away, his blue-green eyes could pierce steel—or melt it. Times like these one could be grateful for a rail to lean upon.



Though he entered to the opening strains of Silence the Voices, he carried not a microphone but rather a broom and dustpan from the Paramount’s janitorial closet. He shuffled to and fro as he made his way closer to the front of the stage, not looking up until he was front and center. Feigning surprise at the crowd already beside themselves, he began to sing, leaning on the broom and dustpan with eyes closed. Yogi’s guitar roadie made his way towards Chris and coaxed the cleaning supplies from his hands. Whether or not he re-strung the broom later is still unknown.

As Chris sang his anti-war anthem, a handful of easily-recognizable fans sat stage left, just out of the lights. Most noticeable was wife Vicky and their two children, Toni and Chris Jr. Vicky’s mother, a mirror-image of her daughter and assumed by most of us to be Vicky’s sister, joined them as well. The kids were soon at Chris' feet.


And then, it began. The pressure cooker. Our group of nine was stationed combat-style elbow to elbow, wide-stanced, front and center. Laurie and I split the very center of the stage. We were all determined to stay connected, but we underestimated the forces we were up against. Might as well have tried to stop a herd of stampeding buffalo. Somewhere in song number three, No Such Thing, I was faced with a decision. The crowd surge from behind, while expected, was far more powerful than I had anticipated. There were spear-like elbows striking my ribs with deadly force, and every pint of air I had taken in prior to that point had now been expelled from my body like the last dregs of toothpaste from an empty tube.

I still had my goal—my mission: to stare without reservation at the object of my affection, whom I believed would never be this close to my person again. I added one last minute goal as Let me Drown began: to survive the show conscious and free of broken bones. I was beginning to doubt my ability to achieve the latter. Try as I might to focus on Chris belting out the high notes directly in front of me, I could not keep myself from wondering at exactly what point the bones of one’s forearms might snap as they tried to stem the force of hundreds of rabid fans behind them. How many pounds of force were required to fracture a rib, I pondered as yet another elbow slammed between two of my screaming ribs. I was wishing now I would have worn one of those bull-riding vests. I looked to my right and saw Laurie, veteran rocker, holding firm, despite a split lip as a frantic couple in their fifties were lifted/dragged over her head. I glanced to my left to see new friend Dolly, a good 60 pounds lighter and 17 years younger than me, grimacing in pain but holding fast, still finding enough air to sing. If Dolly could bear it, I thought, surely I could. Though, of course, her bones would heal much faster…

During the next several songs I adopted a Zen-like approach to the experience. As I have no knowledge of Zen spiritualism whatsoever, you may feel free to take that with a grain of salt. I decided that sure, my body could have withstood this abuse much easier back in 1991, but mentally I was far stronger now than I was back then. And that is where I put my faith. That, and a fairly comprehensive health insurance plan. I had been careful to bring my driver’s license and credit card along for the ride, but I was now questioning the wisdom of leaving my health card back at the hotel.

Before we hit the fifth song, Outshined, women and men were being lifted, dragged and pulled over our heads by a bevy of security guards who wore the not-too-reassuring look of several large deer in the headlights. I stood more chance of being rescued by my new mates than by these guys, I decided. I hoped it would not be necessary. Dolly was under more duress than ever now, but I noticed that a man behind her had braced both of his arms to either side of her on the rail to provide some buffer from the relentless crowd. I found this both reassuring and envy-inducing, as all I had behind me was a young girl who, it seemed, would soon be fused onto my spine.

Chris. Songs—Show Me How to Live (through this, I thought) and Say Hello to Heaven (also appropriate). Yogi’s guitar screaming at us directly at ear level. My eyes fixed helplessly on that area between the bottom of Chris’ striped shirt and the top of his low black jeans. Every time he raised his arms above his head he revealed a land I would always dream of visiting, at which point I lost any and all self-respect and crumpled into the rail. I’d tear my eyes away to watch his face but as those eyes passed over the front lines of his fans I would be overpowered and forced to lower them once again. Was he even singing? Did it even matter? Breathing became less and less important. The shirt soon became unimportant, too.



Somehow I had managed to cling yet to the sign I had made on my coffee table two nights before. I was such a dork. I drew it with multi-colored Sharpies and covered it with laminate, expecting rain. All it lacked was neon lights. As Chris took his first breather and went acoustic he asked for, and received, requests. He recognized those from our group who had been in Vancouver the night before and made an effort to read the sign they had made up while sitting for hours in front of the venue. He chose one of their songs, Wide Awake, and played it, to all of our delight.





[Chris and guitarist Peter Thorn]

“Tom Morello used to say this was the most political song we ever wrote.” He told us. “But Tom didn’t write it, I did.” I looked around for Tom, expecting an argument. No Tom. He said something about never forgetting what had happened before, during and after Katrina, adding what we already knew—that this song had arisen from those emotions. He wrote, he played it, and we sang it.

At the next pause I held my sign up again, regardless of the risk to my ribs as my arms were no longer braced to protect them. To compensate, I bent at the hip and jammed my knees into the grill of the rail to create room to draw a breath. Later I would discover a rainbow of bruises to show the pressure my knees had absorbed.

My brightly-colored but pathetic sign still seemed invisible to Chris. Forty-one years of being invisible, culminating in complete transparency at the very feet of my number one icon. Me, bitter? I made a fateful decision and tossed the sign as carefully as I could to a point on the stage beside him. It hit his right boot. Shit. This, he noticed. He laughed and bent down, still holding his guitar, to pick it up.

“Just play it, Fucker!” He laughed. I was mortified but no more noticed than I had been a few minutes before. He held it up to the crowd to show the side which requested Call Me A Dog. “It landed this side up so I don’t have to play the other one.” He dropped the sign and launched into my song. My song.

He didn’t have to see me in the crowd, I reasoned. New BFF Tosh had offered me her spare pass to go backstage. Backstage to meet Chris Cornell. Top of my To Do list (okay, right under Evict Bat From Attic). All I had to do was survive another two hours of bone-crushing madness. Thanks to a healthy dose of adrenaline and pride, I did—even when he jumped down from the stage right in front of us and pretended to be a rabid fan of Peter, eventually breaking 4 of his 5 strings. Peter continued to play on his last string, unfazed.



















Things moved insanely fast following the show. Most of us were fully occupied trying to re-inflate our lungs, but I think we all managed to find a comb and run it through our gnarled and sweaty hair. I’m sure it helped immensely. ;o) Anybody would be a beauty after sitting outside for 6 hours, then enduring 2 ½ hours of extreme heat and physical violence. We were a picture, to be sure. Within minutes of the show ending we were ushered by the tour manager along the side of the stage, up some narrow stairs. I passed a large trash can and was tempted to throw up all my nerves into it. Instead I dug out a melted Junior Mint and sucked on it, thinking it might make my breath just slightly more appealing than stomach bile. A group of 12 or so, we filed down a hallway and into an elevator, where I requested No Moshing from the exhausted group. I leaned gratefully against the wall of the little box until we reached our destination. I can’t tell you if we went up or down. I was still spinning.

Into a room that looked ready to stage a convention for door-to-door vacuum salesmen. Shabby chic. Okay—just shabby. No band, yet. We all noticed the table which held several iced waters and sodas. None of us had any voice to speak of (pun intended) and a young kid my friends knew from the Cornell Discussion Boards wasted no time asking if we could have some. They waved us over. A small woman stuck her head out of some nearby curtains and brought our attention to a small cluster of chocolate cupcakes with white frosting and chocolate sprinkles.

“Eat the cupcakes! They’re really good!” For the first time in my life, I had no desire whatsoever to consume chocolate cake. This, I thought, was powerful stuff. Give me a week with Chris Cornell and there was no telling how much weight I could lose. (Oh, the places I could take that last statement…)

Word passed through the small crowd that “they” were coming. “They” did indeed arrive, entering the room in single file. Guitarist Yogi, bassist Corey, Chris, guitarist Peter, and drummer Jason. I lost my balance and fell back on Laurie’s feet, who waved it off most graciously. The fivesome made their way across the room and into chairs behind a long table without incident. Goddamn—the pure talent!

We waited as a family of four asked Chris to sign dozens of professional pictures, which left him grumbling. Then a couple took their iPods up to be signed. So much for that original idea—my iPod and phone were all I had to be signed, other than my book, The Shipping News, which had ridden out the storm shoved into the left sleeve of my coat,

It’s funny—I am not a huge worshipper of signatures, but something about having them all right there, twiddling their Sharpies in anticipation, made me want to get every surface of every belonging I had tattooed with their initials. Thankfully for all involved, I resisted the urge. As I made my way to Chris, I thanked Jason and Peter, for whom I had nothing to sign. Bad groupie. Then, Chris.

Chris looked at me expectantly. Insert witty phrase here.

“Sorry I threw my sign at you,” I croaked.

“That’s okay.” He smiled. I started fumbling with my electronics. “I didn’t know—I didn’t bring anything to sign.” I looked up and he smiled still, kindly, no sign of him rolling his eyes, as I was doing to myself. “All I have is my phone and my iPod.”

He scooped them both up and pocketed them. “Thanks very much!” He said. “Have a great night!”



I took a step further down the line, feeling like I had just made a modern-day sacrifice to a modern-day god. I looked him directly in the eye. “You can have anything of mine you want.”

Jesus Christ [Pose]. What did I just say? I hoped my voice was still inaudible. He laughed again and put my items on the table. He signed them both and handed them back to me. He was still smiling, and I was amazed that it did not look pasted there. Oh, it may very well have been, but he did a remarkable job of making it look genuine. I was grateful for that. Tosh was moving right up behind me when I remembered the one thing I had wanted to get from him. (Not that. I hadn’t lost ALL my senses.)
I drew his gaze away from Tosh as I asked him if I could shake his hand.

“Of course!” And he did. Firm, friendly, warm. Eye contact. Heaven Beside Me.

Soon road manager Yonnie was yelling that we needed to get our picture and get moving. A small battle ensued as Yonnie and our group argued about whether we would be in front of or behind the table to get our picture. Funny how it comes down to the smallest things… We had to get Chris’ attention to confirm to Yonnie that yes, we could file behind them. File we did. A force stronger than nature made me stop directly behind Chris. I could not, would not, move any further. I had come a long, long way for this, and I don’t mean the distance between Wisconsin and Washington, or even the 17 years. Something else. I think I did everything but pee on his chair to stake my territory. Really, one of my finest moments.

Until, of course, I found myself holding rabbit ears up over Chris’ head as the first flash went off. Holy shit, I thought. I can’t take me anywhere! The girls told me to behave. Sure, I said, as my hand settled on Chris’ back. Anything you want.

Anything you want.