walls.corpus

Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction photos and thoughts

Monday, 15 June, 2009 — photography music

I have photos from the concert up on Flickr. So far, I have 12 from Nine Inch Nail’s portion. In the next couple of days, I’ll have a few from Jane’s Addiction. There are quite a few photos from other Flickr users, too.

Some observations and thoughts on the concert:

• Nine Inch Nails performed as a four piece. Robin Finck was the only support player I’d previously seen with NIN in-concert. But, nothing seemed lacking by having one less person on stage.
• NIN had better sound than Jane’s Addiction. Vocals and instrumentation were very well balanced.
• Back in Section 13, Dave Navarro and Eric Avery’s work seemed too much for Farrell to sing over. Part of this is I’m not incredibly familiar with Jane’s Addiction’s material, so without knowing what all of the songs where, I had a harder time keeping up. @lkmi wondered if it was just the nature of Perry Farrell’s voice.
• Jane’s Addiction had a more thorough light show. They also had the benefit of going onstage after twilight.
• Compared to the Lights in the Sky and With Teeth tours, NIN’s lighting and presentation was greatly simplified. What there was was well done.
• NIN covered a wide variety of material, including a couple of more obscure tracks from The Downward Spiral. I don’t recall anything from Ghosts I-IV. Songs I was surprised (but not disappointed) not to hear: “Closer”. “Starfuckers” was also not in the set. We did get “Metal,” “Burn,” and “I’m Afraid of Americans,” however.
• Street Sweeper Social Club was already on stage when we arrived. We caught the last three songs of their set. They rocked and I wish we’d been there a bit sooner to see Boots Riley and Tom Morello do their thing.
• Overall, this was the most on-time show I’ve seen at a large venue. No issue of “Rock Standard Time” here. Set changes were efficient.
• I’m pretty sure it was Rob Sheridan I saw photographing side-stage in the later stages of NIN’s set, after the fans were moved off-stage. Then, during “Head Like a Hole,” he was onstage filming video. I hope this makes it into the growing list of High Definition videos from the stage Sheridan’s been posting.
• This was my third NIN show in as many states. Past shows were: Sacramento, Calif. in June, 2000 (Fragility 2.0) and Richmond, Virginia, in March 2006 (Live: With Teeth)