Review by Warren J. Eallonardo
The State University College of NY at Geneseo is better planted in my brain because I muscled my way into the front row, as the venue was general admission. The band had just played Saturday Night Live a month and a half prior, so we knew when certain things were coming and what they were going to sound like. For example, when Christopher Thorn got out his red Gibson SG, we knew it was Paper Scratcher, just like on SNL. When it was time for No Rain, unlike in Buffalo in September, it had the Ripped Away Version intro. I remember the band playing Tones of Home quite early in the show. Shannon threw some (approx. 5-8) tiny bouncy rubber balls in the air and he danced with them as they were bouncing with him in unison. It looked so cool, even choreographed. The best song of the night was Deserted, which was faster and more aggressive than on the album. I went in not a big fan of that song but left with an all new appreciation of it. They played Walk, which no one had ever heard before as Soup wasn't going to be released for another 20 months. At the end, they played Candy Says. This sticks out in my mind because the Change CD single hadn't yet been released and no one knew it. During the chorus, Shannon held out the microphone over the crowd and we were all as silent as church mice. Shannon got this look of confusion and anger, as if to say "how the heck don't these people know this song?" It was awkward considering he did the same thing a few songs earlier with No Rain and the crowd took over in great fashion and form. It seemed, at the time, like the crowd were just a bunch of No Rain fans and didn't know the band. But in retrospect, I know that there were plenty of people like me who knew every lyric and collected every rare track, but just weren't fans of Velvet Underground, the original performers of the song. Alice Donut played first. The song that stands out was their cover of the Beatles' Helter Skelter, with the lead vocals substituted with a trumpet. Meat Puppets played second, but Backwater was yet to be released and Nirvana's MTV Unplugged was in the wings, so they were, by in large, unknowns as well.
credit: blindmelon.org
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