Last night’s Sandy 12.12.12 Relief Concert featured several forgettable performances from an array of artists selected with no kind of musical continuity in mind. You had your standard Bruce Springsteen “everythings gonna be okay” type rocking, along with Alicia Keys in a backless pant suit, Roger Daltry forgetting to button his shirt, and Kanye West doing karaoke in a leather dress. Basically it was a telethon with obligatory over-the-top numbers, for an obligatory large audience, for a good cause we all just want to start forgetting ever happened.
The final shebang of the evening was the promise of rock legend Paul McCartney teaming with the remaining members of the classic grunge group Nirvana, for some live distortion. They let Pat Smear in the gang too, who briefly played with David Grohl’s band the Foo Fighters, and often accompanied Nirvana on tour, for when Kurt was too botched to play those really tough power chords. Perhaps I misread the situation, but I assumed this supergroup was going to burn through something off of Nevermind, given the buzz surrounding the event. But they played this instead:
Alas, it was not the Nirvana reunion we’d been promised, which is actually probably a good thing. Paul played through a Bo Diddly-shaped electric resonator guitar/bass (?) type thing, which should have been the first hint he wasn’t going to dive into “Come As You Are.” Instead, they broke into a slide heavy hard rocking number called “Cut Me Some Slack,” which Grohl intends to put into his upcoming film “Sound City Movie.”
It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, if not a bit generic, but for those hoping to see Paul screech through some of Cobain’s rhetoric, the climax came as a bit of a letdown. No word yet when Ringo and Pearl Jam will be getting together.