Tom Morello at the Fillmore

Pardon my gushing but this show simply rocked. Part acoustic, part electric, ALL FACE MELTING AWESOME!

This review is a challenge from me to me: lets see if I can finish writing it before my ears stop ringing.

The intro act was a tiny black guy with fierce muttonchops. He is a rapper. Not a bling-bling bitches and hoes kind of rapper, an Oakland rapper and his stuff was all political. He also possessed easy, crisp diction, which immediately endears him to ME since I'm of the opinion the mush-mouth "yo, ganstas in da hood yo!" Timbaspeak of most rappers is a shortcut for dudes who can't be bothered to actually find words that rhyme. This guy could definitely rhyme. He played with his voice too: going high and low, almost like singing but not quite.

A recurring theme of the night was "it's the first show of the tour," with all the pros and cons that come with that. The rapper forgot his words a few times, and commented at one point about how he's used to having a whole band backing him up. Instead he had this one blond, If-Kurt-Cobain-Were-A-Biker-Guy acoustic guitarist supplying the "backing beats," a very basic set up, but hey, they made it work. And Boots Reilly has charisma. He reminded me of a cat: all cool, slow grace with sleepy eyes and wild edges. It was good, but I gotta admit, even when it's well done, rap is just not my thing, and while I admire the guy for fearlessly facing a new set up and clearly having buckets of talent, I was ready for the main event by the time his set was done. Too bad we had to wait some more while more people fuddled around with the gear. It seemed to take them forever.

At last, finally... they killed every light in the place. And when the lights came up again, there was that giant Negative Stars and Stripes up there. How it got up there so fast, I've got no clue, but I gotta say, that thing, full-sized, appearing out of nowhere does put a nice chill in the bones. Nice priming for the Nightwatchman's entrance: all in black with that baseball cap casting dark shadows on his face, suspenders hanging at his sides, and huge mirrored aviator sunglasses giving him a menacing kind of anonimity. Like or hate it, the Nightwatchman in full regalia, backed by that spooky flag, IS a pretty imposing image that Morello's kept pretty consistent ever since he began his solo exploits, but it doesn't always blend with Tom's actual, de-sunglassed stage persona: conversational, upbeat, and a full of a kind of crackling energy that might have been optimism. His knack for refering both himself and "the Nightwatchman" in the third person creates a kind of ironic seperation too: sometimes Tom Morello IS the Nightwatchman, and sometimes he's just telling us about his folk-rock creation. I forgive him because the Nightwatchman, real or fake, is an interesting character, and since there's irony anyway in a Stadium-Rock Guitar God like Morello masquarading as a shadowy, underground folk hero, the storytelling/fantasy element works just fine. Both Morellos, the real and the invented, are compelling personalities, and both of them rock pretty damn hard.

Tom seemed to enjoy letting us all know that this was the very FIRST show on the Fabled City tour, how he was originally going to start the tour in LA (cue the boos) but he remembered how much he loved San Francisco (cue the cheers). He remembered how he'd been performing at that very theater back in 2003 when the US first invaded Iraq, and how after the show he'd marched downtown in the anti-war protests. So he's got history with San Francisco, and this was clearly his crowd: both artistically and politically. This was clearly his crowd: if the T-shirts weren't Rage Against the Machine or Audioslave, they were The Nation or Cindy Sheehan for Congress or "Arrest Chaney First." Unlike Cornell, he didn't comment on the sharp smell of weed in the air.

He went through a few songs on his own, then brought out what he called The Freedom Fighter Orchestra, revealing the source of that Kurt Cobain look-alike. He was back and he had this black, old-looking electric, and I remember looking at him and thinking: damn, that's gotta be intimidating, playing electric guitar in a band with Tom Morello in it. The guy was decent through: sounded nice and big and fuzzed out and was in fact the ONLY electric guitar on the couple songs before Tom put down "Whatever it Takes"...... and picked up his infamous customized electric "Arm the Homeless."

"Well well, what have we here?" he said. And the crowd went crazy.

And that was the meat of the show. Plugged-in versions of songs off the first Nightwatchman record like "One Man Revolution," newer songs like "Whatever it Takes," a harrowing cover of the Ghost of Tom Joad, and even the heart-stopping into to "Bulls on Parade," which almost turned the crowd into a giant mosh-pit right then and there. It was a night big on emotional highs and lows: one minute you're leaping around, pumping your fist in time to thunderous electric rock and the next minute everyone's dead silent, listening to Tom strum quietly and sing without his mic. There was even a surprising RATM cover "Geurilla Radio" which, acoustic and sung in Tom's thoughtful, gravelly barratone, acquired a fascinatingly different kind of weight. The scratching solos were classic Morello, there were at least five mid-air splits, and he brought the house lights up so that he could watch us all sing (and jump) along to "This Land is Your Land." He told an awkward story about some 5-year old's mother asking him if they made stuffed animals of him, for her kid. He put down a guitar entirely for the verses of one particular song and it's odd seeing him onstage without one: he clung to the microphone with what looked like white-knuckles. The new stuff still had the edge of experimentation, and none of it was boring.

But it was also, again, their first show of the tour. Hell, the Freedom Fighter Orchestra uniform shirts still had their sharp fold-lines, and there were a few technical difficulties. I pity that poor unknown, hardworking guitar tech: every two minutes or so it seemed he had to rush out from the wings and tweak something or other. Tom broke a harmonica holder and needed to duck out of a song's chorus entirely to grab his back up. Something was wrong with Arm the Homeless in the middle of a song and THAT had to be fixed. All members of the band save the drummer gestured at the sound guy at some point with problems with the mix, and the band were jostling with each other onstage over who was supposed to go where... It's a testament to Morello and his band's stagecraft that he didn't let any of these shinanagans took you out of the moment for too long. After all, this is the first show, and clearly some edges are going to need ironing before they're a tight rocking unit. Didn't stop the show from being throughly enjoyable.

It was a long show. I won't lie, I was exhausted by the time it was over. But goddamn, if it wasn't great fun. It ended two hours ago, and finally the adrenaline is wearing off.

Si Ce Puede. Viva le Nightwatchman!