Tom Morello review

From the SF Weekly:

It was midway through the Tom Morello hootenanny when Rage’s shredding machine grinned at the crowd and said, “Let me remind you, you all paid $15 to get in tonight. That’s like a buck a superstar.”

Actually, if you were gonna do the math, by the end of the night, we’d been entertained by Morello and his Freedom Fighter Orchestra, Steve Earle, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Sammy Freakin’ Hagar, Boots Riley of The Coup, Corey Taylor of Slipknot (sans mask of course), Joe Satriani, and Damian Kulash of OK Go, so technically it came out to something like $1.87 a superstar. But really, everyone at Slim’s was too busy pounding fists with fierce excitement to remember exactly how much they’d spent to get in. No matter the cost, they were getting their pennies’ worth–both in the energy the audience fed to the stage to the goodwill the headliners shot back at their fans. There was a lot of love in the room, man (and a lot of men in the room). Not to mention a lot of dollar bills that went to a righteous cause, thanks to the activist concept behind Morello’s Justice Tour, a singular concert that has you leaving feeling real good.
The political thrust behind these tours is, as Morello explained, to “bail out people, not banks.” An alternate version of this mantra, which he also espoused during the three-hour long show: “Feed the poor, fight the war, rock the fuck out.”

The Rage/Audioslave/Nightwatchman succeeded on pulling off all fronts last night. He gathered together a gaggle of rock gods during the day to personally wrap and hand out burritos with Project Open Hand, a San Francisco organization that feeds the needy, and one that received 100 percent of the ticket sales for last night’s show (plus all the $1, $5, and $10 bills people stuffed in its coffers by the end of the night at Morello’s repeated suggestions). But equally importantly, he also gathered those same ax slingers to get rowdy from the stage at night…

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