Yngwie Malmsteen 1994 or 1995, my first and last concert with him. He had a whole band but played only a couple of songs and even then the spotlight was always on him. And ever so often in between songs he just shredded away to show how fast he was. Musical value: zero. Then he switched to acoustic and continued the mindless shredding but with an even worse sound. And every minute or so he paused, raised his arms in the air and was awaiting the applaus, which came less and less. Out of the roughly 90 minute set, it felt like 80 minutes were him noodling aimlessly on the guitar. I knew before that he had a big ego and probably was a dick, but this concert raised the standards for egomaniac to whole new levels.
Soundgarden 1996. The place was packed with way too many people, like putting 10 pounds of shit into a five pound bag. The place was hot and overcrowded and we waited for the concert to begin. You could see the drumset for soundgarden in the back and the one for the support act in front.
The support act started and was only mildly interesting (a band called Eleven). They finished and we were waiting for Soundgarden. The stagehands carried the drumset off stage only to bring another one. Turned out there was a second support act, hooray! The place was now even hotter and even more overcrowded. The second support act (Moby with a punk band) was boring but we endured it, waiting for the main act. Moby finished and the stagehands carried the drumset away, only to bring another one. Alright! Three support acts, double time hooray!!! A band called Sponge (sadly without a bob) then got on our nerves. They were just plain bad and what made it even worse was, that they tried to cover Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. But they murdered and slaughtered the tune, it was atrocious.
Then, after maybe two hours of terrible support acts, Soundgarden finally came on stage. The place was now hotter than a finnish sauna. There were more people collapsing in the front row than young girls on any boy group concert, because of the heat.
From the start it was obvious that Cornell had severe problems with his voice. He was more screeching and screaming than singing. He tried to get through, but on the last songs his voice gave away and you could barely hear him. The bass player stood there the whole time like he was bored out of his mind, and the guitar player seemed angry about everything. It was not fun to watch and less fun to listen too. If it wasn’t so crowded that we literally had no chance of getting to the exit, we would have left after the first couple of songs.