Last Night: Tom Morello, Steve Earle, Wayne Kramer, Sammy Hagar, Boots Riley, Corey Taylor, Joe Satriani, and Damian Kulash

By Jennifer Maerz in Last Night

Thursday, Mar. 26 2009 @ 11:57PM

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.”

Click “Read the rest” for more, including footage of “Rock Candy”