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Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt and Gary Cherone jumped onstage with Tom Morello on Friday night (June 2) to cover Audioslave classic Cochise.
The performance took place at the Best of Blues and Rock festival 2023 in São Paulo, Brazil, where both Extreme and Morello were on the bill.
Naturally, the pairing of old guitar buddies Morello and Bettencourt meant the track simply had to have an extended call-and-response solo section, opening with Morello’s groaning lead from the original, before Bettencourt dropped some wailing bends and syncopated funk (even if the sound engineer forgot to crank Nuno up to begin with).
Morello follows up with one of his old tricks – the classic slide + toggle switching = DJ equation – before Bettencourt rounds things out with leads as bluesy as we’ve ever heard from the virtuoso.
It’s business as usual for the rest of the song, as Cherone reaches into his upper register to channel Chris Cornell’s monster vocal range. Props to Bettencourt’s spooky harmonics in the middle eight, too.
In a pre-show press conference, Morello shared his thoughts on Bettencourt: “He's been a huge influence,” he said. “Combining funky music with heavy music and then musicianship with abandon are things that have been involved in this band and I think in Nuno's playing from the very start.”
Bettencourt reciprocated Morello’s praise, joking, “It's funny because when we heard Rage Against the Machine for the first time, we loved it so much that we hated them. We have this saying that Jimmy Page – and I said this to Jimmy Page, I thought Jimmy Page wrote all the great rock ’n’ roll riffs and threw the rest of us all the scraps, the bones. And that was until I heard Rage Against the Machine.
“Every riff was monstrous; it was everything. And the fact that they had a rapper took it to a whole other level of genre and changed the game.”
The performance also marked Bettencourt’s return to the stage after suffering a knee injury that caused him to perform a date sitting down and cancel a subsequent show.
Bettencourt and Morello have performed together on several occasions in the past, most notably on their cover of the Game of Thrones theme tune using Fender’s highly limited electric guitars inspired by the hit HBO show.
Extreme’s new album, Six, is out on Friday (June 9) – last week, the band unveiled new single Other Side of the Rainbow, which Bettencourt says features his favorite solo on the whole album.
