By now, there’s a kind of collective Kubler-Ross process that we all go through with the deaths of beloved musicians, accompanied by varying degrees of grief and angst. The one-two gut punch of Prince and Bowie last year will be pretty hard to top. And now, Soundgarden lead singer Chris Cornell has died at age 52 of suicide. Cornell wasn’t quite as famous, and so he won’t be grieved as much as Bowie or Prince. But in crucial respects, there’s a lot to be said for the nature of Cornell’s talent and his deceptively influential musical legacy.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and while in high school from 1990-94, played guitar in a band that was good enough to play clubs Portland and Seattle, and thankfully not good enough to be embarrassed decades later by having its songs floating around on the internet. But I did grow up reading The Rocket with talmudic interest and can cite chapter and verse of grunge history. Obviously, Kurt Cobain was a big personality in spite of himself, and more than 25 years after he started singing with Pearl Jam, I’m not sure Eddie Vedder has ever resisted the urge to shut up in front of a microphone. And yet, Soundgarden—Cornell especially—always remained ciphers.
A couple months back, I caught a concert video of a reformed Soundgarden on MTV Live. In between songs, they did backstage interviews of the band. The main takeaway from the interviews was that these guys really don’t enjoy talking about themselves. And aside from an infamous live cover of Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom Girls,” levity was never Soundgarden’s strong suit.
The relative lack of navel gazing is actually refreshing coming from a band that was at the center of a generation-defining epoch, considering we’re still poring over the absurd ephemera in notebooks Cobain scrawled when he was high. Upon hearing the news of Cornell’s death this morning, a friend commented that “Soundgarden is the only Seattle band that really aged well.” There’s a strong case to be made for this, and perhaps it’s because they let their music do the talking.
After Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Soundgarden were the third big band out of Seattle. Soundgarden’s major label debut, Badmotorfinger, came out barely a month after Nirvana’s Nevermind and, while it did fine, it hardly made Soundgarden a household name. This was probably for the best. Soundgarden didn’t quite soak up the same spotlight and avoided some of the excesses associated with grunge was a global phenomenon. Their early recordings, and the accordant production, have a certain vibe reminiscent of similarly dated grunge records in certain respects. But with their first popular record, 1994’s Superunknown, the band made a pretty big leap sonically and musically. By the time they finally dominated MTV, they sounded like a well-produced rock band that took their craft seriously, which in many respects was antithetical to the grunge aesthetic.
It also helped that Soundgarden was founded in the mid-1980s. They had their own identity outside of grunge. The grunge associations were unavoidable and it’s hard to blame them for piggybacking these things to success. Soundgarden’s first record was released on the legendary record label SST, best known for releasing proto-grunge acts Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr. Guitarist Kim Thayil actually moved out to Seattle from Illinois with Bruce Pavitt, one of the founders of that other legendary label, Sub Pop records, which released Nirvana’s first record.
Despite being at the center of the Seattle scene, early on Soundgarden were probably more likely to be invoked in the same breath as Black Sabbath, or even the last big ’80s band out of Seattle, prog-metal act Queensryche, than they were with Mudhoney or Nirvana or other more definitional grunge acts.
Soundgarden were always unclassifiable, except to say that musically they were damned interesting. They weren’t quite metal, they weren’t quite grunge, and they weren’t quite prog rock. They were all of the above. Thayil is a rock ‘n roll unicorn; he’s insanely technically proficient, and yet adamantly refuses to play the kind of flashy licks that would clearly demonstrate his abilities. The result was an endless barrage of compelling and heavy riffage that belied incredible complexities lurking beneath the surface.
Nearly every song was played in an odd tuning and descended into odd time signatures; parts of “Spoonman” are played in 7/4, and the band’s biggest hit “Black Hole Sun” alternates between 4/4 and 9/8. (Another more obscure song, “Limo Wreck” is played in 15/8.) Other hits such as “Pretty Noose” had dramatic tempo changes and odd signatures. Soundgarden were hardly the first or only musicians to do these things, but King Crimson and Tool aren’t exactly radio staples. I’m not sure any band in rock history has ever been simultaneously this musically exotic and this popular.
Which brings us to Chris Cornell. As vocalists, Vedder and Cobain are incredibly compelling. But technically, they’re not very good singers. Cornell was simply amazing. He had a four-octave range and pipes that could blow down a brick house. Soundgarden’s time signature and tempo shifts should have made the phrasing of pop melodies impossible. Almost no other vocalist and songwriter could have made Soundgarden come together in such a memorable way. Cornell could belt out and sustain long notes that held steady and compelling melodies while the band lurched through tectonic shifts underneath. The result is a kind of tension makes hearing the same Soundgarden song hundreds of times easy, and yet you still marvel at the inventiveness.
But after 1996’s Down on the Upside, Soundgarden broke up. Cornell put out some competent solo records, and enjoyed quite a bit of success in the early aughts with the band Audioslave. In that band, Cornell joined up with the remnants of Commie rockers Rage Against the Machine, where among other things, he played a politically charged concert in Cuba. But politics were never Cornell’s bag, and no musical endeavor came close to the 22 million records Soundgarden sold. Not even, unfortunately, the record the band made when Soundgarden reunited in 2012. Nonetheless, when Cornell’s death was announced this morning, Soundgarden remained so popular they were in the middle of a tour selling out large venues, 20 years after they first broke up.
Still, Soundgarden unique as they were, did embody one of the more tragic grunge cliches. Cornell admits to being a teenage drug addict, and the popular side project Cornell did with members of Pearl Jam, Temple of the Dog, was born out of a desire to pay tribute to their musical compatriot, Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood, who overdosed. Cornell struggled with drugs later on as well, and checked into rehab during his time with Audioslave, before sobering up in 2006. If you saw a recent picture of the 52- year-old Cornell, he appeared to be the anti-Keith Richards. He appeared to be in great shape, was as strikingly handsome as ever, and could have passed for 15 years younger than he was.
Regardless Cornell was struggling with something. Maybe if, like the rest of his grunge peers, he’d been slightly more dramatic about his problems he could have gotten help. Undoubtedly, Cornell will be missed. Perhaps friends and family can take comfort in the fact that no man whose voice is seared into a generation the way that Cornell’s was, is ever truly gone.
