Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,891
By This is the grave of Chris Cornell.
Born in 1964 in Seattle, Chris Boyle grew up Catholic but it did not stick. In fact, his mom pulled him from Catholic school before he could be expelled for questioning the teachers too much! But he was a horrible student anyway and then dropped out of high school. The only thing he really cared about was rock and roll. He had piano and guitar lessons as a child, though he was no great musician and never would be. But he could also sing and boy could he do that well. Actually, he cared about one thing other than rock and roll: drugs. He was doing pretty hard drugs by the time he was 12 and he had a bad PCP experience at 14. He ended up getting the crappy jobs someone like this gets. But he was playing in local bands and while in some local cover band, he met a young guitarist named Kim Thayil. They became friends and musical partners.
In 1984, Cornell, Thayil, and the bassist Hiro Yamamoto started a new band they called Soundgarden. Kind of a pretentious name, but whatever, they were kids, it’s all good. And as a fan of bands named Drive By Truckers and Wussy, I have no room to complain about band names far less bad than those. Cornell was the drummer in this early version of the band, but he wasn’t very good and he was so good at vocals. So they soon hired Scott Sundquist to play drums and Cornell moved to full time vocals. Sundquist didn’t stick around long, being a family man among some crazy rock kids, so soon it was Matt Cameron, who would be the drummer for the classic rendition of the band.
Soundgarden played around in the growing Seattle alternative rock scene. In 1986, a new label called SubPop formed in Seattle and it almost immediately signed the band. They released their first EP, Screaming Life, in 1987 and then another EP called Fopp in 1988. Later that year, now on SST Records, the band released their first full-length album, Ultramega OK and it did quite well, getting a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Album. At this time, Grammy voters had no clue about metal and maybe they don’t today, I don’t know. But still, that’s hardly on Soundgarden. After this album, the band left SST and signed with A&M, so the big money guys saw a lot of potential here. That led to the 1990 album Louder than Love that was ahead of its time. Definitely not glam hair metal, though not as different as the grunge pioneers emerging at this time would have liked to think, the album hit #108 on the Billboard 200. They weren’t getting rich off it yet, but they were doing pretty OK. But 1991’s Badmotorfinger would make the band one of the big grunge bands. It’s true enough that it was Nirvana and Pearl Jam that blew the lid off the hair metal world, but as the world soon discovered, there were a pretty big core of bands working out of Seattle ready to go and Soundgarden was perhaps the best of them. The album hit #39 on the Billboard Top 200 and they opened for Guns n Roses on the Use Your Illusion tour. Superunknown then went to the top of charts in 1994 and “Black Hole Sun” became their biggest hit ever.
But the band was changing. Cornell liked the success more than Thayil and wanted to move away from the heavier and guitar-based sound the band had gotten big with. Badmotorfinger had already seen some of that and Thayil wasn’t thrilled. Also, the grunge moment passed pretty fast. 1996’s Down on the Upside did nowhere as well and was also much less heavy. Like a lot of albums from the CD era, it was also way too long, at 65 minutes. The band broke up the next year.
Cornell could belt it out, no question about that. I was never a huge Soundgarden fan, but then there’s not a single male-led band out of the grunge movement that I like that much. Those bands didn’t click with me when I was turning 18 and grunge hit and they didn’t click with me since either. The former is less surprising, I was where I was in my life in 1992. But I’ve gone back and gotten into so much music that I didn’t necessarily like that much back in the day, but grunge still does little for me. That said, I have nothing negative to say about Soundgarden. If you were going to put on a grunge album, it might as well be Soundgarden and perferrably over most of the other bands. Cornell obviously was a great rock vocalist and the band rocked pretty good too. So they are above fine. In fact, I have no issue at all with them going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. Pretty well deserved, I’d say.
About Cornell’s post-Soundgarden career, I dunno. A lot of people are just whatever after their early work. Cornell released four solo albums, none of which I even remember. He was better known for his work in Audioslave, which always left me pretty cold, though I have a friend who swears by that band. Given that I also was never a Rage Against the Machine guy, combining them with Cornell probably wasn’t going to do much for me. They formed in 2001, did three albums that sold well, performed in Cuba, and then Cornell ended it in 2007, against the desires of the rest of the band.
Soundgarden did sometimes play together in later years, beginning in 2010. Why not, the tensions of the band and that whole era were long past. Then even released a new album titled King Animal in 2012. I have zero memory of this album’s release; evidently the reception was that it was alright, but nothing great, like lots of old bands trying to get back together and make a few bucks and feeling they need to do something more than just playing the hits. Why not, this is the entire last 45 years of the Rolling Stones now. It was after a show, in 2017, that Cornell hanged himself in a Detroit hotel room. He always struggled with depression, as did a lot of the folks from that scene. He was 52 years old.
Chris Cornell is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.
If you would like this series other members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I am disappointed to say that Warren Zevon had his ashes scattered, it would be the uber-LGM grave post after all. Still, Zevon being agreeable to anything would be counter to his personality, so it’s OK. But Randy Rhoades is in San Bernardino, California and Billy Preston is in Inglewood, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.