Soundgarden - In the Garden of Grunge

Seattle, the 80s, grunge…

In Seattle, in the early 80s, there was a band called Shemps, featuring Chris Cornell on drums and vocals, Hiro Yamamoto on bass and Matt Dentino on guitar. The band mainly played covers (strictly of dead artists, due to a particular fixation of Dentino's) and had just one original song to its name: "Marilyn Monroe", written (unsurprisingly) by the guitarist himself. After a handful of gigs and a few line-up changes, the band in question split up, and from its ashes a new outfit was born, again with Chris Cornell on drums and vocals and Hiro Yamamoto on bass, but with one change: guitarist Dentino was replaced by Kim Thayil, who had himself spent a spell in Shemps as a bassist standing in for Yamamoto.

Thus were born Soundgarden, taking their name from a sculpture by Douglas Hollis ("A Sound Garden", precisely) located in a Seattle park, made up of a series of metal structures resembling radio antennas that, moved by the wind, produce particular sounds and noises depending on how hard the gusts blow (a work "sublime and squalid at the same time", according to Kim Thayil). In Seattle, Chris shared an apartment with Andrew Wood, the friend who would burn out much faster than he did. Chris dreamed of making the big leap with Soundgarden, and he succeeded; the other was busy writing the lyrics that would take shape on the debut of Mother Love Bone, but success, for Andrew, didn't arrive in time. Seattle was exploding, becoming the center of the world for those long-haired kids who knew how to channel all their rage, all their youthful unease, into a song format.

Within a short time, Soundgarden had finished writing around fifteen songs and started playing the city's clubs, drawing the attention of audiences (and not only them), eventually opening (together with the Melvins) for a Hüsker Dü show. Meanwhile, Chris Cornell, with his bandmates' agreement, decided to give up his role as drummer to focus exclusively on vocals, also in order to make the most of his undeniable qualities as a frontman. In his place on drums, after a brief stint by Scott Sundquist, the band brought in Matt Cameron, former drummer of Skin Yard.

It was 1986, and at the time the band, after contributing three tracks to "Deep Six", a compilation meant to offer an overview of Seattle's new music scene (alongside Soundgarden were, among others, Green River, Skin Yard and Melvins), was touring the clubs playing alongside other unknown bands (including Faith No More), when they were approached by the independent label Sst and by the fledgling Sub Pop, with whom they recorded, respectively, their first single and their first EP, Fopp, works that at the time were dismissed by critics, who, at best, considered the four musicians mere Led Zeppelin imitators. Despite this, Soundgarden gradually built up a certain reputation, to the point that several majors came knocking (Geffen, Warner Bros, and A&M), but the band chose to continue on with Sub Pop, releasing the EP Screaming Life in 1988.

The Early Albums

That same year also saw the release of their debut album, Ultramega OK, on Sst. Critics began to take notice of them, while still continuing to be compared (particularly because of Cornell's singing style, an old-school "shouter") to Led Zeppelin, and being hastily pigeonholed as a metal/hard rock band. Certainly, Soundgarden's first work (as was the following year's Louder than Love, after which Yamamoto left the band, replaced first by Jason Everman and then by Ben Shepherd) is still a somewhat immature album, undoubtedly influenced by a certain heaviness traceable to metal conventions, partly due to pressure from the record label, which was — to be fair — keen on launching Soundgarden as a new heavy metal band, riding the wave of Metallica's enormous success.

There's no doubt, however, that on closer listening one can notice something different, as if the band had used the form (and thus also the greater technical demands) of metal to express states of mind closer to the punk spirit, also due to the subject matter of the lyrics, far removed from the stereotypical themes of most American heavy bands of the time. Furthermore, on closer analysis, one cannot miss the "darker" influence of certain new wave and dark bands that the members of the band have never hidden (Pere Ubu, Bauhaus, Wire, Joy Division, Killing Joke), alongside the all-too-obvious nods to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

Chris Cornell's singing style, in many ways comparable to that of Robert Plant or Ian Gillan (of whom, in any case, Soundgarden's frontman is far from being a mere clone), had the merit of reintroducing into rock a style that had gone missing in the 80s, or that had at least become démodé, as was the case with some power metal or epic metal bands of the period. Cornell's voice, backed by Soundgarden's musicianship, renews this vocal style without falling into the trap of sounding stale. Ultimately, the band's sound, while not appearing strongly innovative, is compelling precisely because it manages to express the sum of the four members' varied and eclectic musical influences, wrapping it all in a punk-metal shell.

The leap in quality comes in 1991 with Badmotorfinger, released after a brief pause during which Cornell and Cameron gave life to the Temple Of The Dog project, in memory of the late Andy Wood, together with Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam (at the time still in their start-up phase), also appearing both as cameo performers and as composers of the soundtrack (alongside other bands such as Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Smashing Pumpkins) for Cameron Crowe's film "Singles", a snapshot of the grunge scene.

Temple Of The Dog is an album that will forever remain a true cult classic, and one that marks the official introduction to the world of Eddie Vedder's voice, engaged in a landmark duet with Cornell on "Hunger Strike".

If up until that point the band had remained, so to speak, "halfway there", in limbo, producing works with interesting but immature ideas, with Badmotorfinger the fruits of all their previous work are finally gathered: every intuition takes on a precise shape, from the compositional style to the sound, down to the use of the voice. It's Soundgarden's last decisively heavy record, and it remains one of the best hard rock albums of the 90s, as well as a milestone in the Seattle band's career.

Aside from a few "tricks" (such as the feedback created by blowing on the strings in "Slaves & Bulldozers", or the sample of a broken talking doll at the start of the epic "Jesus Christ Pose") and the interesting experiments with guitar tuning, songs like "Rusty Cage", "Outshined" and the aforementioned tracks have a freshness that couldn't be found in previous work, even though the sound remains always "borderline" with a certain kind of metal, seasoned, moreover, with a pinch of psychedelia. Coinciding with the release of this album came the news of a support tour with Guns N' Roses, the springboard that would finally launch them into the "big leagues" of rock 'n' roll.

Mainstream Success

1994 is the crucial year: Superunknown comes out. It's one of those rare cases in rock history where peak success, a commercial softening of the sound and artistic quality all overlap. Superunknown is, in fact, an album of excellent songs, whose new, more accessible shape allows Soundgarden to shed for good the (reductive) label of heavy metal band. Don't be fooled by the band's new direction: experiments with tunings, odd time signatures, nods to Indian music and hints of psychedelia are all still present, only now everything is more muffled, less shouted, better measured and, essentially, contained within some of the finest compositions of the band's entire career.

Even Cornell's voice sounds softer, pushed less insistently to the limits of its range. Among the tracks worth mentioning, besides the famous "Black Hole Sun", which would even land in heavy rotation on MTV, special note must go to "Spoonman", on which Soundgarden play with Artist The Spoonman, a street performer known for his musical performances banging spoons together, and "Mailman", slow, heavy and hypnotic, as well as "4th Of July", "Let Me Drown", "Fell On Black Days", "My Wave", "Like Suicide" and the title track. After the already decent success of Badmotorfinger, Superunknown catapulted Soundgarden to the top of the rock business, where Nirvana and Pearl Jam had already arrived some time before.

1996 brings Down On The Upside, a much-anticipated album that was not received in the best way. It's the logical continuation of Superunknown, yet many saw it as the definitive softening and further commercialization of the Soundgarden sound: a judgment that was, to say the least, hasty and somewhat ungenerous.

It's certainly the record where the band showed the least desire for renewal, but nonetheless it contains some excellent compositions (above all "Pretty Noose", "Ty Cobb", where country influences even pop up, complete with mandolin, and the melancholy "Boot Camp", one of the darkest, most depressed tracks in their catalogue). The album is a pleasant listen, as long as you're not looking for experimentation at all costs.

The Breakup

The following year, through a press release, the band members announced the group's split, after more than ten years of activity. Soundgarden, together with Alice In Chains, represented one of the thousand faces (the one closest to metal) of what the media called grunge. A phenomenon tied to a music scene born in Seattle (a city that, until then, had been on the margins of the rock world, save for being the birthplace of Jimi Hendrix) around the second half of the 1980s, though it can't be defined as the expression of one clearly defined musical form, given how many stylistic manifestations and influences it drew on (from punk to metal to hard rock, passing, albeit in smaller doses, through new wave, country and folk). Grunge, in fact, seems to find its leitmotif more in geographic circumscription and generational malaise than in the stylistic canons of the music that expressed it.

Even though some bands from the Seattle scene carried on (Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Melvins), it's fair to say that Soundgarden's breakup coincided with the closing of a cycle, or, to put it more bluntly, with the end of grunge.

In 2002 Chris Cornell took part in the Audioslave project, alongside three members of Rage Against The Machine, with whom he would go on to make three albums and a live record between 2002 and 2006.

The Comeback

Widely heralded by the release of the double anthology Telephantasm (2010) and the period live album Live On I-5, the reunion yielded Soundgarden's first album of new material, the sixth overall, after roughly 16 years. King Animal (2012), true to the quartet's classic sound, tries to pick up (at least in spirit) right where things were left off in 1997: a fairly muscular, compact work, heavy 90s-style grunge with pronounced (and more mature) bluesy-psych leanings, at times almost stoner, plus the occasional sixties-style melodic opening. Although age and inspiration keep it from reviving the glories of the past, it does at least offer an honest, dignified version of them.

Soundgarden come out strong, buoyed by a couple of sturdy, effective anthems like the syncopated "Been Away Too Long" and the full-throttle "Non-State Actor" (with Cornell throwing himself into his bold howls). "By Crooked Steps" speeds up a down-tuned, Sabbath-like monster riff over an acid, bluesy swagger, introducing two of the best tracks in the set: the lovely Eastern-tinged guitar over the spasmodic, pounding rhythm of "A Thousand Days Before" and the slowed-down heavy blues of "Blood On The Valley". "Taree" runs along the same lines: a nasty, rust-caked, no-frills track. On a slightly more melodic register, tinged with 60s influences, are instead the acid-rock of "Bones Of Birds" and "Black Saturday", which opens acoustic and Stones-like before spilling into a relentless crescendo over odd time signatures. That's where the positives end, and fatigue and padding set in: the barren, muddled "Attrition", the inevitable (and pointless) Cornell-style ballad ("Halfway There"), tracks that struggle to get going ("Worse Dreams") or spin their wheels ("Eyelid's Mouth"). Better, then, the closing "Rowing", a sort of chipped, somewhat doomy dark-blues with its shadowy call and response.

In 2014 A&M released a triple-CD rarities collection, Echo Of Miles: Scattered Tracks Across The Path, containing seven previously unreleased tracks, among them "Storm" (from old sessions with Jack Endino), "Kristi" (an outtake from "Down On The Upside"), "Twin Tower" (from the "Louder Than Love" sessions), the instrumental "Night Surf", two covers of the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide…" and a remix of "The Telephantasm". The collection was put together by guitarist Kim Thayil. A single-CD version is also planned, containing only 14 tracks.

The solo adventure and the tragic ending

In the wake of Soundgarden's breakup, and before the start of the Audioslave experience, Chris Cornell had embarked on an uneven solo career, nicely kicked off in 1999 by the well-received Euphoria Morning.

With Audioslave behind him, Cornell would return a few years later with the electroacoustic Carry On (2007), followed by the misstep of the embarrassing Scream (2009), produced by Timbaland.

The 2011 live album Songbook and the successful Higher Truth (2015, after the Soundgarden reunion had taken place) would put Chris back on the right track, helped also by successful solo tours in which he revisited, in acoustic form, material from all of his various artistic incarnations.

In 2016 it's time for major celebrations for Temple Of The Dog: the album is reissued with unreleased material added, and a run of American shows puts the supergroup back in the spotlight, even raising hopes of a new album.

But while fans were anxiously awaiting at least the announcement of a European tour, the morning of May 18, 2017 brought the sudden news of the death of Chris Cornell, found hanged in his hotel room the evening after what turned out to be the last concert he played with Soundgarden, at the Fox Theatre in Detroit. Thus came the definitive end of one of the most beautiful and gripping fairy tales in rock, not just within the Seattle grunge scene, leaving millions of fans in disbelief.

In November 2018 Universal released a lavish commemorative box set, curated by his wife Vicky and simply titled Chris Cornell, which traces the artist's entire career, featuring numerous unreleased tracks and a booklet containing photos and testimonials from musicians who worked with him: Kim Thayil, Mike McCready, Matt Cameron, Tom Morello and Brendan O'Brien. The first two discs run through all of Chris's artistic reincarnations, pulling at most two tracks from each album made with Soundgarden (starting with "Haunted Down," from the debut EP "Screaming Life"), Temple Of The Dog and Audioslave, plus selections from his solo career. The third and fourth CDs hold the final stretch of his career and a selection of live performances, starting with a staggering "Into The Void" (from the Black Sabbath catalogue) performed with Soundgarden at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle in 1992, a version that underlines both the band's musical roots and Cornell's transformative powers. The sequencing of the tracks shows the gradual narrowing of Chris's vocal range, evident in his performances over the last decade — just listen to the live version of "Reach Down" from the Temple Of The Dog reunion tour, which, having been recorded on November 21, 2016 (again at the Paramount Theatre, as if drawing a thread back to the band's beginnings), is the most recent recording included here.

The box also gathers the soundtracks he made for "Singles," "Great Expectations," "Casino Royale" (the famous "You Know My Name"), "The Avengers," "12 Years A Slave," "13 Hours: The Secret Soldier Of Benghazi," "The Promise" and "Vinyl," his collaborations with Slash, Santana (with whom he revisits "Whole Lotta Love") and Gabin (recorded during one of his stays in Rome, where Chris had bought an apartment right in the city center), his duets with Cat Stevens ("Wild World") and his daughter Toni ("Redemption Song"), and covers of "Hey Baby" (played with McCready, Ament and Cameron for "Stone Free," the 1993 tribute to Jimi Hendrix), "Billie Jean," "Imagine," "A Day In The Life," "Nothing Compares 2 U" and "One," all of which he often paid tribute to during his acoustic sets. Besides the moving, eerily prophetic unreleased track "When Bad Does Good," some of these performances are being officially released for the very first time. A few rarities, on the other hand, were already known to the most attentive fans, such as "Storm," taken from an old session with Jack Endino. When, on the fourth disc, Temple Of The Dog perform "Stargazer" live, a Mother Love Bone song written by Andrew Wood, Chris is figuratively reunited with the roommate from the days when it all began in Seattle. But the true closing of the circle comes on the box's final track, with Chris performing, voice and guitar alone, "Thank You" by Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, a voice to which Cornell has always, and deservedly, been compared.

In July 2019 came the release of Live From The Artist Den, the recording of a Soundgarden concert held on February 17, 2013 at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, in front of the cameras of the TV show of the same name. The tracks from "King Animal" sound wonderful, partly because they were built around Chris's vocal condition at the time, but the real interest here lies in digging through the great classics, moving from the hyper-rhythmic sabbath of "Jesus Christ Pose" to the impetuousness of "Ty Cobb," from the menacing "Hunted Down" to the softness of "Fell On Black Days," from the stone-grinding "Spoonman" to the notes that made "Rusty Cage" and "Black Hole Sun" immortal, from the warm embrace of "Blow Up The Outside World" to the guitar whirlpools of "Slaves & Bulldozers" flowing into the sadly prophetic "In My Time Of Dying."

In the 2010s Chris Cornell seemed to have beaten his inner demons. He hadn't, and now, with hindsight, the images of that man with hair covering a face that always seemed perpetually sullen feel like a premonition. Watching him bend over his guitar like that, or stretch his voice to reach notes it could no longer hit, because of age and years spent on stages around the world, is almost dramatic to witness — testimony that many fans are probably still not ready to face. The wound is still too fresh for a loss that came more unexpectedly than ever. The packaging is lavish: twenty-nine tracks for over two hours of music. You can choose between the double-CD format, the quadruple vinyl, or go for the Blu-ray to catch the concert footage in the highest definition. In the super deluxe edition, on top of everything already listed, there's over half an hour of unreleased interviews, a forty-page illustrated book, lithographs of the band members, and a replica of the passes for that night's access.

Meanwhile, a battle is underway over completing the album Soundgarden were working on at the time of Cornell's death. Kim Thayil, Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd have reportedly already finished their respective parts, but the masters containing Chris's original vocal tracks are missing, and it seems his wife Vicky has been reluctant to hand them over. And while on one hand she's blocking the completion of that project, on the other she has announced to the world her intention to release many of the songs Cornell had set aside. According to the account given by the family, in 2016 Chris recorded ten cover versions, personally overseeing the production and mastering and playing all the instruments himself, with contributions only from Brendan O'Brien. The result is contained in No One Sings Like You Anymore, available digitally since December 2020 and in physical format since the following March.

It's always moving to hear Cornell's voice again, every time so powerful, expressive and thick with the pain that never left him. The images in the video accompanying "Patience," Chris's tribute to Guns N' Roses, are especially touching, with a succession of frames tracing an entire life, one that was painful for him beyond anything we could possibly imagine. And it's fascinating to hear him take on, without fear, songs that only the greatest would dare approach, whether because of the sheer beauty of the songs themselves ("Nothing Compares 2 U," written by Prince for an extraordinary Sinead O'Connor), or because of the stature of the people involved (the tribute to "Watching The Wheels," from "Double Fantasy," the album released by John Lennon just days before he was brutally murdered).

But the most interesting moments on No One Sings Like You Anymore lie in the less well-known material, particularly in its — for many, unexpected — soul excursions, a world only seemingly distant from Cornell's grunge fury, one in which he shows great mastery and immense respect. On that front, his readings of "You Don't Know Nothing About Love" (recorded by Carl Hall in 1967) and "Stay With Me Baby," made a hit in 1966 by Lorraine Ellison, will surely stand as memorable. The more "pop-oriented" detours included here are, objectively, less intriguing, though they do reveal artists and songs that somehow influenced and shaped his artistic path. Vicky Cornell has already announced the upcoming release of a second volume, which this time will be completed and assembled without being able to follow Chris's own intentions — the man who sings like no one else ever will again...

Contributions by Simone Coacci ("King Animal")

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