soundgarden's chris cornell comes full circle

back into the superunknown

by daniel brockman, boston phoenix, april 2011

Prior to 1991, “the year punk broke,” Cornell and Soundgarden were considered just a metal band, and not necessarily a marketable one at that. Rock bands, if they do it right, can become part of a greater societal movement, hitting the zeitgeist and hoovering up fans like power-mad demons, subversive priests at the altar of the counterculture. Or something like that. The thing is, the members of the band themselves, unless they are conniving biz types, are often unwilling participants in the zeitgeist part. Whether they're the Beatles running for their lives from crazed teenyboppers or members of any band who were ever labeled "grunge" denying that they were, in fact, "grunge," the musicians just want to play music and sell records, regardless of what anyone — fans, press, the record label — tells them it all means. And to Chris Cornell, Soundgarden frontman extraordinaire, experiencing the pop-culture insanity of the early-'90s alternative explosion was . . . well, it was a phenomenon that, being on the inside, he wasn't privy to.

"Soundgarden was actually pretty insular," says Cornell, on the eve of the "Songbook" solo tour that comes to Berklee this Saturday and will see him reworking songs from his entire discography (solo, Soundgarden, Audioslave, Temple of the Dog, and other odds and ends, just Cornell alone on stage with an acoustic guitar). "We had friends, and we were part of the 'scene,' but we weren't fixtures, as individuals, and you wouldn't find us at the clubs all the time. To us, we were a post-punk indie band, that was our influence, and that's where we were coming from. We thought, musically, that we were just different from anything else."

And he's right — Soundgarden didn't sound like anything else, perhaps because they rejected the Stooges-derived party-rock sound so prevalent in underground circles in favor of finding a way to bridge metal and post-punk sensibilities. In doing so, Soundgarden helped to popularize what came to be known at the time as an "alternative" to prevailing metal trends — "grunge."

Twenty years removed from its heyday, the G-word is far less incendiary and argument inducing. These days, it's generally understood as a misnomer for a then-burgeoning trend of underground bands who were (a) not averse to distortion pedals and (b) generating enough major-label sales that someone had to come up with a name for it. The process, though, was far from inevitable. "There was no concept or idea of major labels or radio airplay," Cornell explains, "because it didn't exist in the world that we knew as indie post-punk, which became alternative. 'Alternative' was a word that was used correctly at the beginning, which meant 'alternative to anything commercially viable,' and that's kind of what it was."

But prior to 1991 (Grunge Year Zero, or "the year punk broke"), Soundgarden were considered just a Seattle metal band, and not necessarily a marketable one. The late '80s was an odd time for metal, to say the least. On the one hand, you had the wild and out-of-control success of hair metal's superstars, as Def Leppard, Guns N' Roses, Poison, et al. moved out of clubs and into stratospheric worldwide fame and success. On the other hand, you had the slow rise of metal's underground finally becoming too big for the mainstream music business to ignore, as Metallica, Slayer, and a zillion others started selling out hockey arenas on their own, and without radio airplay or major-label promo heft. Soundgarden eventually emerged as a legitimate stadium-filling underground act that didn't even have to cater specifically to the metal faithful. "The interesting thing is that we had some great experiences early on opening for big metal acts. I mean, our first big moment was opening up for Metallica at the Oakland Coliseum. It was 45,000 people."

Soundgarden stormed the world of major-label indie metal for a second time in 1991 (after the underwhelming sales of 1990 major-label debut Louder Than Love) with the epochal Badmotorfinger, a massive work that showed their penchant for tricky arrangements and noise-guitar solos while maintaining stadium-filling choruses and headbanging moments of sheer heaviosity. Tracks like "Rusty Cage," "Jesus Christ Pose," and "Outshined" were walloping and weird and yet still able to bum-rush MTV and non-college radio; they ushered in a half-decade where feedback, shrieking, psychedelic weirdness, and relentless rock drumming would supplant Michael Jackson and Wilson Phillips as the sound of American radio. But as the band ascended, Cornell began to feel that they were being misunderstood. "As a music fan," he explains, "aggressive music has only been a part, a fraction, of what I'm a fan of. And in Soundgarden, we did a lot of different things — it wasn't always the sledgehammer-to-the-head approach."

Even a cursory pass through a typical Soundgarden album reveals the dynamics that Cornell and the band always strove for: the acoustic passages, the Eastern influence, oddball moments and melodies that were the farthest thing from the metal trends of the time. "Look at a band like the Beatles," Cornell says. "They did whatever they wanted, unapologetically. They could do 'Helter Skelter,' but also 'Eleanor Rigby,' which is just Paul and a string quartet — and no one goes, 'Oh, that's weird!' "

Soundgarden eventually hit their career high with 1994's Superunknown, which shows their Beatles-esque quest for oddness at a peak, especially on the inescapable summer-of-'94 single "Black Hole Sun." In 1997, Soundgarden split up, and Cornell's subsequent career has seen him form the supergroup Audioslave with members of Rage Against the Machine as well as release a number of solo albums, each notable for how little it adheres to the Soundgarden blueprint. His latest, 2009's Scream, is a true departure: produced by Timbaland, it's a strange dance-rock hybrid, with Cornell's trademark castrato autotuned and manipulated over clinking and clashing rhythm tracks. Clearly a labor of love between both Cornell and Timbaland, the record was a modest commercial success but a massive critical failure, a laughing stock that stings Cornell even now. "Look, I love the album, still. It doesn't sound like anything else. I mean, to me, that's what it means to have a long creative career: doing different things, taking chances, having different collaborations, and not worrying about surprising anyone with the sound, or what it might mean."

Since Scream, Soundgarden have buried the hatchet: they headlined last year's Lollapalooza festival in Chicago and are currently working on a new studio album. For Cornell, the important thing is being part of a musical openness, whether that's blowing minds with the newly rejoined Soundgarden or playing acoustic with no sonic barrier. "Every musician, no matter who, began as a nerdy kid in a bedroom trying to discover new music. That moment of discovery is so important. It's just a fact, it's how it works. I mean, back in the day, there were a lot of guys in grunge bands with dreadlocks who, you know, had been Duran Duran fans until one day they discovered something and it changed their life."

Reprinted from the Boston Phoenix - originally available as an online feature here

Chris Cornell Fan Page © Clare O'Brien 2011