chris almighty

by michael christopher, hot press, dublin, july 2007

Photo by Max Vadukul

With Seattle rockers Soundgarden having gone their separate ways in 1997, songwriter and vocalist Chris Cornell venrured out on his own and, two years later, released a debut solo album, Euphoria Morning.

However, whilst working on the follow-up record, Cornell was invited to join the line-up of Audioslave (comprised of the remaining members of Rage Against The Machine following Zack de la Rocha's departure from that bend) via the intermediary offices of super-producer Rick Rubin.

Cornell bid adieu to his colleagues in Audioslave in February of this year, due to "irresolvable personal conflicts as well as musical differences" and so finally got around to releasing his second solo album. Titled Carry On, the record contains plenty of Cornell's trademark hard rock, in addition to a few surprising curveballs, including his theme for Casino Royale, "You Know My Name", and an acoustic cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" [actually the album version isn't acoustic - webmaster].

How has life as a solo artist been treating the singer so far?

"Pretty good," says Cornell, sitting in a quiet corner of the restaurant at the Beacon Hotel in Sandyford, on the day of his recent support slot with Aerosmith in Marlay Park."There are some aspects that make it hard. It's a second solo record, but it's kind of like a first one in some ways. People didn't really get the chance to get used to me as a solo artist after Euphoria Morning, because I did a very short tour and wasn't out on the road again for quite a while.

"And then I ended up being in Audioslave and touring as the singer of a band again. So I think there's that issue, which probably would have been sorted out by now, if this were, say, my fourth solo record. I suppose I would be more established as a solo artist, although I'm not really sure what that means, or if it would be any different. The upside of it is that I was in Audioslave, we made three great records, and now, out on the road as a solo artist, I'm performing songs from pretty much any part of my history that I feel like, going right back to 1990."

Among those Cornell enlisted to contribute to Carry On was guitarist Gary Lucas, who co-wrote the tracks "Grace" and "Mojo Pin" with Jeff Buckley. Cornell himself was friends with the late singer, and oversaw the oproduction of the posthumously released Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk.

How did Cornell first meet Buckley?

"Jeff was a fan of mine," he explains. "He came to a London show when he was on the road by himself, without a band. I think the day before he came, someone from the record company gave me a Live at Sin-e disc. You get a lot of CDs on the road, and most of them are pretty bad, but this was the first one I'd been given, probably since Nirvana's demo, where I listened to it and went, "oh my God". It just made a huge impact on me. Then he came to the show next night, and we hung out, and we became friends after that."

Cornell, of course, first came to prominence as the frontman of Soundgarden, who along with Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Mudhoney, were at the forefrontof the Seattle grunge scene in the early 90s. Indeed, prior to Audioslave, the singer had the experience of playing in another supergroup, Temple Of The Dog, whose eponymous 1990 album was a collaboration between Cornell and the future members of Pearl Jam.

"At the time we made that record, I thought of it as being a quick side project," reflects Cornell. "Soundgarden was like my career band, and it was very important to my life and my musical future. The other guys in Temple Of The Dog, they'd had Mother Love Bone, and they were starting to form Pearl Jam. They'd just met Eddie, in fact. So Pearl Jam, although it hadn't been named yet, was somehting they were completely invested in and were very nervous about.

"Temple of the Dog was really just a way for us to go make a record where none of us were that concerned about the outcome. The reason why it was so great, and why I think it's helped all of us in our careers, is that all of us learned a big lesson. Namely, that if you can record and mix one album in 14 days with one or two reheasrsals and it's that good, and no-one's that worried about it, you can do it as many times as you want.

"You don't have to obsess over songwriting, performances or production. It's been something that I've carried with me since then. they guys have said that they were trying to recreate that environment on the first Pearl Jam record."

Although Soundgarden first broke into the mainstream with 1991's Badmotorfinger album, it was the band's follow-up record, Superunknown, released three years later, that really sent them into the stratosphere. Did the massive success of the album take Cornell by surprise?

"Yes and no," he muses. "I don't think it would have been a big surprise had it not been as big, we probably would have felt that it was par for the course. But it still didn't sell as much as Nevermind or Ten. Even the follow-up to Ten sold more than Superunknown. So to us it was like, "Oh, now it's our turn". And still, even when it was our turn, it wasn't the same kind of overwhelming commercial success, it wasn't hit after hit. Actually we kind of stopped that in a way, too.

"We put out "Black Hole Sun" as the second single after "Spoonman", and it wasn't what we wanted to do, but the radio stations started playing it. then the record company wanted the third single to be "Fell On Black Days", another ballad. We thought, "Look, we're selling a lot of records here to people who've never heard of Soundgarden, and don't really know what the band is. And if two of the first three singles are "Black Hole Sun" and "Fell On Black Days", we're gonna start selling the album to people who maybe aren't going to like it."

"We wanted to put out "My Wave" as the third single, and the record company basically said, "We'll do it, 'cos you insist, but you'll lose momentum on radio and your record will start to fall off the charts". And that's what happened! (laughs)"

Did Chris find that his life changed dramatically as a result of his new-found fame?

"The big change kind of happened with "Outshined", from Badmotorfinger," he remembers. "It was all to do with MTV, and it happenend within hours of being on tlevision. We were in the middle of Mississippi, I think, on tour, and I went into a 24-hour grocery store at 4 o'clcokl in the morning. The butcher, who was about 45 years old, recognised me, and the viseo had only been playing for about seven hours. He said, "You're from that band, you're on TV". And I looked at him like, "that is just fucking unbelievable."

Chris notes his level of public recognisability rises and falls depending on where he is in the record promotion cycle.

"After we'd done touring, andthe videos stopped being played all the time, I could go out in public without getting recognised very much," he says. "Then the new record would be releeased, and it would get harder again. Recently, it was easier than it had been for years in terms of recognisability, until the James Bond DVD came out, which had the video for "You Know My Name" on the extra disc.

"Within two or three days of it being released, I noticed in airports that people who would never have known who I was started to recognise me. They don't necessarily know why they recognise or why I look familiar, but it's there. Like, I get old women doing double takes, and they might think I'm somebody's nephew. They're not really aware of why they look twice, but they do!"

Chris Cornell on Nirvana:

"They didn't live in Seattle at first, they were from Aberdeen, which was a little town a couple of hours away, towards the ocean. The first time I heard of them was when (Sub Pop co-founder) Jonathan Poneman have me a demo of what basically became Bleach. Everything on that demo was relesased at some point; it it wasn't on Bleach, it was part of Incesticide or a b-side or something.

The artwork Kurt had done, it was just a photo he had taken and cut and put in there. We all loved it. We all could kind of tell that this was a band who were pretty fucking incredible, which was a little bit weird, I gotta say, because it was like the 10th band in a row that had come out that year that seemed to be pretty amazing, and that no-one had ever heard of. To me that was llike the last one, that was the one where I went, "Holy fuck, where do they find these people?"

"And they were from Aberdeen, which I'd driven through several times when I would go to the ocean or go camping or something, and there's nothing there. Oddly enough, I think per capita it was the suicide capital of the United States because of the cloud cover. So we used to drive through there, and we'd be screaming out the window, "Don't do it!"

"We had played shows with The Melvins, whon I think were also from Aberdeen. And then we played a show with Nirvana. They opened for us in, I think, Olympia, Washington. It was an outdoor show in a park, and there were probably 50 people there. That was one of the two or three times I ever talked to Kurt: he was really quiet then and we never became buddies. I think when he became friends with a lot of the local musicians, he quickly became part of a group of people who were more drug-oriented".

First published in Hot Press, 25 July 2007

 

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Chris Cornell Fan Page © Clare O'Brien 2007