reunited soundgarden readies southern california return

chris cornell checks in on the grunge gods’ new tour and coming album – and why they broke up in the first place.

by ben wener, the orange county register, july 2011

“Soundgarden exists,” Chris Cornell states simply. “The reunion word, to me, doesn’t even need to be used anymore.” Yes, but this resurrection is still such a new and once-unthinkable concept that many fans may still be getting used to the idea. For a long time in interviews, especially during the rise of the Rage-heavy supergroup Audioslave in the early ’00s, Cornell, who turns 47 this week, was adamant that a regrouping would never happen.

Soundgarden, the Seattle band behind grunge staples like “Black Hole Sun,” “Outshined” and “Fell on Black Days” had a remarkably unblemished run of roughly a dozen years and five influential albums, peaking with Badmotorfinger (1991) and Superunknown (1994). Few bands are so perfectly encapsulated; historically, those that are -- the Clash, Talking Heads, the Smiths, let's not forget the Beatles -- have achieved an even more storied mythology partly because they haven’t gotten back together.

So what changed his mind?

“Once we were in the same room again,” he explained by phone a couple weeks ago, “there was that instant understanding that we’re all the same people. Everyone has at least the same ability and capacity to be creative together, plus another decade of experience outside of this. I always knew that was the case, but you can really see it and feel it once you’re in a room together. That’s when you can notice whether the desire for more is there.”

Desire, it seems, was plentiful. Out of left field came the New Year’s Day 2010 announcement that Soundgarden was back together. Four months later, the quartet -- including guitarist Kim Thayil, bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron -- played their first show in 15 years, at their native Showbox. Four months after that, the band headlined Lollapalooza in Chicago.

The wait to see what comes next, however, hasn’t been brief, with Soundgarden setting a deliberately incremental pace. Of course, maneuvering around Cameron’s commitments to Pearl Jam, which he’s anchored since 1998, slows that process.

A month-long tour finally began July 2 in Toronto and brings the band back to Southern California to headline the Forum on Friday. A fresh retrospective of their A&M Records work, Telephantasm, featuring an unheard track (“Black Rain”), arrived last fall. Their first tour memento, Live on I-5, a collection of performances from the West Coast swing of their final outing in 1996, was issued in March.

And a new album, which Thayil has said is “picking up where we left off,” will likely surface next spring. “It doesn’t really matter when we’ll put out a record,” Cornell says. “At some point we will, but it doesn’t have to be by Christmas.” For the first time since its basement beginnings, Soundgarden is once again calling all the shots.

How did the ball get rolling to reunite the band?

Chris Cornell: What happened, I suppose, was this sort of nudge toward it. My wife Vicky and I were going into a store for children, and we saw a little baby AC/DC shirt and a baby Ramones shirt. And around that time online I had noticed people wanting to buy Soundgarden T-shirts but they couldn’t find any, and people have always asked about when we might put together a rarities and B-sides set.

That got me to realize that there has to be somebody that services the legacy. Our catalog had been entirely ignored by management and the record company – nothing was happening. We figured out that we had to take back that responsibility. And once we were in a room discussing those things, one thing led to another, slowly but surely.

It wasn’t like, “Should we get back out on the road?” It was just us in a room together a lot, talking about stuff, and that led to wanting to play some songs, and maybe we could do a show, just for fun. It was all just a progression.

Had you all been in contact over the years?

Yeah, definitely. There wasn’t really any of that tension people expect to happen in rock bands. We were all really good friends to begin with; that never really changed. We had a meeting two weeks after we broke up to discuss different things we had to deal with business-wise, and everybody showed up in a really great mood. That’s sort of the way it was left. It was just time for everyone to move on with their lives and do different stuff.

I’d always understood the breakup had less to do with personality conflicts than with the pressures of the music business.

Yeah. You know what’s funny: I think, because the question “why did Soundgarden break up?” keeps coming up so often to me, the answer just wasn’t good enough for anybody. Nobody liked that answer. They wanted “this guy hated that guy,” or “that guy slept with this guy’s wife.” The real answer was that we got sick of doing it.

We’d been a band for a really long time. We started out as an indie band, entirely organically in a garage, as you should, or in our case a basement … and there was a good three years before we even released anything, and four before we ever released a full-length album. It was a long road, and ultimately we were really fortunate. But by the time we were having our biggest successes, it had turned into a big business -- constant deadlines and scheduling and things that weren’t what we got into it for in the first place.

We just needed a break. Realistically, it might have been possible for us to have said, “Let’s take a few years off,” as opposed to splitting up as a band. We didn’t necessarily have to do that. But ultimately I think the amount of time we did take off was good for everybody. We’re very refreshed and everybody’s really excited about being Soundgarden again, so it all worked out.

It must be easier now, doing things on your own terms.

Well, yeah, we don’t have anyone breathing down our neck. There is no schedule for when the record could come out, except for a loose one that we’ve sort of put on ourselves. Without having that business animal that becomes its own entity, there’s nothing daunting about this now.

Not having worked together for so long helps, too. Everyone had some ideas right away, as opposed to the past, when we’d come off the road having just made a record the year before, and any extra ideas I had I didn’t really like -- that kind of thing. Those days are all over.

It went from this being a hundred-percent creative endeavor, without ever imagining being on a major label and doing world tours, to sitting down and having meetings where somebody would say, “This is where you’ll be in March two years from now.” That just didn’t fit us. Without that there, it’s much easier. We’re probably three-quarters done with the new album, and none of it has felt like a race to a finish line.

It was like that before?

I think the record company was always very self-conscious and concerned about fitting to labels and competition in the arena of radio airplay and magazines and touring. Which is their business to be concerned about, I’m not criticizing that. But at this stage, we’ve sort of graduated to a classic band. Because of the nature of our music, we sort of stand in a category of one -- we’re the only Soundgarden there is. What I’m finding is that we’re moving at a faster pace without having to deal with those outside pressures. Weirdly, I feel like this record has actually come together faster than, say, Down on the Upside or even Superunknown did.

Most people, when they think of that era, see a holy trinity: you, Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

You know, I guess it was maybe two years after we split up when I was driving down the street, turned on the radio and a Soundgarden song came on, and I realized, “Oh, they’re not going to stop playing our songs.” In that respect we never really went away. We’re a band people will always make reference to on some level or another. Not just us, but the Seattle scene that we came from, that we helped start -- looking back from now, it’s actually a movement, culturally and in music, that could be compared to punk rock. Not so much a genre …

… but a turning point.

Yes, and it really was, particularly on the business side of it and with radio. It was a very vital and immediate and all-encompassing moment, and thanks to MTV it had worldwide impact, everywhere at the same time. It’s pretty exciting that we’re part of that.

It’s one thing to be in a room together again -- it’s another to get back on stage. Are you able to describe how that felt?

For the Showbox show (April 2010), we were definitely the most nervous. That was the first time we had played again, but it just felt like the four of us going through songs. I didn’t feel connected to the live Soundgarden identity. After that, we became us again, where it was like this is how it feels to be on stage with Soundgarden.

I think we just had to get through (the Showbox show). It’s like when I put out my first solo record, Euphoria Morning: Even though musically I had gone out of my way to steer clear of anything I’d ever done in Soundgarden, I was very nervous about it, because I’d never done anything like it before. Once it was out, it was out, and that was it -- I was never nervous about being a solo artist again.

I think it’s the same with Soundgarden’s first show back. I remember it being over and I was driving to the airport, and someone gave me a poster that had Soundgarden at the top and 2010 on the bottom. And I thought, “Ah, that’s pretty amazing -- we did something in 2010.”

Reprinted from TheOrange County Register - originally available as an online feature here

Chris Cornell Fan Page © Clare O'Brien 2011