chris cornell's acoustic solo tour is a smash

by charles cross, seattle times, april 2011

 

In the mid-'90s, during the height of grunge, Chris Cornell got a call from producer Rick Rubin asking if Cornell could rearrange Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" acoustically.

"He said it was for Johnny Cash," Cornell recalls. "I loved Johnny Cash. So I tried it for a few hours, and then said, 'it's not possible.' "

A few months later, Cornell heard the brilliant version of "Rusty Cage" Cash had done, arranged by Rubin. The transformation was a learning experience for Cornell, and in a way it provided some of the genesis for his acoustic tour, which brings him to Seattle Sunday for a sold-out show at the Moore.

"You don't have to be quite so precious with the instrumentation of a song, as long as part of the melody is there," he says.

The tour finds Cornell rearranging many of his Soundgarden and Audioslave songs. So far, the tour has been one of the most surprising musical turns of Cornell's long career. Even the timing was unexpected, commencing as it did almost on the day that the rest of the rock world was talking about the announcement of Soundgarden's late-summer tour dates.

Yet Cornell has always been a restless soul, and many of his career decisions — particularly leaving Audioslave — have been unexpected. And with Soundgarden's massive tour not starting until July, he had a window of opportunity.

Every show has sold out, and the dozen dates so far have garnered rave reviews from critics and fans.

"It's been pretty amazing," he observes. "At first, I wasn't sure the audiences were going to be quiet, but night after night, I sing my final note, and I hear it go out into the room, and come back. That's new for me."

It is also new for Cornell to be on stage with just a couple of acoustic guitars, one electric, and a stool. His only odd technological aids come in the form of a red telephone (a symbolic nod to the late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, who used to call Cornell on this phone) and a turntable.

Rather than play to a backing tape, Cornell accompanies a record of a piano piece by Natasha Shneider. She was a musician who toured with Cornell often, but who died in 2008.

"When I sing that song, and hear her play, it is to hear her come alive again," he says.

Other shows on the tour have included covers of songs by Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, John Lennon's "Imagine" and Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." Almost all the covers are by deceased artists. "There's a lot of fallen soldiers," Cornell says.

One of those fallen is central to the acoustic tour. In the middle of the set Cornell has been playing "All Night Thing" from the Temple of the Dog album honoring Seattle band Mother Love Bone's Andrew Wood. He follows that with Wood's "Man of Golden Words," including a verse from Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," and then "Say Hello 2 Heaven."

Cornell says the "Comfortably Numb" lyrics confront the often-distorted memory of Wood.

"It seemed like it was really descriptive of how someone going through drug problems is often perceived as that alone," he says. "But that wasn't Andy: That didn't define him to me, or anyone who knew him."

Though Cornell, 46, moved away from Seattle a few years back, as with most conversations with him, the topic eventually drifts back to the heady days of the early local scene.

"We took a lot of that closeness between everyone for granted," he says.

As with the songs in his acoustic set, time and distance give Cornell a different feeling of the work he created when he was a baby-faced boy.

And though he probably won't play a Johnny Cash cover, Cornell still thinks about Cash's "Rusty Cage."

"It wasn't until Johnny Cash had covered that song," he says with a chuckle in his voice, "that anyone ever told me how great the lyrics were."

 

Reprinted from the Seattle Times - originally available as an online feature here

Chris Cornell Fan Page © Clare O'Brien 2011