Back in 1989 or so, a friend gave me a cassette that changed my life. On one side was Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction, and I warmed to that side first. On the other was Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love, strange and knotty and difficult, and eventually I fell in love.
I saw Soundgarden at a San Francisco club called The Stone, down on Broadway. They were opening for Voivod. (That same friend took me, and later I found him at the bar, chatting with Tim Alexander from then-unknown Primus and Jason Newstead from Metallica.) I remember Chris Cornell, shirtless and in shorts, stomping around on the stage in big combat boots, screaming. I fell in love.
If you never experienced an underground metal show back then, you might not grasp what an intense, overwhelming sensory experience it was, or in what way. The sound was murky and loud, the room was hot as hell and filled with smoke, and anywhere close to the stage was a press of bodies moshing, shoving, jostling, heaving. It was messy, chaotic. You were half watching the show and half trying not to get killed, and you came out smelling like other people’s cigarettes and sweat, deaf and screaming.
When my first serious girlfriend broke up with me, early in my junior year of high school, Badmotorfinger got me through it. I had a best friend then who shared my obsession with Soundgarden, and with Chris Cornell — his voice, his presence, his beauty. When I started a shitty band with some friends, I wanted us to sound like Soundgarden.
When I was in college and that best friend had moved to Connecticut, we would lie on the floor of her weird little apartment in the attic of a flower store, get really really stoned, and listen to Superunknown and the various Soundgarden B-sides we’d dug up and talk about how sexy Chris Cornell’s voice was and analyze the lyrics.
Another thing my friend especially loved about Soundgarden was that they were death-haunted. Chris Cornell was death-haunted. My friend had lost a brother, plus a shocking number of friends and acquaintances for someone in her early twenties, and Soundgarden seemed to understand. Temple of the Dog was a tribute album for a friend of Chris Cornell’s who’d died, and much of Badmotorfinger was about death.
I thought of Chris Cornell as a survivor. But he’s gone now, gone like Andrew Wood and Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley and Scott Weiland. Being a grunge singer is hazardous.
Candles burning yesterday
Like somebody’s best friend died
And I’ve been caught in a mind riot