Chris Cornell Had an Unforgettable Vulnerability

Chris Cornell whose body was found on Wednesday performing as part of Soundgarden in 1992.
Chris Cornell, whose body was found on Wednesday, performing as part of Soundgarden in 1992.PHOTOGRAPH BY GIA KNAEPS / GETTY

On Wednesday night, Chris Cornell, of the rock bands Soundgarden and Audioslave, was found dead in his hotel room at the MGM Grand Casino in Detroit. His representatives called his passing “sudden and unexpected,” and early reports from the Detroit Police Department suggest suicide. (A white man with Cornell’s birthday was found lifeless on a bathroom floor, with “a band around his neck.”) Cornell was an instrumental figure in the grunge boom of the early nineteen-nineties, a community that’s since been virtually annihilated by suicide and major drug addiction, having lost foundational players including Layne Staley and Mike Starr, of Alice in Chains; Scott Weiland, of Stone Temple Pilots; Kurt Cobain, of Nirvana; and now Cornell.

Soundgarden was formed in Seattle, in 1984, and the band became an inadvertent forerunner of a new genre—grunge, a pained and scuzzy mélange of hard rock, heavy metal, and punk. (It would also eventually become a powerful sartorial signifier, spawning a flannel-shirt renaissance and, for a brief time, the idea that men should wear leggings under shorts.) Though Soundgarden was instrumental in grunge becoming visible outside the Seattle clubs where it was honed, the band never really felt exactly of the genre for me: it was too dominant, too gutsy, too solid. Listening to early Nirvana records, a person worries that a strong wind might have disassembled the whole operation. Soundgarden seemed like it could get slammed by a truck and keep playing.

The band came up through indie labels—it released two EPs for Sub Pop, and its début long-player for SST—before signing to A&M, a major, in 1989. “Louder Than Love” is a dissonant and confrontational rock record that plainly recalls early Black Sabbath; play it at the right volume, at the right time of night, and you might feel as if you are accidentally conjuring ancient demons. Soundgarden was always a melodic band—buried in the aggression are all these beautiful little riffs—but it became more explicitly palatable by 1994, when the band released “Superunknown,” a record that produced several charting singles, including the surreal, careening “Black Hole Sun,” which won the band a Grammy, for Best Hard-Rock Performance.

Cornell’s legacy already feels boundless. Anyone who came of age in America in the early nineteen-nineties can, via some mix of muscle memory and deeply embedded nostalgia, probably still bellow all or part of “Hunger Strike,” a single from Temple of the Dog’s first and only album, released in 1991. The band itself was an unlikely and fleeting ensemble, built by Cornell in pure and earnest homage to Andy Wood, a Seattle musician who had recently died, at twenty-four, of a heroin overdose. The idea was to get a bunch of Wood’s friends and former bandmates together—including Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament, of Pearl Jam; and Matt Cameron, then of Soundgarden and now also of Pearl Jam—to write and perform a batch of rock songs that weren’t explicitly about Wood (though two, “Reach Down” and “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” address his death directly) but might instead offer the band a comfortable way to collectively grieve. I can’t speak authoritatively on the complicated ways in which young men mourn, but this still strikes me as a generous and humane idea. Let’s metabolize this pain. Let’s externalize it. Let’s share it somehow.

“Hunger Strike”—a song about social and political accountability—remains one of the weirdest rock tracks ever to reach No. 4 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart; it features Cornell in a duet with Eddie Vedder (who was then fairly new to town, and not an official member of the band) while McCready plays a pretty, looping riff on a reissued 1962 Stratocaster. Cornell sings the first verse, and then Vedder sings the exact same verse again. They both kill the vocals: high and low, two massive performances. It’s as if they were drawing on extra reserves of oxygen, pulling new and better air from some mysterious source. “Hunger Strike” is, I think, a song about not being an asshole—about choosing self-sacrifice over easy, immoral indulgence:

But I can’t feed on the powerless when my cup’s already overfilled, yeah
But it’s on the table, the fire’s cookin’
And they’re farmin’ babies, while the slaves are all workin’
Blood is on the table and the mouths are all chokin’
But I’m goin’ hungry, yeah

This would become a recurring theme for Cornell, who wrote often of his own self-edification and of trying to be a better man. Of course, being better is hard. Something in the way he sang—Cornell’s huge, burly voice was straining but never strained, as if he were trying to get somewhere else but couldn’t, so he just kept backing it up and trying again—felt endlessly searching. “How would I know that this could be my fate?” he shrieks in “Fell on Black Days,” another single from “Superunknown.” Even that record’s title feels indicative of relentless questing.

In the last several decades of American music, many of the most muscular and idiosyncratic voices have emerged from rock, a genre that—unlike, say, rhythm and blues, or pop—essentially frees a singer from any expectations of technical virtuosity. And yet: Cornell was a virtuosic singer with a four-octave range. Like his predecessors Robert Plant, Steven Tyler, Freddie Mercury, and Axl Rose, he manipulated that range in gruesome and seductive ways.

My favorite song by Cornell is “Seasons,” a solo track he recorded for the soundtrack to the movie “Singles,” Cameron Crowe’s paean to being young and mixed up in Seattle. There is no rhythm section, just Cornell and some guitars. It nearly sounds like an outtake from “Led Zeppelin III”—it would fit comfortably between “Tangerine” and “That’s the Way”—but is made singular by Cornell’s particular vulnerability, a tough brokenness. He sings about the strange sadness of wanting something but never quite knowing how to get it. Instead, he stares, wistfully and helplessly, as it remains just out of reach. Time keeps passing:

And I’m lost, behind
The words I’ll never find
And I’m left behind
As seasons roll on by

The way his voice jumps up on the “be-hind”—I don’t know. It’s an obvious expression of worry, but there’s something so kind in it, too. It is as if he is saying that he will always stay here with us, with everyone who’s been left behind. Let’s remember it that way.