Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview (2024)

Considering the events of the past year, members of the Seattle rock community can hardly be blamed for feeling that success comes with too high a price. Chris Cornell, 30, the singer and principal songwriter for Soundgarden, is no exception.

Superunknown, the band’s fourth album, was released last March and entered the Billboard chart at No. 1; praised by critics as the band’s best record to date, the album went on to sell more than 3 million copies. But three weeks later, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain shot himself to death. Two months after that, Kristen Pfaff, bassist for Courtney Love’s band, Hole, died of a heroin overdose. All of which brought back memories of March 1990, when an overdose took the life of Cornell’s former roommate Andrew Wood, the frontman for Mother Love Bone.

But Cornell, a Seattle native, can remember a time when his hometown wasn’t just rock-tragedy central, before the international press latched onto grunge as a fashion statement and as a talisman for generational ennui. The youngest son in a large Catholic family (“T’m Bobby in The Brady Bunch,” he says), Cornell took piano and guitar lessons as a child but began his band years as a drummer. “It was the only thing I had an attention span for,” he says. “When you’re young, playing drums is immediately satisfying ’cause whether or not you know how to play anything, the bottom line is that you’re pounding on something, so you’re happy about it.” By all indicators the Seattle scene is over. Cornell wears his hair short now, although his signature facial hair remains, along with a silver hoop in each ear. He says that despite their recent financial solvency, he and the other members of Soundgarden have allowed themselves few luxuries apart from a brand-new rehearsal space in a former travel agency on Aurora Street with a magnificent hillside view of Lake Union. “There is no ladder up here,” he says of Seattle. “Everything is kind of parallel. You either rent the house you’re in, or you own the house you’re in. But either way, it’s the same f*cking house.”

Yet Soundgarden’s history and achievements are inseparable from those of Seattle. Screaming Life, Soundgarden’s 1987 debut EP, was the second release on the influential Sub Pop label (after Green River’s Dry as a Bone), and Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil can take credit for having brought together Sub Pop co-owners Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt.

Cornell’s shoulder-length tresses — aptly named Sub Pop hair — and Soundgarden’s mix of ’70s heavy metal and ’80s punk ushered in a new rock & roll era. Kurt Cobain would later say that Soundgarden were the main reason Nirvana wanted to record for Sub Pop. (Guitarist Jason Everman, briefly a member of Nirvana, was later a short-term member of Soundgarden.) Cornell even married within the scene; his wife, Susan Silver, once managed the U-Men, a band considered grandfathers of the local scene. Today, Silver manages Soundgarden — Cornell, Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd, who replaced original bassist Hiro Yamamoto in 1989 — as well as another hot Seattle band, Alice in Chains.

Having spent the spring and summer on the road, Soundgarden opted in August to cancel further touring plans and returned to Seattle to write and relax. For Cornell, eating appears to be a favorite pastime (he’s a sucker for raw oysters on the half shell); watching basketball is another. We spend our last night together in Seattle watching the Supersonics squeak past the Utah Jazz in the pay-per-view season opener at a friend’s house. That night a small, friendly group of musician types, including Scott Sundquist, Soundgarden’s original drummer, invests all its energies in cheering the Sonics to a narrow victory.

“For some reason basketball pulls everyone together in Seattle,” Silver, also a native, says later. “Even more than bands, more than music.”

In retrospect, what’s your take on rock’s Seattle years?
It’s hard not to be a little bitter about it. We lost good friends in the process. And all of a sudden you realize that it’s turned into something that’s considered a fashion statement. It’s like mining. It’s like somebody came into your city with bulldozers and water compressors and mined your own perfect mountain and excavated it and threw out what they didn’t want and left the rest to rot. It’s that bad.

We benefited [as a band]. We’ve made any statement we wanted to make about music and about who we are. But it doesn’t really come across in terms of what Seattle was like. All of a sudden you see it on TV, and people that you know and love are getting the wrong idea because of what they saw on the news. You can’t help but think that somewhere, somebody’s been robbed. And I don’t even think it’s me. I think it’s everyone.

You can call it being naive, but there are genuine reasons to be optimistic about doing something that you truly believe in and succeeding at it.
Sure, sure. But it’s being a part of something and then having that be dismantled in front of you and not even having the chance to have it catch up with you. We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged.

We weren’t so much a part of it as a lot of other bands. No one really knew us, we didn’t go to parties. But at the same time, when a lot of other bands from Seattle started having success and getting attention, we were really proud to be amongst that and a part of that. And it felt really good.

But outside of the people that were involved with the Seattle scene when it was happening, the rest of the country and the world and probably a lot of the bands that play in Seattle now think that what the Seattle scene was about is Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Alice in Chains — guitar-based rock with punk influences and ’70s influences. Period. End of story. And that’s so far from what was going on.

What was left out was the completely experimental music, from free jazz to theatrical bands to a lot of very Gothic-bent bands. Other people who were part of the scene that we were in, a lot of them were either exploited or f*cked over by the whole thing or completely passed on because they didn’t fit into the narrow perception of what Seattle had to offer.

What happened in Andrew Wood’s case?
It’s almost impossible to say when somebody that you know dies mysteriously. But what it felt like was that somebody came into your back yard and started f*cking with your scene, f*cking with your people. We thought that everything could remain intact and be true to itself, then just expand out with these tentacles, and that was naive.