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[Q&A] Soundgarden's Chris Cornell on going solo, not being "grunge" and loving Elton John



CHRIS CORNELL is in many ways the most representative hard-rock/metal frontman of the 90s: even as his long-haired shirtless image coupled with powerful lungs that could hit glass-breaking highs would seem to make him the Ian Gillan of his generation, at heart he was both a punk and a subversive. Meaning that his band was going to inject noise, chiming atonality, and other post-punk weirdness into the heavy riffing monstrosity that was the mighty SOUNDGARDEN. And that rambunctiousness fit the times, as their popularity grew and grew as they got weirder and weirder. We profiled Cornell this week for a piece that previews his sold-out show at Berklee tomorrow night, where he will be up onstage, just an acoustic, that voice, and that hair, belting out tunes not just from Soundgarden, not just from Temple of the Dog (the Pearl Jam/S'Garden supergroup of sorts that went multi-platinum in the early 90s), and not just from Audioslave (Cornell's post 'Garden band he did in the early 00's with members of Rage Against The Machine), but all sorts of other weird covers and solo tunes as well. In the meantime, we thought you'd enjoy the entire conversation, wherein he not only details the peculiarities of playing solo acoustic, but also reflects on the strange period before grunge and alternative when Soundgarden flirted with mainstream metal stardom a la Metallica, GN'F'N'R and Skid Row. Check it out:

So what was the impetus for this current acoustic tour, reworking and revisiting your old material?
Well I guess that the impetus is that it’s just me and a guitar. And that becomes kind of a motivation to reinterpret whatever I want to play.

What has it been like, revisiting old material: does it bring you back to when the material was originally written?
You know, I guess years and years ago, I started doing a [Soundgarden] song called “Mind Riot” from Louder Than Love, and the song was written in a tuning where all the strings on the guitar were tuned to some octave of E. It’s a really difficult tuning to get a guitar to do, so if we tried to do it as a band, it sounded badly out of tune, so I just had one guitar in that tuning all the time, and I’d do that one alone. And that seemed to be this great kind of refrain for everyone in the middle of a set. So I kind of continued doing that. When Audioslave toured, we had a song that, similarly, would be good for me to do acoustically. And as I did that, that ended up being two or three songs, and that just kind of got me into sitting down and reinterpreting songs on an acoustic guitar. And then there was always that desire to do that, to just pick up an instrument and perform.



It must shed a new light on your songs, reworking them for an “unplugged” format.
I remember seeing, I think it was Elton John Unplugged, in the middle of when that was a really popular thing to do, every rock band was doing it and it was kind of pathetic, a bunch of guys that were given Ovations so that they could just play their songs the same way they would have electric. And I saw Elton John, and he just came out and sat at a piano and played a bunch of songs. And it was amazing! And I really noticed the difference between what one guy or one band can do versus another, and I wanted to do that-- to just pick up an instrument and play my songs and hold the attention of an audience. And it was the total opposite of what my bands did. And also I guess I have always felt, to some degree, how much of a singer/songwriter are you if you can’t just sit at an instrument and do that?

But it's a lot of pressure, right? It's all on you, versus just being in a band and blowing everyone's minds with rock.
It’s a real it’s-all-on-you kind of thing. Anything that happens is going to be audible, any mistake is going to be glaring, anything that anyone says in the crowd, it’s all right there. There’s no sonic barrier, you know? And that’s also what’s great about it, though: as scary as it sounds like it might be, you get over it immediately, because there’s sort of no other option! You sit downa nd sing your songs, and people sing along, and you can hear it, and they can overpower the p.a. because it’s so loud. People shouting out requests, that sort of thing, not necessarily having a setlist. I did a show in L.A., it was a benefit, and there was a fan, this young guy, who wanted to get up and play a song with me that he knew. And you never know how that’s gonna go! And people will point out “Isn’t that when you’re most vulnerable?” and I’m like “No, that’s when it’s not your fault!” You can actually stand there and connect with some guy you’ve never met before, and somehow at the end of it, just reflect and think “Wow.” In the context of an acoustic set, there’s much more opportunity for that kind of situation to occur.



The music you’ve made has always been pretty all over the place-- even in Soundgarden, you guys weren’t just a “metal” band, there was always a lot of diversity. And your solo career has also been similarly diverse, especially with the Scream album you did with Timbaland a few years ago. Do you feel like sometimes people mistakenly just peg you as a metal screeching dude?
In terms of being a music fan, aggressive music, I suppose, has always only been a part of what I’m a fan of. And I became known for that, I became well known as that. Even in the context of Soundgarden, for example, we did a lot of different things, musically, it wasn’t always the aggressive sledgehammer-to-the-head approach to music. It was often subtle, aethereal, dreamy. We did sonic assault songs like “Jesus Christ Pose”, but then there would be more chordally-oriented melodic songs like “Black Hole Sun”, and it was all in the context of the same band. To me, that’s always made sense. THe first band that I really got into, as a far, was The Beatles. And they did whatever they wanted, however they wanted, and they embraced any influence unapologetically. They did “Helter Skelter” and they did “Eleanor Rigby”, which is just Paul and a string quartet, and no one thought that was weird! So in the context of my career, the biggest trouble I had was being known or associated with aggressive music and then getting people scratching their heads when I do something other than that.





But for me, that’s always going to happen, simultaneously. The song “Seasons” [a solo acoustic song that Cornell contributed to the 1992 Seattle-set Cameron Crowe film Singles] I think is a good example, and so was Temple of the Dog. That came from a period when I was writing songs that I didn’t think were going to be appropriate for Soundgarden, which was definitely my focus at the time, and it became something else. I suppose that was a turning point in my career, perceptually, because with Mike and Stone and Jeff and Matt, it was a different combination of people. And I knew that in Soundgarden we were special, as a group, but I didn’t know I was going to be able to do something special outside of that. But that collaboration happened very quickly, and it was special, and it made me not want to stare down my nose at other collaborations as my life continued, I felt like that just wouldn’t be exciting. With Scream, I mean, look: I love the album, still. It doesn’t sound like anything else! And I think that these collaborations, that is what it means to have a long creative career: doing different things, taking chances, having different collaborations, and not worrying about surprising anyone with what it might mean or might be thought of to mean. So this is just, in a sense, another angle of music that involves the performing of music more than anything else. And I’m just trying to make that impactful without using tools I’ve always used, in a different context.



It must be interesting revisiting these songs from twenty years ago, especially because you guys were in the midst of this insane pop culture explosion what with Seattle and grunge and alternative and all that nuttiness. Did you sense at the time how insane all of that was?
Soundgarden was actually pretty insular. We had friends and we were part of the scene, but we weren’t fixtures, as individuals, and you wouldn’t find us all at clubs all the time. I think we became more of that as we became an active band in the scene, but as far as the early version of the bands, it was all about Malfunkshun and Green River and Melvins and Soundgarden, and members of those bands all formed bands that people knew about, that they equate to what is the Seattle Sound. And we were influenced by that to some degree, but we were mostly influenced by a post-punk US indie scene. There was no concept or idea of major labels or radio airplay because it didn’t exist in the world that we knew as indie post-punk, which became alternative. “Alternative” was a word that was used correctly at the beginning, which meant alternative to anything commercially viable, and that’s kind of what it was. Musically, we were just different than anything else. When it became a genre called grunge, and we were considered part of it, and bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were considered to be playing the same genre of music that was stylistically different than the greater world of music-- that just didn’t make sense to me. I mean, it didn’t sound to me like it was genre-specific at all, so the only tie-in that I could see was that we were young bands that were roughly in the same area code that were influenced by punk and post-punk music and culture.

Did you ever feel like, at times, Soundgarden was almost a subversive element in what was then mainstream metal?
Well, it depended on the moment. Soundgarden’s first big moment was opening up for Metallica at the Oakland Coliseum [Oct 21, 1991, with Faith No More and Queensryche]. It was 45,000 people, I think, which was to us a good 40,000 people more than we’d ever played to! And it was Metallica, and their audience was great, and we went out there and we were who we were. And Metallica at the time was a band that had gone from indie-metal to major label and taken their fans with them, and at the time it seemed like an example of when it was done right. And we connected with the audience immediately and it worked and it was great.



But then there were times where it didn’t necessarily feel right-- the Guns N' Roses tour [Fall 1991, Use Your Illusion Tour] is a good example. Their audience felt, to me, not interested in other music. Even if the band, as individuals, were. So when we were opening for them, we tended to have groups of Soundgarden fans in the cheap seat with banners, and a lot of empty seats in the front because Guns N' Roses were known for going on late and a lot of their fans didn’t really care who opened for them. At the same time, it felt like were both a freakshow and just us doing what we do, exposing ourselves-- not literally!-- to people, and if even a handful of them are receptive, that’s what we’re there for.

And there were periods where it was discomforting, in situations-- we opened for Skid Row [Feb 1992, Slave To The Grind Tour], which we worried about, that existential meltdown of “Does this make us them?” We did it anyway, and the thing was that when you looked at the sales charts as we toured, the sales of Badmotorfinger in cities where we played with them would go off the charts-- these shows that were sold out hockey arenas. All of their fans were interested in hearing new music, and it kind of changed the game for us. It was the first time we had a gold record, that tour, and it was a clear indication that “Look, you don’t want to pick your audience and try to choose who your fans are, and that will define how cool you are.” I mean, every musician was a nerdy kid in a bedroom trying to discover new music! There were a lot of guys in grunge bands with dreadlocks who had Duran Duran records who discovered something one day and it changed their life!



Was that what happened to you-- that finding music, the right music, changed your life?
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s all part of growing up. But it’s weird: the first thing that happens is that you try to align yourself with a specific club or group that separates you from what you don’t want to be a part of. And the next thing is to point out who’s not a part of it. And there was a lot of that, I experienced that on every level because Soundgarden started out in this microcosm as an unknown band that was known to a handful of people who loved it because it was their special secret. And then we became a band that was the big fish in town, and as new people discovered us, the original people who discovered us were annoyed by that. And then that happened as an indie band becoming a major label band; we had a lot of indie fans, and as we started releasing major label records, reaching a larger audience, and getting radio airplay, some of the initial fans were annoyed by that. And that happened, of course, with other bands, and it still happens now; I’m sure that there are a lot of Arcade Fire fans that now everyone knows who they are because they’re on tv or whatever. You know, “I saw them on their first tour, got their first record.” And that’s a natural progression.
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