A rattling voice that could soothe you as much as it could work anyone into a frenzy, Chris Cornell’s sudden passing last week has left much of the world of rock in sadness. The 52-year-old frontman of one of the 1990s leading rock bands Soundgarden, and later the voice of supergroup Audioslave (with members from Rage Against the Machine), Cornell was on tour with Soundgarden in Detroit. They were scheduled to kick off one of US’s biggest rock and metal festivals, Rock on the Range, in Columbus Ohio.
As someone who took a chance on finally witnessing sonic titans like Soundgarden live at Rock on the Range, Cornell’s death certainly comes as a shock, something that seemed so close and suddenly became a possibility no longer. Following tributes in terms of songs and snippets by artists on day one, Rock on the Range and its thousands-strong crowd paid tribute to Cornell with a video montage, audio from his performances and a special acoustic set by American rockers Stone Sour, featuring Corey Taylor dedicating Pink Floyd's ‘Wish You Were Here’ and 'Hunger Strike' by Temple of the Dog.
Patrick Dahlheimer of Live performs at Rock On The Range Music Festival on Friday, May 19, 2017, in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
As more details emerge, the Internet has been (thankfully) quick to remember Cornell first as a voice that was all soul and heart. Although Soundgarden saw chart success and mainstream fame much later compared to their peers from the Seattle Grunge movement, Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam, the band are best known for songs such as ‘Jesus Christ Pose’ (off 1991’s Badmotorfinger ) and ‘Black Hole Sun’, ‘Spoonman’, ‘Fell on Black Days’, all from their fourth album Superunknown in 1994. Traversing metal and rock, Cornell’s baritone voice coupled with distinctly anguished screams set them apart from their Grunge peers.
Cornell also became part of his first supergroup, Temple of the Dog and delivered the hit ‘Hunger Strike’ featuring Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder in 1990. The group came together as a tribute to fellow Seattle grunge band Mother Love Bone’s vocalist Andrew Wood, who died after battling for life following a heroin overdose. While Cornell lived through several decades of seeing and being part of drug abuse, he hadn’t let it ruin him. Soundgarden dissolved in 1998 and Cornell began releasing solo work, never stopping the flow of his creative output. By 2001, however, he joined forces with members from another recently-discontinued band, Rage Against the Machine, to front Audioslave.
FIEL-- Chris Cornell performs with Soundgarden at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., July 8, 2011. The band reunited after 14 years between tours. Cornell, a powerful, dynamic singer whose band Soundgarden was one of the architects of grunge music, died in Detroit on May 17, 2017. He was 52. (Chad Batka/The New York Times)
In hindsight, Audioslave only seems like a chapter in Cornell and the Rage band members’ lives, something they rode high on the hype train and then broke up in 2007, with the vocalist citing personal and musical differences. Even then, Audioslave became the first thing a lot of kids got introduced to in terms of mainstream rock with songs like ‘Cochise’ and ‘Show Me How to Live’, for the inimitable funk metal force of Rage Against the Machine that began turning to emotive rock to match Cornell’s voice on ‘Doesn’t Remind Me’, ‘I Am the Highway’.
Unsurprisingly, the next logical move that fans waited on was Soundgarden’s reunion, which came in 2010, followed by their first album in 16 years, King Animal . As early as on Wednesday night, the band’s Twitter account posted a quote from Cornell made about reuniting: “What I look forward to the most...is the camaraderie. It’s what we missed when we weren’t a band.” Cornell even kept his solo career in full swing, releasing an acoustic live album Songbook in 2011 and Higher Truth in 2015 and touring solo.
Cornell will best be remembered as one of the most powerful voices in rock, who probably survived a great deal, but is definitely gone too soon.
