Chris Cornell died five years ago today. Read our 1994 interview with the singer, where he reflected on Andrew Wood’s death and the hopeful messages hidden inside his dark lyrics.
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 , 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.
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.
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.
You’re written more than a few doom-laden song lyrics. Is it legitimate to read a songwriter’s demise into his lyrics after the fact? From the time that I started playing drums at 16, I was already out of school. Working in restaurants, whatever, dishwasher, floor sweeper. I became a cook eventually.I went from being a daily drug user at 13 to having bad drug experiences and quitting drugs by the time I was 14 and then not having any friends until the time I was 16. There was about two years where I was more or less agoraphobic and didn’t deal with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, didn’t have any friends at all.
We wrote one song called “Incessant Mace” pretty early on that sounded blues based. It was very slow. Lyrically and vocally, it was very European Gothic. But I guess because we’re American and because of our influences as kids, it sounded to people more like Sabbath or Zeppelin, and people would hate it. That was the first reaction, really: that this was the most uncool thing anyone could do at this point in music in this city. That was a turning point in our career as a band.
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