Artis the Spoonman: the busker who inspired Soundgarden
When working in a rock band, inspiration can come from various places. Even though artists can delve deep into their psyche to create something they feel in their heart, it’s another matter of trying to talk about what’s happening in the outside world, as if putting together standalone stories about strangers. While Chris Cornell often ventured within to deal with his feelings on Soundgarden records, ‘Spoonman’ marked a different approach to the band’s usual way of songwriting.
While they had found themselves in the centre of the grunge movement overnight, they were never looking to become the biggest stars in the world. For all of the credibility they had at the start of their career, Soundgarden would ultimately become the last of the ‘Big 4’ of the genre to make it big, with Superunknown coming out only a few months after Kurt Cobain’s tragic death.
By the time they had created their commercial breakthrough, they had honed their craft down to a science. While still keeping with their avant-garde approach to song construction, Cornell had shifted his songwriting to become more palatable for the mainstream, creating tracks that had a fair bit of brooding anger underneath them, like ‘Fell on Black Days’ and ‘The Day I Tried To Live’.
Amid the different riffs that the band worked out in the studio, Cornell offered the song ‘Spoonman’ inspired by a street performer working on the local Seattle street corners. Known as ‘Artis the Spoonman’, the percussionist was known to play the spoons on various street corners, entertaining anyone who would come by.
Looking to memorialise Artis’ talents, Cornell wrote a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of the street performer, complaining that he needs to knock it off playing the spoons. While the song would get an acoustic version that wound up on the deluxe edition of Cameron Crowe’s Singles soundtrack, it wouldn’t be until the studio version that Artis truly got to shine.
Structured in the vein of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Black Dog’, most of the song thrives off of the various start-stop progressions that Cornell plays, hitting a roaring high note and letting it hang in the air before the rest of the band come storming in. Though Kim Thayil laid down one of his most tasteful solos on the back half of the track, Artis would appear on the song during the breakdown.
Once Thayil’s solo fades out, the central percussion that follows is provided by Artis on the spoons, with drummer Matt Cameron matching him note for note whenever he plays. From there, the song builds in intensity as the rest of the band adds different layers to the mix, giving way to Cornell’s immortal scream on the back half of the track.
Although Artis’ inclusion may have just been a subtle love letter to the street performer, the subject matter was also a good indicator of the band’s sense of humour. While Soundgarden may have been the closest answer to Led Zeppelin that Seattle could muster, they never took their craft too seriously.
