“He wanted to just sing”: The band Chris Cornell refused to play guitar for
The studio has always been meant to be the best collaborative space between artists. As much as people try their best to make their dreams a reality once the tape starts rolling, there comes a point where you need other people around you to bounce ideas off of and see whether you are going in the right direction. Although Chris Cornell could have easily made great albums outside of Soundgarden, he admitted that he never wanted to touch a guitar when he joined Audioslave.
Then again, did we really need Cornell playing guitar on every Soundgarden hit? He had a very unique touch on his electric guitar every time he played, but with that Robert Plant wail, it’s not like everyone was listening for him playing wild solos a la Eddie Van Halen or anything.
Because that wasn’t what the grunge scene he grew up in was about, anyway. The entire mentality of the Seattle sound was about not being the kind of precise musician that came out of the hair metal movement, and that meant making something that was indebted a lot more to punk rock acts like Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys rather than being the next Def Leppard.
Once Soundgarden hit records like Superunknown, though, Rage Against the Machine was already changing how most people looked at guitar. Although anyone behind the fretboard was looking to make something new, no one really took that to heart quite like Tom Morello, especially when he shied away from playing guitar solos and made noise that sounded like they were being made by aliens trying to establish contact with Earth.
As the group concaved in on itself, though, Cornell figured that the next best thing would be for him to work with the non-De-la-Rocha members on a new project. While every part of the band was meant to be a collaborative process on tracks like ‘Like A Stone’ and ‘Cochise’, Cornell only had one rule: don’t give him a guitar.
Despite having a strong sense of rhythm, Morello remembered being tol by Cornell not to ask him to play guitar, saying, “He wanted to just sing. He wanted to be a lyricist and singer and be free of the songwriting part. Which was great because we had a lot of great ideas. He didn’t want to play guitar. He wanted to sing. He was like, ‘Show me some music,’ and for us it was great.”
At the same time, it also might have been a case of Cornell wanting to be practical. He was sitting next to one of the most inventive craftsmen to ever pick up a guitar, so no matter what kind of strange riff he brought to the table, it was always going to be in service to whatever Morello came up with on his whammy pedal or strange sound he created behind the scenes.
In the end, it feels like the right move not to have Cornell have anything in front of him. Whereas he would trade between playing guitars and just singing Soundgarden tunes, this was his moment to turn himself into the frontman he was always meant to be. It may not have had the strange eccentricities that came from Soundgarden, but with Morello’s guitar and Brad Wilk and Tim Commerford’s rock-solid rhythm section, that just meant there was a whole new set of sounds to play with.
