Chris Cornell thought Soundgarden had a perfect career: “I felt proud”
No one in Soundgarden was really worried about the term ‘grunge’ when they first got started.
As much as Chris Cornell liked the idea of making rock and roll when he first stepped in front of the microphone, there was no chance that any band from Seattle was going to bring about the musical revolution in the era when everyone from Poison to Warrant were becoming the biggest bands in the world. But once the Pacific Northwest became the biggest landmark of rock and roll history, Cornell felt that his band played every single record in exactly the way that they were supposed to.
Because when your home first becomes the biggest name in the country, it can be extremely hard to navigate. Pearl Jam practically ran from the limelight when Eddie Vedder was featured on the cover of Time magazine, and even though Kurt Cobain leaned into his own sense of celebrity, he was clearly uncomfortable with how much the press was becoming involved with his domestic life when he started working on records like In Utero.
But Soundgarden were also pretty lucky to have the same kind of career trajectory as the ultimate indie band: REM. The Athens band had the perfect ascent after years of being kings of the underground, and Soundgarden had a lot more years under their belt being indie darlings before they eventually stretched themselves out on the album Superunknown. And yet, the band never compromised their sound when they played.
As much as ‘Black Hole Sun’ might be their signature song, the harmony doesn’t sound like anything that would have necessarily been on the radio. This was Cornell taking The Beatles and crossing it with Black Sabbath, and even on some of their greatest pop tunes like ‘Fell on Black Days’, you can hear them throwing in some strange left turns, like writing a riff in 5/4 or using tunings that even Joni Mitchell would start to question if she ever tried to learn one of their tunes.
And when Down on the Upside became their final record, Cornell felt that he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, saying, “I felt proud of Soundgarden. It didn’t seem to me that, artistically, we made any mistakes. And we put it away in a very healthy state. The last album, Down On The Upside, was one of my favourites, and we walked away then – how great is that? We had integrity, so why fuck with it?” Besides, Cornell wasn’t about to stop making great music the minute he left the band.
The only reason why they broke up was that they had taken their sound as far as it could go, and when working with Audioslave, Cornell had the chance to become the frontman that he was always meant to be. He was in charge of making fantastic lyrics and riffs for Soundgarden, but with Tom Morello holding down the guitar, he was much more free to work on traditional rock and roll epics whenever he sang.
The idea of them reuniting would have been a recipe for disaster, but even when they came back after their long hiatus, King Animal was still one of the best records that they could have made around that time. Most people would have played the same kind of tunes to remind everyone of how great they were in their prime, but this felt like a genuine building block on where they had come from, which they would have probably capitalised on had Cornell not passed away.
But regardless of their tragic ending, there’s a reason why Soundgarden always remained a cut above the rest of the Seattle scene whenever they performed. They wanted the chance to make the most adventurous music that they could, and by the time that they called it a career after the final leg of their tour, it felt like the natural stopping point before they started beating a dead horse musically.
