Chris Cornell thought Seattle would hate him: “A little too attractive”
There was already a pecking order in Seattle before the heavy hitters started to become MTV stars. Artists weren’t exactly looking to become famous in the Pacific Northwest, but there was a mutual level of respect paid to everyone who was thinking outside the box, whether that was Mudhoney bringing punky flair into the sound of Melvins making the kind of music that felt like it had crawled out of a swamp. For a band that seemed to be ripped straight out of the 1970s, though, Chris Cornell thought the rest of Seattle wanted absolutely nothing to do with him once Soundgarden debuted.
Then again, Soundgarden had every single aspect of being a great rock and roll band. Sure, they had a punk edge on their first album, Ultramega OK, but as soon as Cornell opened up his mouth to sing the song ‘Beyond the Wheel’, there was something in his voice that didn’t seem to come from this Earth.
No one since Robert Plant possessed that kind of operatic range, and as much as Cornell liked to push himself whenever he could, it always sounded powerful. In a city like Seattle, sounding like one of the greatest rock and roll bands in the world might not have been the thing that everyone wanted to hear.
This was still the indie scene, and while Soundgarden still had that indie edge to them, Cornell thought that they wouldn’t go over well, saying, “People hated us in the beginning. I’d come on stage with no shirt on, whipping my hair around and generally being a sweaty young rock guy. I used to have about 50 ribbons in my hair, which didn’t exactly please the jocks in the audience. They were probably worried because they found me a little too attractive.”
At the same time, it’s not like Soundgarden didn’t have a bit of weirdness to them as well. For all of the macho posturing that Cornell did onstage, it was going to be hard for him to keep up with the number of changes going on below, from the weird time signatures to the riffs that never seemed to have any beginning or end.
That wasn’t by accident, either. Looking through his back catalogue, some of Cornell’s greatest moments came when he was working on strange tunings that would even leave Joni Mitchell scratching her head, like the ethereal tuning on the song ‘Seasons’ or when he decided to work out a song from scratch in open C for ‘Burden in My Hand’.
This wasn’t taking the easy way out, and Seattle welcomed them with open arms for it. Since the group were one of the last of the ‘Big 4’ of grunge, Soundgarden were hometown heroes for the longest time, even holding onto their core fanbase when they made their pop crossovers on tracks like ‘Black Hole Sun’.
Because being a part of the indie scene didn’t have to come down to how a band sounded to hold any water. It was more about being in it for the right reasons, and as far as Seattle was concerned, it was pretty cool for them to have the art-rock version of Led Zeppelin right in their backyard.
