“Larger than Life”: The two singers Chris Cornell thought he could never emulate
Every singer must be put through their paces if they try to emulate those who have come before. It’s one thing to be able to play original material decently, but whenever someone takes a swing at some classic song, the odds are already stacked against them when they realise the legacy they have to live up to. While Chris Cornell has been compared to far too many rock gods to count, he knew that two major titans of 1970s rock were untouchable in his eyes.
Then again, Cornell’s vocal chops were already a love letter to the biggest names in stadium rock. Despite being a part of the Seattle underground, some of Soundgarden’s greatest moments came when they transformed into a borderline metal band for a few seconds, whether that was the chorus of ‘Loud Love’ or when Cornell reached to hit the highest falsetto notes he could on ‘Beyond the Wheel’.
And we can’t really look at Cornell’s vocal chops without bringing up a certain singer with golden locks that kicked everything off. Led Zeppelin might have been the clearest inspiration for where Cornell would take his vocals in Soundgarden and his solo career, but he always seemed to be doing his own thing rather than aping Percy’s style as bands like Greta Van Fleet would later do.
But whereas Plant was all about performance, the world of rock had shifted towards the realm of theatrical music as well. Although a band like Queen had all of the chops that Led Zeppelin had, Freddie Mercury was the kind of frontman who made sure that no one in that audience wasn’t entertained by the end of the show, especially when strutting across the stage and playing with how the audience worked.
Granted, no amount of rock theatricality would have been complete without Alice Cooper, either. Despite Screamin’ Jay Hawkins really is ground zero for this type of music, Cooper was the one who brought the macabre back into rock music for a little while, down to having a massive guillotine onstage and mutilating babies onstage using fake props.
Both Mercury and Cooper were a part of Cornell’s daily diet of rock music, but he never considered them to be something that he could achieve, telling Louder, “Guys like Freddie Mercury and Alice Cooper were proper rock stars; really cool, really entertaining, larger than life people. I could never do that, though, because being larger than life in my punk grounding was really bad, the complete antithesis to all that punk stood for.”
That being said, Soundgarden didn’t fit that punk mentality, either. That brand of Seattle rock was more suited to acts like Mudhoney and TAD, but when they wanted to, they could still write an off-the-rails song, like ‘Kickstand’ coming up in the middle of Superunknown and the complete piss-take of ‘Circle of Power’.
So, really, Cornell was a rare breed of rock and roll for having all the makings of a classic rock frontman but with too much integrity to make a parody of himself. He could still deliver the goods whenever he played, but no one would ever see him go to that level of showmanship.
