“A big inspiration”: The street performer that shaped Chris Cornell’s career
Toward the end of grunge’s classic era, its original pioneers were reaching their creative and commercial zenith. Ten years after their founding in Seattle, 1994’s Superunknown thrust Soundgarden to the top of the Billboard 200 and formed one of the city’s last key LP chapters, with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain ending his life a month after its release and Alice in Chains eking out their eponymous third album the next year.
The singles exploded onto the rock world with gargantuan heft. ‘Black Hole Sun’, ‘My Wave’ and ‘The Day I Tried to Live’ would stand as perennial live favourites, but leading Superunknown was the mysterious ‘Spoonman’, a potent brew of heavy groove and tribal percussion evocatively detailing the titular spoon player with frontman Chris Cornell’s powerhouse bellow. Shrouded in cryptic lyrical imagery, ‘Spoonman’ would lift a slice of Seattle’s cultural fringe and offer the mythic idiophonist an immortal anthem.
The seeds of the single’s title came from Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament. Before settling on Citizen Dick, Ament had reeled off a list of fictitious band names while working with Cameron Crowe on 1992’s Singles movie. One of the mooted names was ‘Spoonman’, inspired by the real Seattle street performer Artis the Spoonman.
Typically found in the Pike Place Market accompanied by folk singer Jim Page, Artis’s impressive spoon-playing, as well as flute and recorder, turned the performer into a local celebrity, eventually collaborating with Frank Zappa in the early 1980s and later collaborating with saxophone player MC Shoehorn at Australia’s Expo ’88.
Before Singles was even out, Cornell had already sketched ‘Spoonman’s lyrics, fiercely inspired by its affectionate yet evocative title. The single was a smash and helped propel Superunknown to the top of the charts and thrust Artis to the centre of its video, Soundgarden stepping back as secondary figures as the promo dominated MTV.
Cornell would collaborate and generally hang out with Artis for years before contact dropped after his other band Audioslave had roped Artis backstage during their Washington stop in 2005. Yet, the ‘Spoonman’s influence never dimmed no matter how much time passed.
“He was a big inspiration for me that anyone can do that,” Cornell revealed to Rolling Stone in 2014. “I remember sitting in a room, probably with eight or ten people, and he walked in with his leather satchel he always carries with him and took out spoons. Everyone’s jaw dropped. I thought, ‘It’s amazing this guy performs at festivals, fairs and street corners’. This guy can walk into a room and get a reaction”.
He concluded: “Suddenly, I felt embarrassed and smaller, ’cause I felt like I call myself a singer, a songwriter, a musician, and I’ve sold millions of records and toured the world, but I can’t do what he can. I can’t just walk into a room and pick up an instrument and perform and entertain everyone, and their jaws drop. So that stuck in the back of my mind, and at some point, I started to pursue that. He was the main inspiration for that”.
