The artist Chris Cornell said made Temple of The Dog iconic
When Chris Cornell was first starting the idea for Temple of the Dog, the word ‘supergroup’ wasn’t really a part of his vocabulary.
No one in Seattle had blown up yet, and when Andy Wood passed away, he figured that this would be a nice project for members of Mother Love Bone to commemorate their old friend. But once he saw what these musicians could do, he realised that he might be on the verge of a grunge classic before the genre had even become a household name.
Before looking at the music itself, you have to understand that Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone were completely different entities. Grunge is the catch-all term for nearly anything that came out of Seattle during this era of rock and roll, but when looking at the raw musicianship behind everything, it’s not like they were all trying to make the same music. Melvins were a punk rock/experimental project, Mother Love Bone wanted to play arenas, and somewhere in the middle was Soundgarden.
Even though Cornell had all the makings of a rock star, Wood was the guiding light of the entire scene. It felt like an artist that magnetic had the potential to turn the scene into a global force, so when he passed away from an overdose, this felt like the musical equivalent of an Irish wake. Cornell wanted to give his friend the musical sendoff he deserved, but no one could have predicted that the band that would become Pearl Jam was already gelling.
Eddie Vedder had already started coming up to Seattle to jam with Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, and listening to his vocals on ‘Hunger Strike’ is the stuff of alt-rock dreams. No one would have fathomed that a collaboration like this was possible, but if there was one secret weapon behind the entire record, Cornell thought it was Mike McCready.
McCready may have been the new boy of the group, but as soon as the frontman heard him play guitar, he knew the band had a potential beyond being a side project, even telling the guitarist, “You made it really easy, you added something to that album that if it wasn’t there, I can’t imagine [it]. And there wasn’t another guitar player like you sitting around that we all knew. You brought something to it that I think cemented its legacy as being an amazing rock record.”
Which is strange considering how different McCready was compared to everyone else in the band. He had been a hair-metal transplant that had morphed into a Stevie Ray Vaughan worshipper, and while he had far greater chops than anyone else in the band, it never felt like he was overplaying for the sake of it. And if there’s one song that proved his worth in the group, it was ‘Reach Down’.
The majority of the record has McCready shredding through every single scale he can think of, but any song that’s over eleven minutes needs to be doing something right, and McCready practically turns the entire song into a showcase for his blues licks. Most artists around Seattle either couldn’t do that or frowned upon that kind of soloing, but McCready always did it in such a way where Neil Young would have been proud of it.
The group was never meant to last more than one record, but Cornell knew Pearl Jam had gained more than just another lead guitarist. This was one of the few “guitar heroes” to come from that first wave of grunge, and even if Kurt Cobain had a few choice words for their style of soloing, there’s nothing wrong with having chops as long as the person knows when to pull things back.
