The bands Chris Cornell wanted to be remembered with: “The pinnacle”
There’s a good chance that Chris Cornell didn’t need to be remembered as a grunge icon.
The Seattle scene may have brought a dozen new bands into legendary status, but even if no one had ever heard of who Nirvana or Pearl Jam were, it was going to be impossible to ignore Cornell’s voice every single time a new Soundgarden album came out. He was the next incarnation of Robert Plant in many ways, but he didn’t feel like he needed to be the same kind of hard rock singer that everyone else saw him as.
Because when you look at a lot of Soundgarden songs, they’re actually a lot weirder than everyone remembers. The band were still one of the heaviest bands in the world and could create completely different worlds with their music half the time, but it was virtually impossible for anyone to figure out what they were doing once they actually decided to learn some of their songs for themselves.
Even if you knew what alternate tunings Cornell was using on every single song, hearing all of their tunes play around with time signatures was a lot weirder than what everyone else was doing. It was hard enough for people to latch onto what the hair metal bands were doing with the different tapping techniques, so seeing a band writing songs in 7/4 and 5/4 every single time they wrote a hit was impossible for most people to figure out. And Cornell wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
He liked the idea of making something that was a bit more offbeat, and given that he was a drummer for anything else, it makes sense that he would have gravitated towards odd time signatures from time to time. After all, some of the biggest names that he followed were a lot more interested in taking their audience on a journey whenever they made one of their records.
Superunknown was already grunge’s answer to prog rock in many ways, but it still held the power of any great heavy metal release. Cornell wasn’t afraid of letting his Black Sabbath influence show whenever he performed one of his songs, but there was also a healthy love for punk rock in there as well, which makes sense given their status as one of the kings of the underground in Seattle. And in a weird way, Soundgarden seemed like what happened when punk sensibilities and prog excellence somehow congealed.
So despite Soundgarden being known as one of the definitive grunge bands of all time, Cornell felt much more at home being remembered among bands from all walks of life, saying, “I wanted to be in a band that would appeal to younger musicians like Pink Floyd or the Ramones did to me, and we did that. That, to me, is the pinnacle of our success, not being a band that’s playing arenas or on the cover of Rolling Stone.”
Those two bands might sound like oxymorons in a lot of ways, but you can definitely tell where Cornell is coming from. Neither Ramones nor Floyd wanted to go down in history as one of the most popular bands of all time, and even when they became the biggest acts of their generation, they did by making music that reflected where they were at the time instead of having some massive hype around them.
And that’s not all that different from how Cornell viewed himself. It’s one thing to be known for having a bunch of hits that people can sing along to, but even if stadiums of people could remember every line of ‘Spoonman’ and ‘Outshined’, Cornell would have been just fine singing what was in his heart long before he thought about tunes that might have a chance at getting on the radio.
