The best live band Chris Cornell had ever witnessed: “Different from anything”
Part of the beauty of Chris Cornell was knowing that everything that he sang was totally natural.
No one would have guessed that there was someone else out there who could sing as well as Robert Plant could at the height of Led Zeppelin, but even when he was singing with an acoustic guitar, he was still better than 90% of the rock and roll singers out there when Soundgarden first debuted. But even after a decade in the industry, he was still out there searching for other bands that made his ears perk up whenever he heard them.
Because, despite being one of the heaviest bands in grunge, Soundgarden were a lot more underground than people realised. They had to take a long road before becoming superstars, and even when they started working on their more high-profile records like Superunknown, they never dumbed down their sound by any stretch. If they were going to get famous, they were going to do so on their terms with songs that didn’t have to follow the basic rules everyone else did.
This probably explains why so many of their songs have a few odd time signatures thrown in there for good measure. Cornell was a drummer first before anything else, so it was a bit more natural for him to play in time signatures that didn’t have to make the most sense every single time you heard them. But sometimes the right band comes along with grooves that hit you like a smack in the face, the way that Rage Against the Machine did.
Compared to every other band that relied on having a melody over the top, most of Rage’s music felt as if Zeppelin followed the same structure of a James Brown song. Everything was about coming back to the one beat every time they played, and while Zack de la Rocha was more interested in spitting his poetry about the horrors of police brutality, Cornell could see himself fitting in perfectly with the rest of the band when forming Audioslave.
There might have been moments on their record that sounded a bit too much like classic rock worship, but Cornell wasn’t in the business to make yet another Zeppelin clone. ‘Like A Stone’ and ‘Cochise’ were meant to be the fiercest rock and roll songs anyone had ever heard, but when Rage reformed in 2007 after Audioslave released Revelations, Cornell wasn’t exactly broken up about seeing them do their own thing.
He understood that these were the greatest musicians that he had ever seen, and he wouldn’t be selfish enough to keep them for himself, knowing what they could all do together, saying, “Audioslave, for my part, existed because of my memory of seeing them play shows in 1996. I thought they were one of the best live bands I’d ever seen. When I got a call from Tom and Rick Rubin about maybe making a record with them I was really curious. What they bring live is different from anything anyone has ever done. If they can actually be a band, it will be great.”
And it’s not like the band disappointed, either. Their initial reunion in 2007 may have been all too fleeting for most hardcore fans, but the idea of hearing all of those people screaming the bridge of ‘Killing in the Name’ was the reason why they were legendary in the first place. They could make crowds move better than anyone, but Tom Morello always knew that it was about more than just movement.
They wanted to give the audience a jolt of energy that made them wake up from what they had been experiencing for so long, and if one kid could restructure their way of thinking about the world, that was worth it. Everyone has their memories of Rage being this angry band that was the soundtrack to many nights in their bedroom, screaming their lungs out, but when you delve a bit deeper, they were interested in forging a new path for what rock and roll could be.
