The one musician Chris Cornell said had his “dream career”
By the time the 1990s rolled around, there was no one in rock and roll who could compete with Chris Cornell.
Soundgarden may have been trying to reinvent the wheel every single time they made a record, but Cornell’s voice seemed to have years of rock and roll history baked into it, as if he had found a way to recapture the same spirit that Robert Plant had in the early days of Led Zeppelin. But even if the British rock juggernauts were inspirations, that wasn’t the endgame for what he wanted to be.
Then again, it’s hard to think of Soundgarden’s career trajectory and not think of Zeppelin in many cases. There are a few tunes that are a bit more punk-adjacent than most, but if you were given a song like ‘Beyond the Wheel’ or even later tracks like ‘The Day I Tried to Live’ without any context of who it was, you’d probably be wondering how someone could have been hiding a Zeppelin bootleg for that long without it leaking somewhere.
But outside of Zeppelin’s large shadow, Cornell was almost borderline prog in the way that he constructed his tunes. Not everything the band played was in a conventional time signature, and even when they settled on typical 4/4 time, there were plenty of tunes that used weird tunings that would have felt unthinkable outside of a Joni Mitchell or Crosby, Stills, and Nash record. It was still unbelievably heavy, but Young wanted a lot more than playing big rock and roll riffs.
Make no mistake, songs like ‘Spoonman’ and ‘Outshined’ are insanely fun to play, but Cornell didn’t want to live the rest of his days onstage belting at the top of his lungs. He wanted the opportunity to bring things down when he could, which probably explains why an album like Euphoria Morning sounds like one of the best unplugged records that his old band never got around to making.
Seeing someone like Cornell doing acoustic versions of his biggest tunes later on in his career would have been a bit of a culture shock for people who weren’t ready for it, but he figured that if Neil Young could do it, why couldn’t he? After all, Young had been known as one of the defining elder statesmen of grunge before the genre had come to fruition, and his habit of not giving a single shit about anyone but his muse was wildly inspiring to Cornell when he decided to go unplugged.
Because for him, what Young was doing was the kind of status that he would have killed for, saying, “To me it’s kind of seeing my dream career come to fruition (to do an acoustic tour). I would try to look toward examples that made sense in the long run as kind of blueprints to follow and whose careers those were. Neil Young’s a great example. An example of people who will keep doing what they do until they drop dead — and it might be on a stage, for all you know.”
But doing so also invites some of the stranger moves that Cornell has ever made whenever he got up onstage. There are brilliant renditions of ‘Like A Stone’ that he has done on acoustic, but one of the most creative performances he ever gave was singing U2’s ‘One’ with the lyrics of Metallica’s ‘One’ instead. Any other artist would have been considered insane for even trying something like that, but as long as it was okay by Young’s standards, anything was possible.
And while Cornell is no longer with us to share even more music, the fact that he could pull those switches throughout his career is what made him so engaging as a performer. You didn’t always know what you were going to get, but as long as his voice soared above everything, it was usually going to be a good time.
