The singer Chris Cornell felt horrible listening to: “A very dark period of my life”
In a genre that was all about wearing emotions on their sleeve, Chris Cornell kept his music closer to the chest than any grunge rocker.
There was an almost spiritual angle to the way that he sang many of his songs, and even if they didn’t make the most sense on every Soundgarden record, you could still feel the outright passion he had in his voice whenever he sang everything from ‘Outshined’ to ‘Black Hole Sun’. Cornell had a pretty good idea about what he wanted his music to sound like, but he had an even better idea of what he wanted to avoid every single time he turned on a record.
Because if there was one thing for sure, it was that Soundgarden weren’t going to be your average hard rock outfit. Cornell certainly looked the part as a rock and roll god, but when listening to their music, there were a lot more strange moments in between the hits than you initially realised. Not all of their songs had a set structure, and while ‘Big Dumb Sex’ is probably the closest they came to a traditional hair metal song, they had no intention of staying in that realm forever.
There were definitely pieces of the grunge sound that were indebted to metal, but what the LA rock scene was doing felt like something entirely different. This was what Black Sabbath would have sounded like if it were being played by the Bay City Rollers, and Cornell wanted to make music that had the same kind of deep resonance that he heard on everything from Sabbath records to the early Zeppelin albums.
He wanted the chance to stretch and explore, but there’s a fine line between playing rock and getting roped into playing by-the-numbers rock. There was already something intriguing about a band like Kiss when you saw them performing live, but when you picked up their records, the whole thing felt more like a manufactured product than songs that actually felt like they came from the heart.
But if Gene Simmons wrote songs thinking about whether he was going to get laid at the end of the night, Ted Nugent was one step too far for Cornell. There’s no doubt that Nugent could play his ass off whenever he performed live, but even if you ignore the fact that he legally adopted a child so that he could have sex with her, the music itself definitely had a stench coming off of it that Cornell wasn’t into.
He had seen the kind of crowds that played Nugent’s records, and he didn’t really want any part of it once he started making his own music, saying, “I would often listen to really dark music, and if I was in a very dark period of my life, it made me feel happy. If I listened to Ted Nugent at a keg party, I felt horrible. I didn’t want to be around people. I didn’t want to listen to the soundtrack to the keg—Ted Nugent. It’s a party song, it’s a party record, great. That’s for somebody else. It’s not for me.”
While that whole sentiment is a little funny considering Nugent never did drugs or even drank, his records do invite that kind of image in people’s minds. He did have some pretty decent licks in his library like ‘Stranglehold’, but when you look at the more forgettable songs, the knuckle-dragging stupidity of a song like ‘Wango Tango’ deserved to be best left in the past with all those keg parties that most people wish they had never gone to back in the day.
‘The Nuge’ definitely had some attitude behind his delivery, but what Cornell did had to be something a little bit more gritty than what he had already heard. He didn’t need to hear bogstandard middle of the road rock, and it was much more interesting for him to connect with Nick Drake records than worry about whatever the hell Grand Funk Railroad was putting out when he was a kid.
