“You couldn’t come up with anything better”: The two artists Chris Cornell called prototype rock stars
Becoming a rock star isn’t something that happened on a whim once the genre started. While many artists like Chuck Berry could be considered rock stars in the broad sense of the word, the star power behind an iconic frontman or a true guitar hero is something that someone is either born with or they aren’t when they first pick up an instrument or stand behind a microphone. And despite being destined to be a rock and roll frontman, Chris Cornell still felt that two people set the standard for what a rock star was supposed to look like.
Then again, even Cornell wasn’t necessarily cut out to be the biggest rock star in the world when Soundgarden started. Although he could sing in that trademark screeching voice, his first role saw him sitting behind the drumkit and singing at the same time. While the world may have missed out on Soundgarden being a Phil Collins-like situation, there’s a certain power that came from Cornell at the front of the stage.
As much as he hid behind his guitar on a handful of songs, seeing him embrace Robert Plant’s demeanour was one of the most rock star-adjacent things coming out of the Seattle scene at the time. His voice might have read as Zeppelin, but what Cornell did was indebted to Iggy Pop’s work in the late 1960s.
Compared to every other rock frontman, Cornell wanted to copy that kind of reckless abandon that Pop did every time The Stooges got onstage. During every show, it wasn’t clear whether their performance was going to end with the room getting cleared, a riot breaking out, or accidentally seeing one of the greatest performances of all time, but when the last option hit, songs like ‘Search and Destroy’ became anthems for a generation of punk rockers.
But Cornell was into much more than showmanship. Being a rockstar also meant having great songs at his disposal, and Johnny Cash had that in spades. Although he was far more ingrained in the world of country music, Cash was every bit the rockstar that his contemporaries were, never going along with the program and always saying what was on his mind even if it got him in trouble, like his infamous performance at the Grand Ole Opry where he was banned for kicking out the lights.
Even though Cash and Pop were from two different worlds, Cornell thought both were the prototypes for what a rock star should be, saying, “Him and Iggy Pop. They were genetically designed. If you were a Japanese cartoonist, you couldn’t have come up with anything better.”
And people don’t even need to see the performance half the time to notice their power. All they have to do is take a look at Pop walking on the hands of the crowd or Cash’s famous photo flipping the bird to the camera, and that alone will tell you that these were artists that were not meant to be messed with for a second.
Even though they played very different styles of music when they performed, it was always about something more than strictly music. They were looking to get their audience to think, and if it bothered some people, that was too damn bad.
