Spontaneous ‘Spoonman’: The unique way Chris Cornell wrote a Soundgarden classic
It’s borderline impossible to hit on the basic idea of what grunge was all about. As much as some artists may have been willing to talk about their inner feelings, and most of them had songs about angst, there comes a point where some of the songs start to sound closer to absolute nonsense half the time. Inspiration can come from all sorts of places, though, and Chris Cornell ended up working on the song ‘Spoonman’ out of looking at titles for joke songs.
Looking at how every band operated in Seattle, it seemed like one big musical family. Friends would be seen playing with each other’s bands, and it wasn’t out of the question for someone to get kicked out of one band and find themselves in another group with the same lineup just a few weeks later.
This kind of environment was just what director Cameron Crowe was looking for for his movie Singles, which made him think of getting the best of Seattle’s finest on the soundtrack. Though Matt Dillon was cast as the resident rocker of the city, his “backup band” is basically just Pearl Jam, consisting of Jeff Ament, Eddie Vedder, and Stone Gossard.
Amid the other demo tapes floating around in the movie came from a band called Poncier, who wouldn’t have sounded out of place next to bands like Alice in Chains on a bill. The band may have been a complete joke, but even a joke band needs songs to play.
When Cornell was looking at the merch that Ament was making for Poncier, it included joke titles like ‘Spoonman’. Whereas most people would look at a title like that and just laugh, Cornell saw a challenge when he went in to write Superunknown.
Cornell remembered that all the song titles gave him a road map for what the songs should be, saying, “All of them were really inspiring to me. I remember seeing that, and this idea clicked in my head of ‘Wouldn’t it be great to take that home and actually write those songs based on those titles?’. It was kind of rushed”.
Although the acoustic demo of ‘Spoonman’ was included in special editions of Singles, the version that wound up on Superunknown sounded like a long-lost Led Zeppelin classic. Using the same stop-start vocal delivery that Zeppelin used on ‘Black Dog’, Cornell may one-up Robert Plant a few times with his vocal performance, especially towards the breakdown section where he starts to scream ‘COME ON, KNOCK IT OFF’.
Looking back, embracing the tossed-off side of the title was an incredibly creative thing for Cornell, explaining, “It was a great experience, writing songs for the fun of it, for no particular destination, and [end up] creating songs with life that lives on and on and on”.
That wasn’t even the only classic included on that joke tape, with Cornell coming up with the song ‘Seasons’ based on another song title that he had lying around. Even though Cornell could have spent the rest of his life playing an art-rock take on heavy music, this one joke demo tape gave us one of the most raucous and one of the most openhearted songs of his entire career.
