“It wasn’t the same thing”: Which of the ‘Big 4’ did Chris Cornell think wasn’t authentically grunge?
There was always a certain hierarchy when it came to the authenticity of grunge bands. A lot of people may have been born and bred out of Seattle to play only for themselves, but once Kurt Cobain blew the doors wide open for the entire genre, it wasn’t long before the rest of the world started seeing dollar signs and decided that any joker with a guitar could lace up some Doc Martens and have some shaggy hair to join everyone else at the top of the food chain. But Chris Cornell was always one to sniff out some of the posers in between the true rock and roll legends.
Then again, Soundgarden did have a bit of an asterisk next to their name when it came to the other grunge heavyweights. Many people would have accepted them with open arms since they came from Seattle, but judging by how dirty Mudhoney and Melvins sounded when the genre was born, it was easy to look at Cornell posturing and see him as the slacker answer to Robert Plant.
But they had the chops to pull it off as well. Like them or not, Soundgarden did have the credentials that any other grunge band would have killed for, but once they started to go in a more mainstream direction, it was clear that what they were doing was much better than what was coming from California.
The Los Angeles scene had practically been bulldozed over by the time that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ happened, but that didn’t stop Stone Temple Pilots from becoming one of the biggest bands of the time out of San Diego. Sure, their songs may have had obvious parallels to what Eddie Vedder was doing and even had a handful of riffs that felt reminiscent of Stone Gossard, but it didn’t matter so long as people could still listen to ‘Interstate Love Song’.
Out of all the bands from Seattle’s ‘Big 4’, Alice in Chains was always a bit of a holdout. The band had been cutting their teeth for years before grunge had even happened, trying to get their hair metal outfits off the ground, but once Jerry Cantrell returned to Seattle and hooked up with Layne Staley, the darkness in their music fit in a lot better with Mudhoney than anything going on with Guns N’ Roses.
Still, their transition was never enough for Cornell to consider them a true grunge band, saying, “Alice in Chains were little kids that sounded like Ratt, and all of a sudden they saw what was going on and incorporated it. They were truly inspired by [grunge], which was cool, but it wasn’t the same thing.” Even if they were inspired by it, it was enough to put them in the rest of the world’s good graces.
Because when looking at the qualifiers for what the genre is supposed to sound like, Dirt has every single attribute grunge has to offer. From the minute that you listen to it, it feels like the sonic equivalent of working your way through mud, and considering the feelings of despair from Staley surrounding his drug problems, it was almost like listening to a heavy metal band’s take on what grunge could be.
But given that Cornell eventually contributed vocals to ‘Right Turn’ off of SAP, it’s not like he was in any position to chastise them. As far as he was concerned, any attention given to Seattle was alright as long as people were doing it for the right reasons, and even if Alice in Chains were a bunch of kids hoping to make it big, they more than deserve their position as one of the founding fathers of alternative metal.
