The grunge wave of the 1990s felt like one big happy family for someone like Chris Cornell.
As much as every band may have been looking to get a record deal for themselves, it wasn’t out of the question for one band to have a completely different lineup featuring members of other bands if they happened to work well together. But if everything worked so well with everyone on tour, it only took one wrong move for all of that fun to suddenly come crashing down around him.
But it’s not like Soundgarden was ever going to fall prey to the typical rock star antics. They had been touring mates with Guns N’ Roses, and as much as other people would consider that a huge get, there’s no reason to think that they were suddenly going to start taking too many drugs or deal with Cornell going on a massive ego trip, talking about how they needed to completely reinvent their sound or anything.
If anything, they were one of the few grunge bands that were fairly consistent throughout every era of their career. Nirvana was bound to disintegrate after Kurt Cobain found that the fame was becoming too much, and even though Layne Staley hung in there with Alice in Chains, it’s not like those later records didn’t suffer a little bit from all of them being strung out, especially on their final Unplugged concert.
Then again, maybe that all came from Cornell knowing what all of that pain and heartache was like firsthand. He had already dealt with the fallout of losing Andy Wood after seeing Mother Love Bone on the rise for so long, so dealing with the band unravelling and going out on his own was going to be a walk in the park by comparison.
Wood was practically the heart of the Seattle scene, and to see his light be snuffed out so quickly was going to be near-impossible to recover from when everyone reconvened. But before the remaining members of the band solidified the basis of Pearl Jam a few months later, Cornell felt that Temple of the Dog was the only way for him to properly deal with his grief. But even if he managed to create a monument to Wood, it wasn’t going to matter unless he experienced that feeling with the people directly.
When the supergroup eventually hit the road decades after the fact, Cornell felt that something in his soul slowly began to mend itself back together, saying, “I’ve always had really difficult time with loss. I didn’t deal well with Andy’s death. After he died, numerous times I’d be driving and I would look out the window and I thought I saw him. It would take me five minutes to update to the moment and realize, ‘no, he’s actually dead.’ This tour, in a sense, is the dealing. It’s facing the reality.”
And no one would begrudge Cornell for wanting to go through that. Everyone else had time to grieve at home, but since the frontman was in the middle of a tour with Soundgarden, there was no way for him to properly express himself in the way he wanted outside of writing the best songs he could.
Although Cornell did get the chance to play a lot of those classics on the sporadic reunions with Pearl Jam, there’s a reason why so many people played a song like ‘Hunger Strike’ when Cornell passed away as well. Those songs aren’t necessarily the best-written tunes in the rock canon, but they do capture a sense of sullenness that everyone has to go through when they lose someone important in their lives.
