11/14/2023 0 Comments Hungry chris cornell![]() ![]() About two-thirds of the way through, he was having to cut off the one line, and start the other.” ![]() “It got to ‘Hunger Strike’ - I was sitting in the corner, putting duct tape on a little African drum. “I got to watch these songs, and watch how Chris was working, and watch Matt play drums,” he said in the book Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music. Vedder later recalled seeing events unfold on what was the fourth or fifth day after his arrival in Seattle. In fact, his kernel of an idea for the lyrics was so small that he only had one set of verse, bridge and chorus. Cornell felt he wanted one more track to balance the work, but he wasn’t expecting much from it. The song under development was “Hunger Strike,” the last of 10 to be written for the Temple of the Dog album. Vedder, who’d just arrived in Seattle to join his new band, was in the studio while his colleagues Mike McCready, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament recorded with Cornell and his bandmate Matt Cameron. “But these lyrics specifically reflected Andy and my feelings about him. “I’d normally write a character that was part me and part a fictional character,” he explained. Straying from his usual approach, the dynamic frontman wrote about Wood instead of people he’d made up. The death had left Cornell in a world of grief, which he could only struggle through by writing. In his mind, he was already a rock star and he was waiting for the rest of the world to figure it out.” In a sense, he was making his own reality. He acted the way I imagine Freddie Mercury did when I see documentaries about Queen’s early years. “He was very charismatic and funny, sort of in a prankster way, but also self-deprecating while at the same time being this larger-than-life rock star. ![]() “Andy was effervescent,” Cornell said in 2016. Its hunger is tangible but what wasn’t known when it came out was just how hungry these guys were.Wood, once a roommate of Cornell’s, had died of a heroin overdose in March 1990, and his musical friends shared a desire to mark his memory. But listen to the guitar, its jangly melodic, you’d call it indie now we called it college rock then - its REM, Replacements, the Smithereens and the Smiths, and there’s barely any weight to it but it switches and kicks in and it drops into dirge-y metal, you know someone in the band has a sleeveless denim jacket with Rainbow patches - and two of the finest voices in what we call Modern Rock, Eddie Veder rumbling like a didgeridoo and Cornell’s impassioned scream, singular, lonesome, alone, lost, with the arrogance of Robert Plant in it. “Hunger”, good god, you knew something changed. I was writing about music in the early 90s and I recall when Temple of the Dog cassette came in the promo run. We heard about our music through a network of fanzines and late night radio shows, it was underground.īefore your fourteen year old self heard “Rusty Cage” and “Black Hole Sun”, Cornell and his pals were gathering in halls in dismal Seattle but they heard Black Flag and DOA and their older brother’s Black Sabbath albums, they melted together in the mist of their city, melting and moulding. ![]() We gathered in halls and got new music live and in person. We danced around the norm, made the charts, made the news but didn’t make the impact, changed little but the hearts perhaps of those younger. We were the alternative, the other side, the outsiders. The edge is the vital piece here because for many of us now old punk rockers the edge was all we could ever dream about then. He died May 18 too, 1980, although he was much younger and only at the edge of making it. Coincidently his passing and manner of death was similar to the passing and manner of death of the musician I had made a teenage connection with, Ian Curtis of Joy Division. They were teenagers, he was an eloquent powerhouse of a voice who sang of them and to them. For them Cornell and Soundgarden in the early 90s, were their way into music they got him, he got them. Invariably those posts have been from folk about ten, fifteen years younger than me. I’ve spent the day reading FB posts by pals about the passing of Chris Cornell. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |