(Credits: Far Out / Press)
The life of a touring musician isn’t exactly the healthiest occupation to go into. As much as people might like the idea of playing their music for a living, a lot more goes into getting someone on that stage every night, which usually means sacrificing a lot that most of us take for granted. Most people have to make drastic changes in their travel plans, their daily routines and their sleeping patterns, but Chris Cornell knew that life was bound to catch up with him during Soundgarden’s prime.
Out of all the bands to come out of Seattle, though, Soundgarden at least seemed to scan properly as an actual rock and roll outfit. Alice in Chains were always attuned to metal music, and Nirvana was always a punk band at heart, but it was a lot easier to look at what Cornell was doing when singing a song like ‘Loud Love’ back in the day and see the alt-rock answer to a band like Led Zeppelin in the way he presented himself.
But there was a lot more that went into the band’s music than the classic rock of years prior. They still had those punk credentials under their belt, which meant they weren’t afraid to make something feral that Dead Kennedys might have been proud to call their own. It’s easy to see the underground artist hiding deep within them, but everything was about to change when 1991 rolled around.
After Nirvana blew open the doors for everyone, albums like Badmotorfinger were quickly becoming the most in-demand releases of the year, and when people did some backtracking, Cornell turned into one of the archetypes for what a grunge frontman could be. Even projects like Temple of the Dog were getting more attention, but by the time Kurt Cobain passed away in 1994, Soundgarden wasn’t looking to stop.
Superunknown may have come out in the weeks following Cobain’s death, but tunes like ‘Spoonman’ and ‘Black Hole Sun’ were the poppiest offerings that they had ever come up with to that date. All the pieces were there for them to go out and conquer, but for Cornell, this is when he realised the years of playing with his friends were gone forever, and the only way he knew how to deal with it was to self-medicate.
Despite having the biggest hits of his career, Cornell remembered being out of his mind throughout the majority of the Superunknown tour, saying, “I actually played most of the Superunknown tour out of my skin… Or rather, out of my head, drunk. We were so reluctant to be out there, and I just started drinking more so that I could actually have some fun, instead of having to be professional and worrying about keeping to a schedule all the time.”
Even though the band were now in the big leagues, that didn’t mean they would suddenly start making music for the masses like everyone else did. They were always sonic explorers, and whereas Down on the Upside could have been their cash-in record, tunes like ‘Burden In My Hand’ were far more interesting, if only for the fact that they were toying around with more odd guitar tunings behind the scenes.
But it was no surprise to many of the band’s diehards when they decided to call it a day shortly after their next record came out. All of them had entered the music business back when they were playing music for the fun of it, and when it started becoming a job, it was only natural for them to move on to something different.
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