Say Hello To Heaven

TW: suicide

(This is a revised, updated, edited version of something I wrote the day after Chris Cornell died.)

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In 9th grade, Jesse¹—the kid who’d spent our junior high years enduring relentless teasing about his Nirvana and Screaming Trees t-shirts and who was just a few months away from both sweet payback and the ultimate cognitive dissonance of seeing all the jock-bros who gave you crap start to love the thing you loved first (and loved more) — made me a mixtape. Mixtapes were a true, pre-streaming art form that I’ll dive deeper into another time, but suffice it to say, the right mixtape from the right person was really meaningful. This one was one of those.

Jesse’s mixtape had some early Nirvana, some Mr. Bungle, some Green River, a little Mudhoney, a Beat Happening song, and a couple of Soundgarden songs. It was a real ear opener for me.

One of the Soundgarden songs was “Hands All Over”, with its skyscraping vocal soaring above heavy, drone-y riffage. It blew my Zeppelin-loving mind—playing in a similar 70’s rock vein, but sludgier, maybe even more metallic. The singer, Chris Cornell, gave Robert Plant (my previous rock ‘n roll gold standard for wailing lead singers) a run for his money. My high school bandmate Adam and I used to try to cover this song, always stalling out as soon as we realized that neither we nor anyone we knew would ever so much as sniff even the basement levels of Cornell’s celestial vocal range. Nobody could.

Look at this gorgeous rock icon. Chris loved rock music and, as you can see, could take or leave shirts.

Then “grunge” (whatever that was) broke. Or exploded. Suddenly, Soundgarden wasn’t a band you’d have to stay up late to catch a glimpse of on MTV’s Headbangers Ball or 120 Minutes. They were everywhere. So were their peers. A lot of it was good; they call it the cream of the crop for a reason. But also, for every Soundgarden, there were a dozen Candleboxes—indistinguishable, soundalike, lookalike, mediocre, hopeful riders of the wave, all hoping their rendition of “grunge” might get them on MTV. But, hey, at least we got a Soundgarden, a Nirvana, a Pearl Jam, a Screaming Trees, an Alice In Chains. If we had to suffer through a few Days of the New(s), so be it.

When I formed a band with my cousins Mark², we ran into the same How Do We Pull This Off problem that had stymied Adam and me. We loved Soundgarden so much, though, we just had to cover “Outshined” (at the time one of their “easier to cover” songs, though I think drummer Mark—who was the actual musical talent of the band—got frustrated that I’d always inadvertently straighten out the odd time signature). But, because we were mortals, singer Mark would sing it an octave lower. And, even in the less celestial realm, it rocked. We were absolutely feeling Minnesota.

I saw Chris Cornell live three times — an eardrum-assaulting show in Ogden on the Superunknown tour with my brother-in-law Jason, on Chris’ solo album Euphoria Morning tour at Kingsbury Hall with a transcendent version of “Seasons” (one of his best songs), and at the Bridge School Benefit Concert a couple of years before they stopped doing them, where I got to hear Chris sing Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” with the members of Pearl Jam, definitively checking off a bucket list box for 15-year-old (and current) me.

Pretty sure this is a photo of the performance I saw at the Bridge School Benefit Concert with Pearl Jam.

Every time I saw him, I couldn’t believe that he was pulling off — live and in person — that thing that had dropped my jaw so many times through stereo speakers. There was no studio trickery or smoke & mirrors. It was like watching (the man also happened to be gorgeous) and listening to a Greek god—towering, otherworldly, overwhelming, anachronistic, impossible. My cousin Mark told me mythically about an early Soundgarden show he attended in Oakland, where Cornell swung the mic cord over his head like a lasso, hooked it to a beam above the audience, and swung like Indiana Jones over the audience. I have no reason to believe it was anything less than true.

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When my parents picked me up in Brazil after my LDS mission, my loyal, music-loving brother Andy—knowing how much I would’ve missed music during my two years away³—came equipped with a walkman. The first song I listened to? Soundgarden’s “Blow Up The Outside World.”⁴ (“It’s like a heavier Beatles,” Andy said, not inaccurately.) It thumped me and honestly, after two years of rock fasting, I wasn’t totally ready for the aggression of Soundgarden (remember the last post when I said missionaries are weird for a good little while right after their missions?). I made Andy queue up Counting Crows’ Recovering The Satellites while I got my sea/rock legs back. Once my ears were ready, I buried myself in an album, Down On The Upside, that I think, even with its hits, might be their most underrated album. Pretty Noose? Dusty? Rhinosaur? Never The Machine Forever? COME ON.

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Six years ago today I woke up and couldn’t believe the news: at 52, Chris Cornell was gone. Another giant from the “grunge era” gone in tragic fashion. A lonely time for Eddie Vedder and Mark Arm⁵. Who knew these would be the survivors of the Seattle scene? Who knew we’d have to be talking about survivors at all?

So I spent the next week or month with the albums I’d spent so many days and nights with ⁶— Superunknown, Temple of the Dog, UltramegaOK, the Singles soundtrack. (To this day, the band’s breakthrough Badmotorfinger is probably my least-listened-to record for reasons that I can’t fully explain) I quickly realized that it wasn’t just nostalgia fueling my listening; I still loved the experience, the noise, the sludge, the triumph, the riffs, the wails, the dissonance, the tension, the cathartic release. Soundgarden was the evolution of a lot of the classic hard rock (and odd time signature prog rock but with the energy and angst of punk) I loved growing up. Cornell not only had world-burning pipes, but he was a killer songwriter too. His melodies were so good and instinctive, you’d never know he was singing over some weird time signature, alternating bars of 9 and 7 or something. So many musicians want to show you how musically complex they are, dazzling you with their music theory virtuosity. Cornell was the opposite: he wanted to prove to you that it could be musically interesting/challenging and still accessible. And it was.

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Holly and I are sitting with thousands of people in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. The opening band has played and the stadium is buzzing in anticipation of U2 taking the stage to perform their classic album The Joshua Tree in its entirety, some 30 years after its original release. As a U2 fan who didn’t get to see the original tour (it didn’t come through Utah) and who only got to finally see U2 in their early 00’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind era, this is as close as I’m gonna get. It’s the only show where I’ll be guaranteed to hear some of my favorites like “Running To Stand Still” and “In God’s Country” and “Red Hill Mining Town.” The whole crowd feels the same way. Or versions of it.

Time is ticking and it starts to seem like, well, any minute now the band’s gonna come on. And then it happens…

Over the stadium PA, we all hear the familiar arpeggiated electric guitar chords and eerie, alien, chorused-out, swirling lead guitar….

And then that voice:

”In my eyes
Indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face
Lies the snake
And the sun in my disgrace…”

It was just a week after Chris Cornell had taken his own life. The music-loving world’s wound was still wide open, aching.

The stadium snapped to attention. By the time the song got to the chorus—BLACK HOLE SUN, WON’T YOU COME—it was a multi-thousand person singalong, top of the lungs, bottom of the hearts. They could hear us in Montrose, I’m sure. Maybe Glendale too. Maybe even Seattle, who knows. I got the chills. I teared up. I wasn’t the only one.

Tearing up during the recorded-decades-ago song-you’ve-heard-a-thousand-times-and-probably-wouldn’t-even-crack-your-Soundgarden-Top-10⁷ playing over the PA before the band you paid to see even comes onstage?

I guess you had to be there.

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If there’s a Mount Rushmore of rock singers⁸, I don’t know how you argue against Chris Cornell getting a spot. He could do it all.

RIP Chris Cornell. Sleep tight for me.

1. Jesse was the first lead singer of my high school band The Spiders. He got us through our first-ever live performance: U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” live at Clayton Intermediate!

2. Mark S and Mark O, from different families, both named after our grandpa Mark.

3. Different missions have different rules. And the same goes for eras, stiffening or loosening rules. In my era and on my mission, the only music we were allowed to listen to was music from the hymnbook and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I had a cassette of instrumental hymns played by Michael Dowdle on acoustic guitar that I wore all the way out.

4. Two of my favorite albums in the years just before my mission (so…93-95) would’ve been Soundgarden’s Superunknown and Counting Crows’ August & Everything After.

5. Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), Layne Staley (Alice In Chains), Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees), and Chris Cornell (Soundgarden)—all too early. It was like a community epidemic of tragedy. It’s heartbreaking that these guys couldn’t see a way through.

6. Here’s a 40-ish-song playlist of some of my favorite Chris Cornell songs.

7. Fine, let’s do this.

My Soundgarden Top 10:
1. The Day I Tried To Live
2. Blow Up The Outside World
3. Hands All Over
4. Let Me Drown
5. All Your Lies
6. 4th of July/Like Suicide (not sure why, but they’re together in my mind)
7. Pretty Noose/Tighter & Tighter (um, why not?)
8. Burden In My Hand
9. Outshined/Rusty Cage (couldn’t decide. Why do you care?!? This is a footnote, for crying out loud)
10. Flower

8. *ROCK. If it were all singers, you know I’d have Aretha up there.

I think my Mt Rushmore of rock singers would be something like: Chris Cornell, Robert Plant, Paul McCartney and then….oh man…I can’t decide. An open face, different carvings everyday.