Chris Cornell: Man of Golden Words

A mixtape exploring the singer’s life — and tragic death.

As lead singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter of Seattle band Soundgarden, Chris Cornell’s words were a cryptic window into his soul that influenced a generation. It was four years ago today that he left us. Shortly after, I made a mixtape documenting his three-decade career that may explain his untimely death. Compiled here is that mixtape and the story behind each song that tells a tale of one friend gone too soon — and the other who joined him years later.

“Bring life to the dying secret
’Til the last words are told”

[1/10]

Heretic (1986)

This one is where it all started — not just for Soundgarden, but the entire Seattle movement. “Heretic” was the first time the world outside Seattle heard the band by way of a now-legendary compilation called Deep Six. The recording is primitive; Soundgarden had only been a band for a little over a year; Kim Thayil is playing through a $10 amp; no one can hear Hiro’s Yamamoto’s bass; new drummer Scott Sundquist is still trying to find his place in the band after replacing the previous drummer — Chris Cornell. (Drummer Matt Cameron is on this album but playing for a band called Skin Yard. He would join Soundgarden later that year.)

Chris and Hiro had played in another band called The Shemps, handling all the instruments as a duo before meeting Kim in 1984. Deep Six attracted the attention of local DJ Jonathan Poneman who saw Soundgarden’s live show and declared them the most exciting thing happening in rock and roll at that moment. Their performance motivated him to donate $20,000 to Kim’s friend Bruce Pavitt to start a record label to release a Soundgarden record. That label was called Sub Pop.

I spent a good two years of my childhood hunting in every record shop I visited for this album. I can’t remember where it finally surfaced, but it was one of the first times I can remember feeling like I’d discovered something rare and valuable. This was no routine trip to Bargain Trader to dig through the scratch bin — it was a forgotten relic waiting to be brought back to life. I can’t say it was digested easily on the first listen, but the stories this album told spoke to me and helped me to understand that rock music in 1986 had a hidden underground that was more than Eddie Money and Bon Jovi. It was the birth of the music of my formative years, immortalized in Chris Cornell’s soulful croon and uncomfortable shriek, and I was transformed.

“I want something to explode
I’ve been deaf — now I want noise”

[2/10]

Loud Love (1989)

One of the lead-off singles from Louder than Love — an album most never knew existed — “Loud Love” was an example of Chris Cornell’s growth as a songwriter over the few years that had passed since the Deep Six days. They’d released two EPs on Sub Pop and graduated to a full LP on SST, none of which had earned much accolade from critics or fans. They were very experimental, very non-serious albums with titles like Ultramega OK.

Soundgarden had the unenvious task of forging the path for the Seattle bands that would comprise the “grunge” explosion in the early ’90s, and those bands fit into one of two vaguely defined categories: punk and metal. Soundgarden clearly fit into the latter unlike most of their counterparts, and their new major label A&M exploited this to its fullest to ride the dying waves of the ’80s metal phenomenon that the Seattle sound would soon eradicate with the 1991 release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Chris’ shirtless, curly-haired image and high clean vocals combined with the band’s heavy, not-in-a-hurry pace were a clear nod to Led Zeppelin. When the label started talking music videos, world tours, and photoshoots, bassist Hiro Yamamoto got cold feet, stopped participating in the songwriting to which he had so heavily contributed, and left Chris to fill the gap. By the time the album hit, Hiro had bid the band bonne chance and been replaced by Jason Everman for the music videos and tour. (Jason had gained notoriety within Washington’s music scene for fronting the money for Nirvana’s debut album Bleach and touring with them for a bit.)

“Loud Love,” therefore, is a documentation of the beginning of the band’s catapult into stardom as well as Chris’ growing songwriting, demonstrating his ability to compose all the music and lyrics to the (nearly) eponymous single. In many ways it was fresh; in others, cliche. The song begins with Kim Thayil’s thoughtful harmonics using an EBow and gives way to Chris’ high pitched howl and rhythm guitar — something he’d shunned for the first few releases (except to play the bass on songs sung by Hiro). Chris wears duct tape pants and smashes mic stands, TVs, and guitars. Never-aging Kim, as always, takes a backseat to the showboating. Soon-to-be-booted Jason bangs his head violently as if he’s in Slayer. Matt’s complex polyrhythm drumming is something to behold in itself. They were definitely Soundgarden by this point, but not yet the one we’d all come to know. And in the following whirlwind months, tragedy would strike that would haunt Chris to the end.

“And your body shakes,
So you ditch away and you close the shades”

[3/10]

Times of Trouble (1991)

Andy sat alone in his bedroom and tied on a tourniquet. A quick plunge later and he was gone — first, in a gentle nod, in which he laid back and let the warmth numb him, and then into a full coma.

Xana came by later to be with him, but ended up leaving the apartment after a harrowing scene that culminated with her signature at the bottom of a paper declaring his death.

Chris was on his way back to the house at the end of the U.S. tour for Louder than Love with a three-day break before heading off to Europe. Chris and Andy were roommates, both the lead singers of Seattle’s quickest rising bands; Soundgarden was two LPs deep and on a major label; Mother Love Bone had released the Shine EP to great critical acclaim and was days away from the debut of their first full-length, Apple. But Andy was gone.

Actually, the paramedics were wrong; Andy was alive, but comatose. He held on for several days before the doctors removed him from life support and allowed him to pass peacefully in Xana’s arms. Chris immediately left for Europe, his best friend now officially gone, and his short, prolific music career over.

This event shaped conversations of the Seattle scene for years to come, as Andy was the first publicized overdose that would come to be somewhat routine, but it hit Chris the hardest and he coped in the most obvious way possible for a singer/songwriter. The two songs he wrote were too somber and mellow to be included on the next Soundgarden album, and Chris couldn’t stop thinking about Andy’s bandmates who were left with a hit record and no frontman. Andrew Wood was not someone who could be replaced.

When he got back to the states, Chris and Soundgarden drummer Matt met with Stone and Jeff of Mother Love Bone to record the songs, and the project simply continued until they had a full album — a true dedication to their lost friend. Mike McCready joined them, as well as a vocalist who had been hanging around but had never recorded before by the name of Eddie Vedder.

“Times of Trouble” stands out on this record as the words Chris wished he’d been able to get through to Andy before the overdose occurred. Everyone knew he was an addict, but he adamantly denied it — even to Xana. Chris never shook the haunting imagery of his roommate who had his career abruptly end while his own continued to grow. He carried on down the path his friend never would.

But this song stands out as well as a fantastic example of Chris’ continued musicianship. His voice was at its peak, every note a flawless, fine-tuned expression. In the verses, he channels Andy’s spirit to put the listener into the mind of a junkie, then jolts them out of that pit with a chorus, half-penned by Xana, that urges him to get clean. And just when we think we finally know exactly who Chris Cornell is, he busts out a soulful harmonica solo — something we’ve never heard from him before, and something he’d never do again on any record.

Though Temple of the Dog was a one-off tribute between the members of two bands, one defunct, the record didn’t gain notoriety until two future albums were released: Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger and Pearl Jam’s debut, Ten, both released in 1992. When word got out that there was a “supergroup” with the members of these bands, the record quickly went platinum. Chris always hated that the media latched on to the album as a cash cow and not as it was intended. When interviewers would ask if another “Temple” album was in the works, Chris would respond that the musical and Vegas show were nearly complete.

The band never toured. Not until late 2016 at least, when all the original members united for four shows in the corners of the United States. I will always wonder if revisiting these songs — this one in particular — triggered Chris into a downward spiral from which he never recovered.

RIP Andrew Wood, 1966–1990

“Leaning on the pedestal that holds my self denial,
Firing the pistol that shoots my holy pride”

[4/10]

Drawing Flies (1992)

In early 1992, just before my 11th birthday, I was leaving a store with my friend David and his mom, getting back into their car, when he was telling me about a band called Soundgarden. David and I often stayed up all night listening to Metallica and his parents were music aficionados who were the first to introduce me to Neil Young and Rush.

“You have to hear how this album starts,” he excitedly shouted, “Mom, put in the Soundgarden tape.”

She ejected Moving Pictures, popped in Badmotorfinger, and rewound it back to the beginning. What came next was the most inspiring, unique, beautiful thing I had heard so far in my short life: The dual, harmonized, impossibly sustained ring of Chris and Kim’s guitars leading off the album and then exploding. It was hard to listen to and intriguing. It was like nothing that came before it.

That song was “Rusty Cage,” a tune you’ve probably heard; but if you’ve never listened to the rest of the album, you missed out on one of the most important records ever made. The band had finally figured out how to harness their experimental nature and write listenable songs without sacrificing their artistry, and it catapulted them to international fame.

Chris took the songwriting lead on more songs than before, but with Hiro gone and Jason fired, a new bassist was on board: Ben Shepherd, a uniquely talented punk musician who proved to be the missing piece the band was looking for. In fact, he wrote about a third of the album.

Chris didn’t write the music for “Drawing Flies,” but it contains some of the most ironically thoughtful and verbally acrobatic lyrics in the entire Soungarden catalog. It was a song about being unable to think about what to write, with lyrics like “Sitting here like uninvited company / Wallowing in my own obscenities / Share a cigarette with negativity.” Who writes about writer’s block to beat writer’s block and succeeds?

Pairing this up with Matt’s music is a testament to how aligned the four musicians were with each other. Here we have a hard rock tune featuring a horn section playing in a swing 12/8 beat nominated for a Grammy for Best Metal Performance. And it’s just a sliver of the diversity found throughout this album.

As always, Chris’ lyrics here have a dark theme, and he envisions himself half-dead under the stress of being tasked with writing the lyrics, laying around, dead, cartoon X’s in his eyes, and drawing flies. And it’s brilliant.

And yet this isn’t where the Soundgarden story ends; for most, the beginning is yet to come.

“Safe outside my gilded cage
With an ounce of pain, I wield a ton of rage”

[5/10]

Like Suicide (1994)

At the risk of being too obvious when writing a retrospective of the career of a man who took his life, I’d like to share this beautiful Cornell solo piece based on the final track from Superunknown, the album that launched the band to international fame.

The unexpected success and impressive musicianship of Badmotorfinger had earned the band respect from the music industry, allowing them to choose their own producer and studio and relieving the pressure to write “good songs.” Ironically, that recipe led to the completion of an album so accessible that it had no choice but to blow up. Most of the songs were penned by Chris himself, who had emerged as the obvious principal songwriter, and for the first time in a decade, had a new look.

For most, this was their introduction to Chris Cornell — a mustached, spiky-haired, olive-skinned singer with a golden voice. Whether it was from the relentless rotation of “Black Hole Sun,” or the unlikely radio hit “Spoonman” (a metal tune in 7/4 with a fermata at the end of each line of the verses featuring an actual spoon solo in the bridge), the band had definitely become a household name. And most of us heard most of the album.

I considered touching lightly on this moment in Soundgarden’s history because it’s so well-known, but there’s one forgotten track on this 15-song album that comes at the very end, long after the attention span of the typical listener. And while that version is great, it was the 12-string acoustic performance of this song that Chris did for the “Fell on Black Days” single that stuck with me all these years.

It wasn’t literally about suicide, though Chris hadn’t shied away from controversial subjects in the past if he felt like writing about them, and nihilism, depression, and death were always dominant topics in his lyrics, but he generally left the interpretation up to the listener, writing in metaphors and symbolism and rarely in explicit statements. No, this song wasn’t about suicide at all; it was about the inherent danger in simply trying to live.

One day in 1993, Chris was looking out a window of his home when a bird suddenly struck the glass, fell to the ground, and died. The fact that the bird was simply flying and hadn’t intended to slam into the window, juxtaposed with the observation that the bird appeared to fly into it on purpose, was where his head was at when he sat down to write this one.

With Andy still in the back of his mind, I assume Chris thought of how he had just been trying to live his life and be in a band, naturally encountering one of the dangers of rock stardom and succumbing to a drug overdose — almost as if he had done it on purpose.

In the end, this is exactly what happened to Chris. Long-term anxiety induced by constant touring, living in the public eye, enduring a critical roller coaster, and the inevitability of aging had him seeking medication. And an overdose of that medication, while not fatal in itself, led him to take his own life in a hotel room just an hour after his final show.

And while Chris is gone, I’m not even halfway through a retrospective of his career, though I admit that I stopped paying attention to his career for a long time after Soundgarden disbanded. Chris left a clue about the breakup at the end of the next album.

“There must be something else
There must be something good far away from here”

[6/10]

Boot Camp (1996)

For Soundgarden’s final album, Down on the Upside (before their reunion 16 years later), the band decided to ditch an outside producer and write/record/produce the album themselves, yielding an overly long 16-track album that lacked a clear focus. While most of the songs were good — some, the best of their career — it was full of filler, including songs like “Never Named” (literally a song Ben never bothered to title).

The extraordinary success of Superunknown made the band the target of the worst of the music industry, leading to its decline and eventual breakup in April 1997. There was little collaboration; the band members mostly came to pre-recording rehearsal with fully complete songs. Kim only contributed one, recorded at the very end of the sessions. Chris wrote less than half the album.

The three songs from this album immortalized by rock radio were all written by Chris (“Pretty Noose,” “Blow Up the Outside World,” “Burden in My Hand”). But again, the album closes with one Cornell tune that touched me more deeply than the others.

At the time, Chris said “Boot Camp” was about growing up in a toxic environment and the dream of being shipped away from it as punishment. It was later revealed that this song was a covert jab at the band itself, and for nearly two decades was the last song released by the band.

It’s a short, interesting, and telling song with a refrain of “far away from here,” ending with the final line, “And I’ll be here for good.”

“For good.”

And Soundgarden went silent.

“Burn out any memory of me ever breathing
’Til I’m born again”

[7/10]

Black Saturday (2012)

In late 2009, a band booked a show in a small Seattle venue under the name “Nudedragons.” The turnout was small, but those in attendance realized something very important once the band took the stage: This was actually a completely unexpected and historic reunion, and “Nudedragons” was an anagram for “Soundgarden.”

On New Year’s Day, it was announced: After an official breakup in 1997 and nearly 13-year silence, Soundgarden was back and ready to tour.

Chris had spent much of the prior decade as the lead singer of Audioslave, a band that began as somewhat of a playdate between orphaned Chris and decapitated Rage Against the Machine with producer Rick Rubin arranging for them to do some no-pressure jamming. Since Soundgarden disbanded, Chris had released a solo album in 1999 (Euphoria Morning) and was working on a follow-up, but Chris didn’t shine in the spotlight; he wanted to be a famous rockstar, but it never felt right being the sole focus, more of a commodity for the music industry than an artist with something to say. He felt more comfortable with a band, and this band already had another dominant personality: Tom Morello. They released three albums and split in early 2007.

Chris went solo again, releasing another album (Carry On) and then hunted for producers to work with to release an album of remixes. That hunt ended with Chris’ collaboration with Timbaland on a very peculiar 2009 solo album called Scream which had Chris singing exclusively over electronic beats. After critics tore this one to pieces, Chris looked back and picked up the phone to see if the old crew wanted to give it another go.

Two years of touring later, Soundgarden released a new album in 2012 called King Animal. Chris’ voice was clearly not as powerful as it was before, but here was a band picking up exactly where “Boot Camp” left off, launching immediately into “Been Away Too Long” to recap the past decade and a half.

Chris’ contributions to the album, as always, were roughly evenly split between experimental, dark motifs (“Bones of Birds”) and straight-forward sing-alongs. “Black Saturday” was one of the more accessible tunes.

This song illustrates Chris’ fear of growing old; the last time we’d heard him as the frontman for Soundgarden, he was just 32 years old — now 48, the fear of getting seriously ill, becoming inept, and losing his mind that he had always sung about was an actual possibility. It’s ironically upbeat and bouncy, but it is what turned out to be a very real plea for mercy that he be put down like a lame horse if things ever go south.

Before he could carry out the prophecy of this song on himself, Chris had one more solo album in him — his final recordings on an album called Higher Truth.

“Every time I stare into the sun trying to find a reason to go on,
All I ever get is burned and blind”

[8/10]

Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart (2015)

At what would turn out to be the end of his career, Chris released one last solo album, as if learning his lesson the first three times hadn’t taught him anything, and it turned out to be a good call this time. His solo efforts had reeked of inauthenticity, obvious paychecks where the record label called the shots and Chris showed up with his good looks and amazing voice and generated a lot of money for a lot of people — except that the albums were never that successful. Here he returns, having spent another four years with Soundgarden including a full album release, fully in touch with himself as a musician and with endless Soundgarden reunion money to take the pressure off of this album.

But what makes this song so hard to listen to, and this video so difficult to watch, is his ultimate real-life fate of death by hanging. The video is cheesy but it tells a story that seems ominous in retrospect: Chris is serving a death sentence but has apparently struck a deal with the executioner’s assistant to help him escape the execution, and in return, he marries her. In the end, he longingly looks on as the noose is tied around another’s neck and the gallows drop. It’s as if Chris wonders if he made the wrong decision and should have gone through with it.

Again, his voice isn’t the same at age 50 as it was at age 25 when he wielded a 5-octave range, but the authenticity and passion are back. And in the bridge, as the camera zooms in on Chris’ famous half-smile framed by the hangman’s noose, he’s singing “I need this like a hole in the head.” It’s one of those moments that becomes magnitudes more powerful after his death.

Chris now joins one of his most famous 90s Seattle rocker frontmen in a very small club of those who took their own life rather than succumbing to an overdose. Kurt Cobain killed himself at the height of his career and the young age of 27 because he was mortified by the idea of becoming a rock cliché. After the enormous success of the critically acclaimed Unplugged in New York album and some of the acoustic music he had been working on shortly before his death, many have speculated that Kurt could have had a lucrative career in the folk music world, but it’s more likely that we would have seen him head down the same path: Release a solo album as the record company monkey he hated, become lead singer of a completely different band and generate funds for already-rich people, then release a few more solo albums before reuniting with his former band. This story played out over three decades in the form of Chris Cornell, but if it had to end in tragedy, at least his creative output in his final few years was from the heart.

Of course, his day job at this time was to tour with Soundgarden and play their greatest hits, which he did up until an hour before his death.

“So bleed your heart out. There’s no more rides for free.
Bleed your heart out.”

[9/10]

Slaves and Bulldozers (1992)

Chris walks slowly around the stage while his bandmates drone on, Ben and Matt playing the hypnotic, sludgy riff underlying a slow, lengthy, powerful song the fans know all too well. Kim finishes letting loose a cacophony of noises from his guitar and Chris picks up the microphone, looking out at the crowd who begin to cheer and raise their hands. Chris flips back his hair with his left hand, holds the mic to his mouth, and in a low voice, he sings,

“Meet me, Jesus, meet me. Meet me in the middle of the air. If my wings should fail me lord, meet me with another pair.”

He’s singing the traditional “In My Time of Dyin’” popularized by Bob Dylan on his debut album. The rest of the band holds back as quietly as possible as Chris continues, looking the members of the crowd directly in their eyes.

“Well, well, well, so I can die easy,” he continues. “In my time of dyin’, I ain’t gonna cry, I ain’t gonna moan,” and he turns and motions to the entire packed house and finishes, “All I need for you to do is drag my body home.”

A few moments later, he returns to the actual song at hand.

“Every word I’ve said is what I mean.”

Chris and the band finish the song, the final encore of their final show. Matt walks off the stage while Kim, Ben, and Chris remain, generating several minutes of feedback with their guitars stacked and pressed into the amplifiers, their backs to the audience. Quietly, quickly, and without further gesture, he exits to the right, and we never see him again.

Since 1992, the band ended about half their shows with “Slaves and Bulldozers,” nearly 7 minutes on the album and always extended live. It was a perfect show-closer, being old and early enough to appeal to “real” fans while still holding the attention of those that came after Superunknown, and afforded the band an open-ended bridge wherein Chris would sing a few lines from another song. On the Motorvision home video, Chris was singing lines from Pearl Jam’s “Alive.” He’d sing Spinal Tap. At Pinkpop ’92 he simply shouted jibberish. But for the final tour, Chris would always sing “In My Time of Dyin’.”

The song was Ben’s first contribution to the band musically, and Chris’ lyrics reflected his increasingly jaded attitude toward the music industry he had focused his life’s goals upon. For 25 years, the song was Chris’ condemnation of the greed of the industry and an ode to the proverbial selling of his soul. The push to create hit songs on Badmotorfinger had made one thing clear for him: There would be no more rides for free. He was a slave driving a bulldozer.

Chris climbed into a shuttle bus outside the Fox Theatre to take him back to his room at the MGM and called his wife. “They had three days to fix my in-ears and I was getting static,” he slurred, arguing that his voice was off and out of tune. Vicky asked him what was wrong. He explained that he had taken Ativan to calm down and that he may have taken several more than usual. “I’m so tired,” he continuously said, growing more and more agitated until his wife hung up and called his bodyguard Martin to go check on him. By the time Martin was able to kick through both security doors, Chris was gone.

“In my time of dyin’, don’t want nobody to cry.”

“And we fall like a tear falling to the ground,
I’ll never come around and you’ll never heard a word from me”

[10/10]

All Night Thing (1991)

Chris never got over Andy’s death. Even in high-profile interviews for Billboard upon the release of his final solo album he was reminiscing on his time living with and knowing Andy.

He chose to end Temple of the Dog, the tribute album to his friend, with this unconventional minimal jazz-brushes-and-organs ballad. On the surface, it’s a simple song about a man who discreetly leaves a social gathering with a woman at her request to spend time alone with her.

Songs from this era and genre are notorious for being interpreted to be about heroin to the point of being cliché. But maybe — just maybe this time — it’s true. Hear me out.

Chris never wrote straight-forward lyrics; this would be the only example I could find where he didn’t use heavy metaphors and strange imagery to leave the lyrics open to interpretation. There is always some underlying or hidden theme or subversive message.

This was a tribute to Andrew Wood, a man Chris knew very well, and who Chris knew had a drug problem. Everyone knew it. Andy would never talk about it. He was a social butterfly, the center of attention, and then… he’d be gone. He’d start a conversation, pass it along, and slip out. In “Reach Down,” Chris wrote from Andy’s perspective, singing “Love was my drug — but that’s not what I died of.” He was addicted to cocaine and couldn’t kick it, but in the end, it was a heroin overdose alone in his bedroom that took him.

In “All Night Thing,” I have always wondered if the woman in the song is actually the drug calling Andy’s name, urging him to disappear and spend the rest of the night on a binge. On his final (and rare) heroin nod, he never came around. And we never heard a word from him again.

The tale of Chris and Andy is a classic odd couple: Chris was the tall, manly, quiet frontman of an unusual metal band while Andy was the short, androgynous, flamboyant frontman of a classic rock band. Both wanted fame. Both wanted to play music for a living. But while Chris wanted to hide behind his hair, Andy wanted to be at the front of the stage, the biggest star in the world, and was more than willing to play the music industry game to rise to the top.

And of course, it was cut short a week before his debut album, and Andy would never rock the arenas that Soundgarden would go on to play just a few short years later. Chris, Kim, Ben, and Matt started in 50-occupancy clubs, went on small tours in vans, toured Europe, had a multi-night residency at The Whisky, made award-winning videos on MTV, were nominated for several Grammies, and sold 20 million records. It was the life Andy should have lived. And Chris never felt comfortable with it, even after leaving Soundgarden to do his solo albums, fronting Rage Against the Machine 2.0, and ultimately reuniting with Soundgarden. Even on the final tour, he was still just playing a character. And that character was partially based on Andy.

I can’t stop thinking about that final moment of the final Soundgarden show where Chris discreetly slips out of view in front of an enormous crowd, jumps in a van, goes straight back to his hotel and digs into his drug cache. Like the other nights, it was supposed to be an all night thing. But something was different that night.

Something had been building inside of him for years.

Something that went completely unresolved.

And in a whirlwind, the culmination of all the words he had prophecized for so many years came true. All the words of disappointment, despair, depression, angst, and death rang more true than ever as he took his own life at the age of 52.

Ironically, as with many others my age, those same words were the ones that took me through my own times of trouble. Not that my life was ever hard — but in your formative years, everything is an epic battle. And it was good to hear someone else expressing how I felt in ways I couldn’t articulate.

And it was Temple of the Dog — and therefore the story of Chris and Andy — that changed my life. In 1992, before a family vacation, my dad took me to Turtle’s Records to buy an album before the long car ride as was our tradition. I picked up the Spin Doctors album Pocket Full of Kryptonite, but before I could take it with him to the register, I remembered a song my friend David had played for me. It was “Hunger Strike.” It was a collaboration between the singers of two other bands he had introduced me to, and I decided to give that album a try instead.

Every year in the spring, in mid-April during the anniversary of the album’s release, I’ll listen to it in full a few times through, analyzing every note. There’s so much on it to discover, from Chris’ pinnacle-of-his-career voice, to Mike’s anthropomorphic guitar sounds, to Matt’s complex polyrhythmic drumming, and of course Stone and Jeff’s inseparable core. The 5-minute jam on “Reach Down” was the ultimate tribute to Andy’s life. The from-the-heart harmonica solo in “Times of Trouble.” The haunting, high-pitched refrain in “Four Walled World.”

And at the end of it all, this gem: A song on which Chris sings his final words of tribute while accompanied only by Matt and producer Rick Parashar on keyboards. One of his best vocal performances. One of his most unique songs. And one of his most touching.

It was the most selfless thing, and it was a major driver of my essence. And I will be forever grateful to Chris Cornell for bringing it into my life. I hope he went somewhere warm.

“Tell me, Mr. Golden Words, how’s about the world?
Tell me, can you tell me at all?”

[S/10]

Man of Golden Words (1990)

I wanted to write out my tribute to Chris in the form of a mixtape that compiled the full range of his musical career, analyzed his lyrics, and searched for meaning in his death. The one theme that never went away was the brief time he knew Andrew Wood, most visible in the fact that he wrote an entire tribute album to a man very few people had yet gotten to know — therein finally making him famous.

I wanted to imagine that Andy was still alive and capable of returning the favor. So here’s my mixtape’s secret song: Chris performing one of Andy’s songs.

But not just any song; I firmly believe Andy wrote this song about Chris. And I think Chris knew it.

“I want to show you something like joy inside my heart. Seems I’ve been living in the temple of the dog.”

Remember that Chris and Andy were roommates, the lead singers of two rising Seattle bands, and had rooms across the hall from each other. Chris reminisced that the two of them would have “4-track wars” where they would go into their rooms and record demos of songs for their bands, seeing who could outdo the other. But Andy was always insecure about his voice, about his lyrics, and about his composition skills. Where he felt he shined was his ability to be the total package — the showman the industry wanted. In fact, the only record Andy ever released was an EP called Shine. Yet he was always jealous of Chris’ lyrical ability and wanted to show him that he was capable of powerfully expressing himself like Chris could.

(Both of them used the word “dog” repeatedly in their songs. I sometimes wonder if “temple of the dog” was a reference to the house they shared.)

“Where would I live if I were a man of golden words? Or would I live at all?”

Chris was the primary renter of the house because he had the money. Soundgarden had been touring for a few years, had released 2 EPs and an LP, had music videos, and were even nominated for a Grammy. But both had no day job; Andy was primarily supported by his girlfriend and Chris while he focused on writing music and promoting his band.

“Words and music — my only tools.”

Andy understands that he has no skills beyond his destiny as a musician. For a while, he held a job as a valet. But in the end, he needed to rely on the words that he struggled with while living with a man for whom it seemed to come easily.

“Tell me Mr. Golden Words, how’s about the world?”

Andy’s former band Malfunkshun had appeared on the Deep Six record but split, and Andy joined with Stone and Jeff who were also Deep Six alumni from the band Green River. But their new band, Mother Love Bone, had never left the west coast except for a few shows in the Boston area. Meanwhile, Soundgarden had been touring Europe. Chris would come home and talk about the tour, and Andy was eager to get to that point in his career as well.

Yes, Andy wrote this song for Chris. Chris is the man of golden words. And if Andy were alive today, he would proudly step out on a stage, dedicate this song to his fallen friend, and sing it just as Chris sings it here.

Beyond the grave, in the coda of the song, Andy has one final message for Chris:

“Let’s fall in love with music, the driving force of our living.”

Researched and written by Ryan Schorr — ryanwilliamschorr@gmail.com

This mixtape can be found on YouTube here.