Since mid-March of the heinous year of 2020, I’ve been driving nearly every weekday with my wife and son to a home office at my in-laws’ house. As a result of this commute, we’re listening to the radio more often. When I have it tuned to the local hard rock station, songs from our high school epoch occasionally play, including classic hits from Soundgarden. When “Black Hole Sun,” “Fell on Black Days,” or “Outshined” plays, I still occasionally feel surprised to realize that I’m listening to a dead man. Chris Cornell was fifty-two when he died on May 18, 2017. He had outlived his troubled peers from that musical era, like Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Scott Weiland. I guess his sudden death in a hotel room in Detroit right after a show still stuns me.
I saw Soundgarden headline for Metallica at Lollapalooza in 1996. The band was promoting Down on the Upside, their final studio album before their 1997 breakup. At age seventeen, I was still in the infancy of my love for rock. I was familiar with their music—namely Superunknown—but I was incapable of grasping just how fucking awesome they were. I hadn’t lived enough, nor listened to enough other bands and musicians to understand what might and virtuosity they contained with guitarist Kim Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron, bassist Ben Shepherd, and singer and songwriter Chris Cornell.
