Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil has shared a somber excerpt from his upcoming memoir, ‘A Screaming Life: Into The Superunknown With Soundgarden And Beyond‘. This particular read focuses on Thayil learning about the death of his bandmate in the legendary grunge outfit, frontman/guitarist Chris Cornell. Cornell‘s death occurred on May 18th, 2017 while on tour with Soundgarden. After playing a show at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, MI, Cornell went up to his hotel room, where he was later found dead. His cause of death was ruled suicide by hanging.
Thayil gave Rolling Stone the exclusive on this new excerpt, some key passages from which can be found below. Speaking of the period just after the show, Thayil recalled:
“It was just before midnight when I, post-show, went upstairs to the green room to meet some of our guests — two Orioles players and members of Dennis Coffey’s band. I’d mentioned to Chris earlier that they were coming, hoping he might want to say hello, but he had already left the venue. Matt, Ben, and I stuck around, had some beers, and hung out. The night felt off, though. There was something different about it. Maybe I was still adjusting to Jerome [tour manager] being gone from the tour, or maybe it was the strange vibe Chris had been giving off.
I’d known Chris long enough to sense when something was amiss. It wasn’t just that he was tired—there was something deeper, though he didn’t feel comfortable opening up to me. We weren’t hanging out much during this tour. After sound check, we’d briefly talk about the set, songs we were writing, or ideas we were jamming on. But Chris traveled separately and lived on the East Coast, so we didn’t have much chance to connect outside the band. We’d been apart for years, between 1997 and 2009, and during that time, he’d remarried and moved away from Seattle. So I wasn’t fully in touch with what was going on in his personal life, his sobriety, or how he felt about his career.”
Thayil would later go on to explain his own encounters with people expressing suicide ideation and more, including disturbing instances he endured from his own mother, which he said was a constant throughout her life. Thayil would then go on to relay that Cornell didn’t showcase those behaviors to him in a similar fashion:
“Chris never made these kinds of statements to me. I never feared that Chris would harm himself in the way that my mom made me fear as a youth. He was the opposite of my mom. He wasn’t making these proclamations. He never did. Chris’s death and the manner in which he died were so unexpected. It seemed to me at the time to be so out of character in 2017. If Chris had done something like that when the band were younger in the late eighties or maybe even the mid-nineties, on the heels of the deaths of Andy Wood, Kurt Cobain, and Chris’s good friend Jeff Buckley, it might have made more sense. Decades later, at his age, and being a father, it seemed unfathomable. Not in 2017. Maybe in 1997.
I didn’t see it coming. The thing that hurts me the most is to be a close friend and colleague and not to have read things that perhaps, in retrospect, I should have read. That’s hurtful. I feel like I let Chris down by not seeing the look in his eyes, or not hearing a tone in his voice — not being able to read it. But it’s hard to read things like that, because you don’t get a lot of chances at it. You can only look in retrospect and go, Ah, here’s an indicator. There was nothing that was on my radar that I could read at that time.
And then I looked at the paper trail and it was like Fuck, the paper trail goes back to the beginning. His lyrics are just riddled with these kinds of introspective insights. Most of Soundgarden’s work sort of describes something less than sunshiney. That’s what I mean by “paper trail.” This didn’t come out of the blue. I mean, I had conversations with Chris over the years about everything from love, or what is friendship, or death or suicide or the creative process.
We were close enough in the early years that we talked about all these things. But talking about these topics wouldn’t necessarily raise alarms or concern. These were just conversations. We were a dark band, and Chris wrote dark lyrics that befit the music. If people think there was something overtly indicative in his words, then they have a crystal ball that I didn’t have.”
You can read more from Thayil on how the band first learned of Cornell‘s passing and how the group and their stage crew went on to cope with the matter over at Rolling Stone. Thayil‘s above-mentioned book will be published on June 09th. Last year saw Soundgarden inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.
Meanwhile, Cornell‘s surviving Soundgarden bandmates have been working on completing their final studio album with him. Cornell left behind numerous recordings and song ideas for that record, with the band having since been in the studio for some time now fleshing them out for this posthumous effort.
