One guy's homeless, one likes sleeping all day, one's in Pearl Jam, and one's Chris Cornell. Beloved '90s titans Soundgarden are back, but where are they going? [Magazine Excerpt]From a distance, it doesn't look like much has changed.
On a cool Thursday evening in June, three-quarters of Soundgarden stand on a street corner in the Belltown section of Seattle, smoking cigarettes. From half a block away, I can make out the long, lean figure of Chris Cornell clad in a green military jacket, leaning against the window outside the Palace Ballroom, a private dining room serviced by local celebrity chef Tom Douglas. The Soundgarden frontman's dark locks hang past his shoulders, a throwback to the band's heyday and a reminder of his status as grunge's only bona fide sex symbol. Guitarist Kim Thayil, 49, stands facing Cornell, a ponytail snaking halfway down his back from underneath a brown skullcap. A few feet away, bassist Ben Shepherd, 41, tall and imposing in a heavy black overcoat, stares into the distance.
As I cross the street toward the three, the years come into focus. Shepherd is stockier than before, Thayil's bushy beard is more gray than black, and Cornell's face bears etches and grooves befitting his 46 years. Inside the restaurant, drummer Matt Cameron, 47, stands talking to one of the band's new managers, music industry veteran Gary Gersh.
Although many people date the discovery of the Seattle music scene -- and by extension the beginning of the alternative-rock revolution of the early '90s -- to the moment in 1990 when Nirvana was signed to Geffen Records (by Gersh, it bears mentioning), Soundgarden really got there first. At the time of Nirvana's major-label deal, Soundgarden were already inked to A&M, had been nominated for a Grammy, and toured with Guns N' Roses. The band had started in 1984 as a weird post-punk trio, but by the mid-'90s, they were the band that punk kids, metalheads, and classic rockers could agree on: a heavy behemoth with surprising pop smarts that would eventually sell more than eight million albums in the U.S. alone.
Soundgarden called it quits in 1997, weeks after an ugly final concert in Honolulu that ended with Cornell and drummer Cameron playing a few songs by themselves after Shepherd walked off in frustration over faulty gear, and Thayil followed him. It wasn't exactly The Last Waltz. At the time, Cornell says, tensions within the band were high and communication was at a low, but for a band that had thundered its way to prominence, Soundgarden just seemed to sort of peter out.
"The one thing about Soundgarden most people don't get is that we always got along," says Cornell. "We drank, and any band that drinks is going to have chaos, but we never had that internal negativity that usually spells the obvious reasons a band breaks up."
As such, the band's current reunion was pretty inevitable. In April, Cornell, Thayil, Shepherd, and Cameron stepped onstage together for the first time in 13 years at the Showbox in Seattle to perform for 90 minutes as the anagrammatic Nudedragons. In August, they were one of the headliners at Lollapalooza, and this month, the unreleased track "Black Rain" will be featured in Guitar Hero 6 and on a new deluxe Soundgarden retrospective, Telephantasm, which will also include videos, TV appearances, alternate takes, and live tracks. Tonight, they'll sit around a large table, eat good food, talk about the old days, and behave very much like four guys who enjoy one another's company. No angry glances will be exchanged, no plates thrown, and the most substantive argument -- about how many stomachs a cow has -- will be solved via a quick consultation with Thayil's phone. (Answer: one stomach with four compartments.) Even the mention of Soundgarden's former manager and Cornell's ex-wife, Susan Silver, won't set off sparks.
"A lot of times bands re-form, and people have changed in ways that might be negative, and you're just fighting to be able to play the music with some degree of efficiency," says Cornell. "We're not that."
