Faced with yet another theme where I have run the clock down to the buzzer, I am going to re-mention a song that I posted about in 2016. That *is* 6 years ago (what?), but - in addition to the time constraints, there are also just too many confluences to let this go.
-#1: an article I came across in the Washington Post last week about how TicketMaster's dynamic pricing algorithms have set some tickets for "man of the people" Bruce Sprinsteen's 2023 tour in the thousands of dollars - the question being "Does the boss know and/or care?
-#2: I am on the road yet again and continuing my somewhat disjointed first summer of retirement
-#3: I'm in New Jersey
-and #4: there have been thunderstorms almost every late afternoon here for the past week (par for the course along the East Coast if memory serves me right)
So, while, back in 2016 the clip I chose was the incredible version with Springsteen joining Melissa Etheridge on stage, here are some other performances of this wonderful musical story
In 1991, when Axel Rose was asked about some of
his favorite new bands, he said “The singer of Soundgarden has a beautiful
voice.” I had figured Rose to be a tasteless idiot whose well-publicized love
of the Sex Pistols I had dismissed as naive and more about a juvenile liking of
the name than the music. At the same time, his comment had also given me a
weird feeling of hope.
Two years later I was twenty years old and in
Prague on a spring break after studying in a small city in southern Germany.
Room and board inside somebody’s home cost about 9 dollars a day. Three things
are especially vivid from the week I walked around Prague in my ripped jeans,
flannel and Joy Division shirt: two raggedy U.S. street performers who recycled
6-8 songs all day, including VU’s “I’m Waiting for My Man” and Pete Seeger’s
“Which Side are You On?”; two cleanly dressed prostitutes parading around the
main square (I held a competition with myself to see how long I could ogle
before getting embarrassed and looking away); and a ticket table for Guns and
Roses with special guests Faith No More and Soundgarden. 14 dollars a piece.
Rose had backed up his comments and had brought
both bands on a year-long tour. Who knows if the attention he had given to
Soundgarden had anything to do with Seattle’s ascendancy and the brief
improvement of commercial radio in the early to mid 90s? After three days of
indecisiveness, I spent the money and watched the gig in what was then the
world’s largest stadium. There were no :assigned seats. They opened the gates
and you ran. I made it to the third row and had to pee by the middle of FNM’s
set.
Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell’s first words when
he came on stage in Prague were nothing creative or insightful, something like,
“Man, anyone want to play football?” Then Soundgarden followed with a
stunning set that managed within its short 40-minutes to both dig deep and
climb to an epic peak that humbled G n R, who was good in their own right but
nowhere near as enthralling as Soundgarden.
Cornell was an entrancing figure on stage: long
brown curly hair, jade green eyes, olive skin, hair throwing around in the
wind. Sexy as hell. He was wearing a long-sleeve black shirt, unbuttoned,
showing off some nice abs for a guy on a year-long tour. And that voice, that
‘beautiful voice’ as Rose had called it. Growling and bluesy, Cornell’s voice
has always made me think of what it would sound like if the devil came above,
winked and sluiced up the world with some songs he’d been working on with a few
of his friends down below.
Look at recent videos of Soundgarden and Cornell
hardly looks any different. The music hasn’t lost its dark, romantic growl
either. If you want to step back into the Soundgarden catalogue, start with Badmotorfinger.
The swirling, frightening “Jesus Christ Pose”, the dark, Sabbath-like ooze of
“Slaves and Bulldozers” and the psychedelic, yet fragile “Room a Thousand Years
Wide” showcase a band growing so confident in itself: heavy and sexy, just
slightly vulnerable and musically better than anything else in the grunge
scene.
Cornell died under peculiar circumstances after
a show in Detroit, Michigan on May 8, 2017.
It's hard to believe that with all that happened in 2017, Chris Cornell hasn't been gone for even a year. Such is the nature of consequential events in the blast-off news cycle where nearly everything is of some kind of consequence - it's hard to remember all that happened.
So, what to make of senseless loss, or to say? It seems words are a pale annotation to the volume of grief Cornell's suicide created for the musical world.
Our heroes will always let us down in the end, I suppose, whether they mean to or not, whether our feelings about them make any difference. Coming to grips with mortality - and the fact that sometimes, the ones we worship are just as flawed as we are - is as much a disappointment as it is a tragedy.
It's been a heartbreaking year. So many voices have gone silent. I'd like to think artists never really die, not if we keep listening. I'm still pretending Chris Cornell--and so many others-- isn't gone, and I'm still listening.
Written as a bit of a "joke, the song "Seasons" was originally found on the soundtrack for the film Singles, Cameron Crowe's love letter to the city of Seattle and the still evolving grunge scene. Cornell wrote and recorded five songs and gave them to Crowe on cassette, under the moniker Poncier. The title is actually the last name of Single's protagonist, Cliff Poncier, played by Matt Dillon. Cornell was originally offered the part of Poncier, but opted instead to do a dialogue-less cameo during one of the movie's funnier scenes. Poncier's character is clueless, hapless, a spot on representation of hipster, poseur silliness. Eventually, his band (the equally-not-real-but-still-famous, Citizen Dick), implodes and Poncier perseveres as a solo artist, despite any lack of talent. The cassette tape makes its appearance here, as his solo demo.
And, here's where we get a little meta: the cassette itself was real, even though it was meant to be a prop. The song titles and the artwork were created by Eddie Vedder, Jeff Amet and Stone Gossard (they played the members of Citizen Dick). But Cornell took it one step further, as a thank you to Crowe for putting him in the movie and actually recorded five real songs.
Here's the scene, cut from the original film, where the cassette makes its appearance:
That's quite a wink wink in-joke, given how great the songs are--timeless pieces of early 90s grunge, minor chords and static, crunching rhythms. You can hear them all on the rereleased and expanded Single's soundtrack, and in various versions on some of Cornell's later solo releases. Go on the hunt--it's a fun bit of grunge treasure hunting.
The standout is "Seasons", a funeral dirge that winds glorious and hymn-like. It's a mediation on loss and voicelessness, on the fleeting nature of both life and the (lack of) control we have over what happens, despite our best attempts. It's a beautiful song, a sad song, and a strangely accurate at pinning down and defining the feelings of those of us left behind when so many beautiful voices have gone silent, with so much still to say.
When grunge/metal heroes Soundgarden parted ways in 1997 (they have since reunited) I coudn't wait to hear what frontman and main songwriter Chris Cornell would do next.
Over the years his debut as a solo artist, the song Seasons on the soundtrack for Cameron Crowe's Singles in 1992, had grown to be a big fan favorite and it was obvious that whatever he was cooking up would be worth waiting for. The first sign of things to come was the sublime Sunshower on the Great Expectations soundtrack in 1998. The full-length Euphoria Morning hit the shelves the following year and the moment I heard it I had a new favorite album.
Perhaps surprising to fans of Soundgarden, the album couldn't have sounded less like Soundgarden. No grinding, distorted heavy metal guitars to be found anywhere. This was more similar to his Temple Of The Dog side-project from 1991.
Dark and melancholy, but always melodic and enticing the album is absolutely brilliant from start to finish. Great stuff on here, like the gloomy Steel Rain, the Jeff Buckley tribute Wave Goodbye, the bluesy When I'm Down and of course Disappearing One, in my opinion one of the best songs he has ever written.
I'm glad he put some clarinets in the intro or I'd have no reason to post it this week.
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