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A depressing passage from Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil’s planned memoir, “A Screaming Life: Into The Superunknown With Soundgarden And Beyond,” has been released, as per theprp. This specific read is on Thayil discovering the passing of frontman/guitarist Chris Cornell, his bandmate in the renowned grunge group. On May 18, 2017, Cornell passed away while performing with Soundgarden. Cornell went to his hotel room after performing at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan, and was subsequently discovered dead there. Suicide by hanging was determined to be his cause of death. Rolling Stone was given exclusive access to this fresh excerpt by Thayil; some of its most important passages are listed here.
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.
Later, Thayil would describe his own experiences with persons who had suicidal thoughts, among other things, including the unsettling experiences he had with his own mother, which he claimed was a recurring theme in her life. Thayil continued by saying that Cornell did not exhibit those behaviours to him in a comparable way.
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 at Rolling Stone about how the band and their stage crew handled the situation after learning of Cornell’s death. On June 9th, Thayil’s aforementioned book will be released. Soundgarden was admitted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year.
