Chris Cornell, rock musician, 1964-2017 An angst-driven Seattle grunge trailblazer
With his howling voice, thundering guitar riffs and edgy, angst-driven songs, Chris Cornell was one of the progenitors of the grunge movement, which dominated rock music in the early 1990s, blazing a trail with his band, Soundgarden, for Kurt Cobain, Nirvana and the like to follow.
Soundgarden were misfits, according to Cornell.
‘‘To the punk kids we were heavy metal and the heavy metal kids thought we were too punk rock,’’ he explained.
By yoking the two together, Cornell and Soundgarden went on to sell more than 20 million records and win a brace of Grammy awards before the band broke up in 1997.
Refusing to be defined by the sound of the genre he had helped to create, he branched out as a solo artist and co-wrote and performed You Know My Name, a tune brimming with an almost Beatlesesque melodic sensibility. It became the theme for the James Bond movie Casino Royale, which introduced Daniel Craig in the role of 007.
He also toured as a solo acoustic performer, playing at venues including the Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall.
Christopher John Boyle was born on July 20, 1964, in Seattle into a middle-class family. His father, Ed, was a pharmacist and his mother, Karen, was an accountant.
One of six siblings, four of whom became rock musicians, he discovered a cache of Beatles records abandoned in the basement of a neighbour’s house at the age of nine, and was hooked.
As a lonely, gangly teenager - he eventually grew to 1.9m (6ft 3in) - he was prone to bouts of anxiety and depression. At one point he became so withdrawn that he dropped out of school and barely left his room for two years, a breakdown brought on by a combination of a reaction to the drug PCP and the trauma of his parents’ divorce.
A job working in a fish market where he was tasked with ‘‘wiping up the slime and throwing away the guts’’ can hardly have improved his darker moods, but music was his solace, and by his late teens he was playing around Seattle in a covers band called the Shemps. By 1984 they had become Soundgarden, with Cornell originally playing drums before switching to guitar and lead vocals, ‘‘as I was the only one who could sing’’.
It was a fertile time on the Seattle alternative rock scene. The teenage Cobain was putting together Nirvana, and a number of other bands that would spawn the seminal grunge acts Pearl Jam and Mudhoney were starting to make their mark.
In 1987 Soundgarden signed to Sub Pop, the Seattle label that would also become home to Nirvana, and within two years they became the first of the Seattle grunge bands to sign to a top label when they joined A&M. Grunge hit its peak in 1994 with Soundgarden at No 1 with the album Superunknown, including the Cornell-written songs Spoonman and Black Hole Sun, which won him Grammy awards as ‘‘best metal performance’’ and ‘‘best hard rock performance’’.
However, the Seattle scene was dealt a devastating blow from which it never recovered when Cobain killed himself in 1994. Soundgarden continued for another three years before collapsing under the pressure of endless touring and the rock’n’roll lifestyle.
‘‘I think we made the best records of that scene, we were the most daring and experimental and genre-pushing,’’ Cornell said.
He was married to Soundgarden’s manager, Susan Silver. Their daughter, Lillian Jean, was born in 2000, but they separated two years later amid considerable acrimony. He fought a lengthy court battle alleging mismanagement, and it took him four years to win back access to his collection of 15 guitars, which she had kept.
He married Vicky Karayiannis, a publicist of Greek heritage, with whom he had two children, Toni and Christopher. They opened the Parisian restaurant Black Calavados, and he converted to the Greek Orthodox Church.
Like many involved in the grunge scene, he struggled with addiction to drugs and alcohol. ‘‘I did everything I could get my hands on,’’ he admitted. He checked into a clinic in 2003. ‘‘I actually like rehab a lot,’’ he announced while undergoing treatment.
He went on to front the charttopping Audioslave, a ‘‘super group’’ featuring former members of Rage Against the Machine. He left ‘‘due to personality conflicts’’, and reformed Soundgarden in 2010.
He had played a sell-out show with the band only hours before his sudden and unexpected death on May 17.