Lauded rocker Chris Cornell dead at age 52

DETROIT — Chris Cornell, one of the most lauded and respected contemporary lead singers in rock music with his bands Soundgarden and Audioslave, hanged himself in a Detroit hotel room, according to the city’s medical examiner. He was 52.

The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office said it completed the preliminary autopsy on Cornell, but that “a full autopsy report has not yet been completed.” A police spokesman told two Detroit newspapers that the singer was found with a band around his neck.

Cornell’s death stunned his family and his diehard fans, who Cornell just performed for hours earlier at a show in Detroit.

His family issued a statement through an attorney refuting “inferences that Chris knowingly and intentionally” killed himself, and said that without toxicology test results completed they don’t know what caused his death.

According to lawyer Kirk Pasich, Cornell had a prescription for the anti- anxiety drug Ativan, which he said has various side effects.

Cornell’s wife, Vicky Cornell, said in the statement that when she spoke to her husband after the Detroit show, he told her he may have taken “an extra Ativan or two” and was slurring his words.

Soundgarden’s current tour kicked off in late April and was planned to run through May 27. He was found dead at the MGM Grand Detroit hotel by a family friend who went to his room after Cornell’s wife asked him to check on the singer, police said.

Cornell was a leader of the grunge movement wi th Se a t t l e - b a s e d Soundgarden — with whom he gained critical and commercial acclaim — but also found success outside the band with other projects, including Audioslave, Temple of the Dog as well as solo albums. He was widely respected in the music industry: He reached success in every band lineup he was part of it, his voice was memorable and powerful, and he was a skilled songwriter, even collaborating on a number of film soundtracks, i ncluding t he James Bond theme song for 2006’s “Casino Royale” and “The Keeper” from the film “Machine Gun Preacher,” which earned Cornell a Golden Globe nomination.

“To create the intimacy of an acoustic performance there needed to be real stories. They need to be kind of real and they need to have a beginning, middle and an end,” Cornell said of songwriting in a 2015 interview with The Associated Press. “That’s always a challenge in three in a half or four minutes — to be able to do that, to be able to do it directly.”

Cornell, who grew up in Seattle, said he started using drugs at age 13 and was kicked out of school at 15.

“I went from being a daily drug user at 13 to having bad drug experiences and quitting drugs by the time I was 14 and t hen not having any friends until the time I was 16,” he told Rolling Stone in 1994. “There was about two years where I was more or less agoraphobic and didn’t deal with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, didn’t have any friends at all. All the friends that I had were still ( messed) up with drugs and were people that I didn’t really have anything i n common with.”