Birthplace of grunge mourns ‘Seattle’s son’ Chris Cornell

Grief-stricken Chris Cornell fans left flowers at memorials across Seattle for the musician whose forceful, somber songs helped cement the city's place in rock history.

One of the locations where people gathered was the Sound Garden art sculpture at a Seattle park, for which Cornell's band Soundgarden was named.

"It's really sad that he could never find peace in his life," said Chad White, who came to the art display with his young son Ignatius to honor Cornell.

A bench near the centre of the sculpture was covered with flower arrangements, one of which included a note, "Say 'hello' to Heaven," a reference to a song written by Cornell for a musician friend who died decades ago.

KEXP, Seattle's popular independent radio station, paid tribute to Cornell all day. The station played non-stop songs from Soundgarden, Cornell's other bands and his solo work, as well as artists who covered Cornell's material and those who were influenced by him.

"Seattle's son, Chris Cornell, has passed away," DJ John Richards told listeners.

The city's Space Needle went dark at 9pm for an hour in tribute to Cornell.

Cornell was born and raised in the city and was part of a closeknit group of artists who formed the foundation of what would become the grunge scene that exploded in the early 1990s by combining the bombast of early 1970s heavy metal with the aggression and attitude of punk rock.

"He was a huge influence, one of the greatest singers ever to come out of Seattle, maybe the greatest single voice," said Charles R. Cross, a Seattle-based music journalist and author who knew Cornell personally.

"I don't even know what to say. I'm just shocked," he said. "We don't know the full story. The darkness I knew. But it's a devastating loss."

Authorities say Cornell hanged himself in a Detroit hotel room Wednesday following a Soundgarden concert. The band had reunited in 2010 after years on hiatus.

The group formed in Seattle in the 1980s at a time when the city was far off the beaten path of the musical mainstream and there were few venues for smaller artists to play original material.

Cornell was roommates with Andrew Wood, lead singer of the Mother Love Bone, who died of a heroin overdose in 1990. Two members of Mother Love Bone went on to form Pearl Jam and they joined Cornell on a tribute project to Wood — Temple of the Dog — which helped introduce Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder to the world.

Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Mudhoney were among the most high-profile bands to come out of Seattle and dominated the pop culture landscape of the early and mid-1990s.

"In some ways, they (Soundgarden) were the last band in Seattle to become famous in the grunge era but they were the ones who worked the hardest and the longest," Cross said. "There's no doubt that Soundgarden's music is very dark and melancholy at times. There are also parts of it that are very celebratory."

"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."

"There's something about Seattle, it's always been a hard rock town, too. I didn't realize growing up as kid that Seattle had much more of a hard rock focus and a guitar rock focus than other cities did," Cornell told the AP in 2011. "It was like a Detroit, only northwest kind of. There's no reason that I would think I know how to define it, but it's always been there."

The band, which had released hit songs and found success, marked a mainstream breakthrough with "Superunknown," its 1994 album that won them two Grammys, sold more than five million units in the U.S., and launched five hits, including "Black Hole Sun," one of the most popular alternative rock songs from the 1990s.

Cornell referenced death — and suicide — in 2007 interview with the AP when discussing his single, "No Such Thing." It appeared on his second solo album, "Carry On."

"The 'no such thing as nothing' line comes from the concepts that humans don't really have a flat line until we're dead. If we are not leading a happy productive life, we are leading probably an unhappy non-productive life. If a person doesn't have enough food, they actually are hungry. If they don't have enough money it's not that they have no money, they actually have something and it's called poverty. There's no just kind of flat lining coasting. You're either going in one direction or in another direction. All that came out of me trying to imagine why somebody would be, for example, a suicide bomber."

The music industry mourned his sudden death online. Elton John tweeted, "Shocked and saddened by the sudden death of @chriscornell. A great singer, songwriter and the loveliest man."

Chris Cornell