Black Days

Pearls and Swine, bereft of me.

Long and weary, my road has been.

-I am the Highway, Audioslave

It has been a bad stretch for my music people.  It started with David Bowie, stretched through Leonard Cohen, and now has hit really close to my generation.  Chris Cornell, age 52, lead singer of Soundgarden, Audioslave, and main collaborator in Temple of the Dog, is gone.   He's not the first to go.  Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone was gone before the Seattle sound even growled its way out of the northwest.  Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, the reluctant voice of Generation X, could not manage the pain of his body and the wild success of stardom for very long.  Lane Staley, Alice in Chains, went out in 2002, but by that point it wasn't a surprise.  Neither was Scott Weiland, Stone Temple Pilots, even though we maybe thought Scott had grown out of it.

Cornell is a freaking shock though.  Cornell and Staley are the two of that group that actually had technically impressive, transcendent voices.  Cornell had a range that would shame an opera singer, he could do smooth, he could do growl, he could do a controlled primal scream.  He also seemed, from the outside at least, to have his stuff together in a way that Weiland, Staley and Cobain certainly did not.  He was a thoughtful guy, and a hard working musician.

If I'm honest, as I have grown up into middle age, Soundgarden is the band that has aged the best out of all the Seattle explosion.  They were a little more metal and less punk than Nirvana, they were a little less metal than Alice in Chains and a bit too hard edged for the Pearl Jam crowd, but Badmotorfinger and Superunknown get on my list of albums I do not ever want to live without.  Cornell has done some absolutely stupendous solo work too, his cover of Michael Jackson's Billy Jean is absolutely perfect, as is his cover of Prince/Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares to You. 

Cornell's work with the "supergroup" Audioslave is sometimes scoffed at because it was just so good, and the parties involved were so beloved for their other bands, that it almost immediately got over-hyped and people constantly whined and complained about how different it was from Soundgarden or Rage Against the Machine.  Cornell sunk some really amazing lyrics into those catchy tunes.

I honestly thought he was going to be one of those singular musicians, like Bowie, Cohen and Dylan, who managed to actually grow up and keep making good music, reinventing as needed, innovating, reaching back for the best and slamming us with the new. He had the tools, he had the voice, as it turns out he just didn't have the time.

I don't know what it was that took Chris away, I assume we'll find out in due time.  It doesn't much matter to me what it was, his voice is still, and our world has less music in it.

Stay healthy Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, you're about all we have left.