Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil recalls the shocking death of frontman Chris Cornell in his new memoir A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond, out June 9th.
In an excerpt shared on Rolling Stone, Thayil describes the awful experience of learning of Cornell’s sudden death after a phone call from drummer Matt Cameron. Cornell died in May 2017 after taking his own life in a hotel room just after Soundgarden played a show in Detroit.
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In the book, Thayil writes, “‘We’d been on the road for an hour or two when Matt called me. ‘Kim, I’m reading a lot of weird shit on the internet. Somebody posted ‘RIP: Chris Cornell’ on my Facebook page.’ That didn’t seem possible to me. We’d just seen him a few hours ago. ‘Aw, it’s probably just bullshit,’ I told him. I didn’t want to believe anything could have happened to Chris.”
The guitarist continues, “We all got on our phones and computers to see if we could learn anything. It seemed more like a hoax or prank; these kinds of things happen all the time on the internet, where anyone can post anything on social media. Someone’s ‘joke’ goes horribly awry. This wasn’t a joke. [Band associate] Paul [Lorkowski] finally got confirmation that Chris had died by suicide in his hotel room, not long after the show. I roused [bassist] Ben [Shepherd] to break the news. We still couldn’t believe it, though, like Are you sure? People were panicking and hyperventilating.”
Thayil also ruminated on the changing tenor of Chris Cornell over the years, which made the suicide all the more upsetting and shocking.
He writes, “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.”
Thayil adds, “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.”
The surviving Soundgarden members have been working on finishing up a new album featuring the final recordings by Chris Cornell. Kim Thayil’s memoir is available to pre-order from Amazon.
