It's Just The End of the World: Chris Cornell and Me

I've been trying for a while to write a longer piece about Chris Cornell... but everything I tried to write sounded like a high school journal entry. 

And then I decided that was something to embrace. That's where my musical life truly began. That's where his music began for me. Removing the high school feeling from anything I wrote would be like removing the submerged portion of the iceberg, i.e. most of the iceberg. 

 
Everyone who knows me knows I've been blah blah Pearl Jam blah blah Soundgarden for pretty much ever. Their music has been a huge part of my life for 26 years. But it wasn't just an 'oh I really dig their music' kind of fandom; it was classic teenage capital O obsession that included but was not limited to papering my closet doors with posters, writing their names on my shoes, stealing billboards and crying actual (private) tears just because I loved them so very much. It was the first time where music - understanding it, absorbing it, enjoying it, learning more about it, listening to it - took over my whole life.

It was almost like I joined a quest the moment I first heard 'Alive' and 'Jesus Christ Pose'. It was suddenly VERY important that I find out everything there was to know about these bands: what they looked like, how they spoke, what they thought about pretty much anything, what bands THEY liked, what bands they'd been in before, what those bands sounded like, what those bands looked like... on and on. My friends and I pored over lyrics, wrote out lyrics, studied liner notes, stood in the local newsagent and scoured imported music magazines for interviews and articles and photos and posters; we recorded their music videos, pored over TV appearances and studiedt heir every word and mannerism like our own Zapruder films. And constantly, in every free moment, we listened to the music. 

It was a collective obsession. It wasn't just me on my own, it was all of my friends. We all had varying levels of obsession, but we just somehow formed this unspoken Voltron together to find new information, sharing our finds with each other and celebrating this ongoing acquisition of knowledge. From Pearl Jam and Soundgarden we were led to Temple of the Dog, to the Singles soundtrack, to Mother Love Bone, to Green River, to Mudhoney, Alice in Chains, Nirvana. We were living in a small country town in Australia in the pre-internet 90's... none of this information was at our ready disposal. It was a lot of leg work! Every new mention of a band created an opportunity to uncover more of these exciting secrets that this music promised to reveal. Every new band meant a trip to Geelong or Melbourne to find used tapes or new tapes; we had no hope of finding back-catalog gems in our one-record-store town. We saw Singles together; bought Doc Martens together; raided Army Disposals stores for army greens, nicked our Dad's flannel shirts, and worried our mothers that we were lesbians with our newfound love of men's clothing (always a plus). 

As my obsession grew I made a pretty good show of making it seem like the music was the most important thing to me. Oh how I sneered when I heard other girls talk about how 'cute' Eddie Vedder was, or how handsome Chris Cornell was. Pshaw. I was above such things. For me the 90's was about enjoying the music for the music and not for its image .... 

Sure, Sharon. Sure.

The truth was that at 16 years of age, Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder were the most mesmerizing men I had ever seen. I mean, god bless him, Chris Cornell spent almost the entirety of the 90's without a shirt. I know teenage me AND adult me are thankful for that. Like the music was fucking great and it got me through a lot of stuff but all of the hours of just straight up looking at him and feeling a certain way is worth a LOT. 

Chris Cornell IS the Magic Man foretold by the great prophets known as "Heart". 

Which brings me to a side note. For 16 year old me, this music was a revelation of non-threatening masculinity. It was a big turning point for small-town me. I'd spent my early high school years obsessed with glam metal bands like Poison and Motley Crue, whose aggressively sexual lyrics were somewhat softened by the fact that they feminized their *appearance* so as to be less threatening. But the music was still unquestionably *for* men, and designed to attract women as an added bonus. It wasn't until I started listening to Soundgarden and Pearl Jam that I realized how different it was. I didn't have to think about being a girl, or sex, or anything when I listened to this music. The lyrics weren't always about anything that you could directly figure out. Nothing sexual anyway. They weren't overtly trying to attract women in the way that Poison or any of those other bands I liked had been; they were just kind of there, in a band, playing and there wasn't a sex-related gimmick. There was a lot of freedom in that. And relief. Because being a teen is a lot, and it's nice to have something in your life that doesn't point back to sex or your weird body or your dumb hormones for a goddamn change.

Another beautiful thing about this music - not just Soundgarden, not just Pearl Jam, but their whole spiderweb of interconnected music - is that it didn't pull me away from people. I mean, sure I still moped in my room and wrote terrible poetry and deathstared the world in general, BUT. From that first day in 1991, all of this music was a shared experience. 90% of the music that I came to love was discovered with the help of my friends, or given to me by someone. It was not solitary by any means. It was definitely quest-like...but also kind of like being in the Scooby Gang where each band was a new mystery to be solved. And they would've gotten away with it too, etc.  

We built a life raft out of this music. Hell...it was better than a life raft. It was sturdy, bulletproof, like a D-Day landing craft. Our shared enthusiasm created a barrier against the life-shit that was raining down upon us. And for me personally, it speaks a lot of that music and those friendships that while a lot of my teenage memories are of difficult times, they are as much of shared moments with my friends and this music. Even though individually we might have not quite fit in at school, we fit in with each other and collectively made our own weirdness cool to each other. We stopped noticing where we fit in with everybody else; it didn't really matter.

But back to Chris Cornell, and my high school journal thoughts about him:

During the 90's, Chris was the (beautiful, shirtless) axis at the center. His friendship with Andy and his tendril-like connections to all of the bands that I loved gave him a seniority of sorts, and made him feel more knowledgeable somehow. The older brother, in a way.  When Eddie or Kurt or Layne or Weiland were careening under the weight of their fame and/or clearly struggling, Chris was steadfast. He was my north star, a constant light in the distance. I know he struggled privately with addictions of his own. But his outward calm during that time meant something to me, and it gave me a kind of hope. Soundgarden, while they were together originally, were solid; perfectly, heroically unbothered, nonchalantly bulldozing through the hype of those years and I fucking loved them for it.

Chris Cornell's voice is a string that vibrates all the way back to my 16th year. Every song is a memory. In my grief, I am putting my energy into trying not to feel selfishly bereft over what I am now without, and instead trying to be thankful for all that he left behind.   

To finish up, I leave you with a memory:

October 1999. I visited Sacramento for the first time to meet Clay (my now-husband) in person after almost 4 years of emails and newgroups. During my stay, we took a road-trip from Sacramento to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. We had quite a few CD's in the Acura's CD changer, including Nine Inch Nails The Fragile, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas soundtrack, Motley Crue's Too Fast For Love; but the one I remember most was a brand new album that had just released in September that year: Chris Cornell's Euphoria Morning. To this day the album evokes California and Nevada landscapes blurring past my eyes in a haze of orchards, coastlines, cities and deserts...of looking over at Clay every now and then and just smiling because he was real... of laughter and a fun adventure...of the promise of an endless highway stretching to the horizon. 

Thank you Chris. For everything.