Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [253]
SCOTT MCCULLUM He’d fight alcoholism and drug abuse, deteriorate, get back on his feet. Finally, he had kidney failure in 2008. I knew that his life expectancy was greatly diminished and he could go at any time, but I was still shocked when that happened. Especially since we were going to get back together and put together arrangements for some music he’d been working out.
DANIEL HOUSE Ben died of complications of diabetes. I visited him several times at the hospital and spoke to the doctor several times. At the risk of saying things that will piss people off, the doctor told me that Ben had what was called alcohol-induced diabetes. As much as his death was officially due to complications with diabetes, I think the unofficial reason is years and years of heavy drinking and doing a lot of drugs.
CAM GARRETT He was just in his forties. About a year before he died, I was doing a light show for Love Battery, and this guy came up and set his drink by my projectors, and I kind of shooed him away. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was him. I didn’t even recognize him. He was so gaunt. He should have told me, “Hey, it’s me, Ben.” But he didn’t. He just kind of slunk away. I think he felt so terrible, and he was really miserable there at the end.
BEN SHEPHERD Was making Down on the Upside a difficult experience? Yeah. For me, the love of my life was leaving. I think we were working on tracking the day that she left me. I can’t remember what the song we were tracking is called now—it’s one of my tunes, too. The rest of the band seemed to be chugging along. But we were writing different; we didn’t jam as much as we used to. It turns out, thinking about it and hearing all the stories later on, there was a massive lack of communication going on.
SUSAN SILVER Chris and I weren’t talking to each other. Chris had definitely become a bad emotional wreck during those times. There was some sort of transition going on that unconsciously or not—I don’t know, because he didn’t say—maybe he wanted to do something different and hadn’t identified it yet. He was unhappy with how things were going on the record, and then he’d just come home and curl up on the floor in a ball and sob.
FRANK KOZIK Soundgarden, they were super-nice guys. I did a music video for them, for “Pretty Noose,” which was from their last album. You could tell that those guys were getting really burned out by the mechanism at that point. They definitely didn’t want to do the dog and pony show one more time for this fucking video.
So I was like, “Okay, if you were not a rock star and it was a Saturday afternoon, what would you be doing?” And the big guy with the beard was like, “I’d be shooting pool,” so he was shooting pool. And the other guy was like, “I’d be riding my motorcycle,” so he’d be riding a motorcycle.
I asked Cornell, “What would you be doing?” and he was like, “I’d be sitting here getting shitfaced.”
CHRIS CORNELL During the Down on the Upside period, I was drinking all the time. I was playing shows drunk. I would have a keg cup full of vodka with ice before I walked out onstage. And I wasn’t aware enough to understand that that wasn’t good. I wasn’t singing as well or playing as well. I had a couple bad episodes. It wasn’t anything new or unusual for someone in a rock band, but for me it was—the band was so important to me and on all the early tours with Soundgarden I never drank on the road.
STUART HALLERMAN By the time there’s whiskey on the band’s rider, during the last few years of the band, the whole scene turned into a different thing. Instead of having a few beers, they were kind of soused sometimes. Ben, his mean streak would show up. Chris actually got into some moodiness that I had never seen before. It just wasn’t as golden and pure as it used to be.
FRANK KOZIK The way it worked with the video was this weird dude, who was the