Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [255]
MATT CAMERON I came back to my house from a long walk with my dog and I saw Chris’s truck in my driveway, and I was like, Awesome, Chris came over, man. He hasn’t come over to my house in a long time. Maybe we’re gonna start working on some new music.
I get into the house and my wife informs me that Chris is waiting for me in the basement. I’m like, “That’s strange. Why isn’t he in the living room?” I remember he smelled like he had been up for days drinking and smoking cigarettes—it was just a total waft of alcohol. I was really happy to see him. I played him some music I’d been writing for Soundgarden. So he listened politely, and he just said point-blank, “I’m leaving the band.” I was kind of relieved, in a way. I just didn’t know how we were going to rebuild after that last show in Hawaii.
BEN SHEPHERD Chris Cornell shows up in my driveway. I had just played a gig with Devilhead, Brian and Kevin Wood’s band, and I got a bunch of the rocker guys to come over to my house. Chris had come to visit me before, but I thought, Oh, that’s strange. He has a bottle of MacNaughton’s with him, and he comes into the house, like, “Hey man, what’s going on?”
A friend of mine who was there said, “Today’s the day the Beatles broke up.” It was the anniversary. And we all drank to that. And then Chris goes, “Can I talk to you?” And I go down to the car with him, and that’s when he said, “I’m leaving.” I spat on the ground—just like when I got asked to join the band—and said, “All right.” But to me, it seemed like, What’s the point? We shouldn’t break up. We should all just take time and live for a while.
KIM THAYIL Chris decided that he wanted to move on with his career. I was relieved. Most of our breaks we did songwriting or preproduction. There was a lot of tension trying to maintain the schedule, the expectations, the success. We were in our mid-thirties. People are married, have girlfriends, other friends and family, just a lot of things to pay attention to. We needed to attend to those things.
SUSAN SILVER I knew Chris was extremely unhappy. That night after the Hawaii show, he was so flipped out he wouldn’t even talk about it. The basic sentiment was, “I never want to tour with those guys again.” There was no conversation about it after that. As he told me later, it was to protect me and my position with the band and not put me in a potentially uncomfortable or maybe even legally difficult situation. He got a totally separate lawyer and went about all of it with great focus. After he went to each of their houses, he came home and told me what he had done. And then got really drunk.
ERIC GARCIA (assistant for Chris Cornell/Susan Silver) With Chris, it got pretty dark. I think it started during Soundgarden, towards the end. He went into severe depression, drugs and alcohol. It was odd. I remember a conversation I had with Sean Kinney about it, and Sean was like, “What the fuck is Chris doing?” We were talking about the fact that Chris was going off the deep end at the wrong time. This is shit that you’re supposed to be doing when you’re like 25, you know? It was like if you knew somebody and then they ended up being exactly what they said that they never wanted to be.
CHRIS CORNELL It was mentally, physically, and spiritually a fucked-up point in my life. I was waking up and drinking a glass of vodka just to get a dial tone. My marriage wasn’t working at all, and rather than face that, I turned to constant inebriation and then drugs.
BEN SHEPHERD It’s hard to become a civilian again. I feel like I just disappeared. My honey had just left me, my band had just broken up, and then my band Hater broke up, so I had nothing but three separated ribs from a stunt that I’d pulled—diving into a moving van my friends were driving and landing on the stick shift. Then I got addicted to pain pills like an idiot.