SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Remembering Seattle rock legend Chris Cornell
May 18, 2018, 4:06 PM | Updated: May 21, 2018, 2:27 pm
Chris Cornell died one year ago on May 18, 2017. I never met him, but he was always one degree of separation away from the crowd I ran in back in the day. I use to play flag football with his brother on Saturdays. Somehow, like many of you, I felt that we were kindred spirits through his music.
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If you’re a music fan, his passing was just another body blow of one great artist after the next. It was a nightmare sequence. In rapid succession we lost Prince, Chris Cornell, and Tom Petty. All very different, musically, but each had that special thing that made them timeless.
Chris Cornell had the greatest rock voice since Robert Plant, hands down. Prince combined the best of funk, R&B, rock, and pop to conjure his own slinky, sexy music. And Petty’s tunes sounded like they just materialized from the super ego of Americana. Crank them up with the window down while your friend puts her bare feet up on the dashboard and sings along.
If you came of age in my generation, songs by these artists will conjure very specific memories.
Asking my little league teammate Doug at baseball practice if he’d heard “Darling Nikki” yet from Prince’s Purple Rain. It was the most scandalous song I’d ever heard.
Looking at myself in the mirror in the early ’90s Seattle. I’d just grown my hair out long and was trying to figure out how to do the shorts over long johns look like Chris Cornell. I couldn’t pull it off.
Attaching my feelings of crushing on a pretty girl I knew to the song “American Girl.” It seemed like Petty understood what it was like to long for someone just out of your league.
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I have such vivid memories of driving through Bothell and Kirkland and Juanita listening to Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” and then “Black Hole Sun” as loud as my crappy speakers could go. It was no small feat for me then to scrape together the $15 needed to buy a new CD. I would marvel at Chris Cornell’s range. How does he hit those notes? How is his voice even possible?
How is this even possible that it’s been a year?
At some point today, crank up some Badmotorfinger and be glad you lived in the same town as one of the greatest singers in Rock & Roll history.
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