by Mark Yarm
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 label-slash-MTV guy, came in and was like the producer or something. The guy was a retard. He was asking Cornell, “Can you take your shirt off?” Cornell was like, “I don’t want to be the pretty guy with the shirt off. I want to be the asshole.” He just really wanted to go have a cheeseburger and not take his shirt off.
So the compromise was, okay, he’ll take his shirt off, but only in the context that he’s just brutally raped and murdered his girlfriend in the video. It got filmed, and then they cut that part. They refused to show the video in the U.S., except when MTV had the show where they’d air the weird videos once a month or whatever.
MATT CAMERON I think we were yearning to be a smaller band or just a band that was completely about the music. I know that’s completely cliché and hokey, but success can really tear the good times apart. I think it manifested itself in the touring that we did for Down on the Upside. Sometimes there was a disconnect between us and the audience. I got the impression that sometimes it felt like a chore for Ben or Kim to be up there. There was some infighting, and it wasn’t a good feeling overall.
SUSAN SILVER The bigger the band got, the bigger everybody’s tendencies got. Matt took on more and more of a leadership role; Chris became more and more withdrawn. Kim’s a peacemaker—he wanted everything to be good with everybody—but all the responsibilities of the business and touring seemed to overshadow his availability towards playing, so it seemed like he was having less fun.
Ben always had his wild-card moments, but at that point they tended to be more explosive, more dangerous sometimes. He was hostile towards the audience. “How dare you like me?” was the energy that he put back towards people. If they were being too overly appreciative, he’d find a way to spit on ’em.
SOOZY BRIDGES In February of ’97, Susan gifted us all—family and people close to her—tickets to come to Hawaii and see Soundgarden play the last show of their tour. At the show, Chris was amazing; his voice was really on top.
CHRIS CORNELL The bass rig wasn’t working in sound check, and I remember thinking, Oh, that’s not a good sign. It was a mystery why it stopped, but it was one of those things where they got it working now so it will be okay. What inevitably happens is when you start playing, whatever the mystery was will show up again.
BEN SHEPHERD My fuckin’ gear was dead. I’m not going to stand up there like some dumbass monkey and pantomime the songs. Let them finish the fuckin’ set. I remember smashing my bass on the stage and seeing everyone else there gasp, and my daughter, who was nine years old then, was standing there laughing. She was having the time of her life.
I go backstage and Kim goes back there with me. I’m like, “Kim, you’ve worked really hard. You got to go back out there and finish this show, man.” Susan tried to interrupt us at one point, and I slammed the door and said, “Get the fuck out of here! This is between us. This is band talk.”
SUSAN SILVER Everybody walked offstage and into the dressing room, and I’m following them in there. And as Ben got in the dressing room, he spun around and we were staring in each other’s face, in a dead eye lock, and he had his fist up in a punching position. We stared at each other for a good 30 seconds and I turned around and walked out.
BEN SHEPHERD I finally told Kim, “I’ll go with you back out there.” He walks back up to the stage, and I didn’t. I totally tricked him. Because he was so loyal to me—I’m his brother—unless I tricked him, he wouldn’t have gone back out there and finished.
SUSAN SILVER Kim was extremely upset and thrown off by the whole thing, and I went to Matt and Chris and said, “Two choices: Stop it now or you guys can go back up there and perform.” By that time, Ben was gone. Matt and Chris went back up there and performed a few acoustic songs; I don’t think Kim went back out.
KIM THAYIL It was nothing that unusual. We had live performances that would sometimes end in tantrums or breakdowns. Sometimes it was Ben and at times it had been Chris, at times it had been me. But the band did not break up then, though people characterized it as that. It just happened to be the last scheduled show of the tour. The band broke up a couple months later.
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 Chri
s, 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.
Three separated ribs and no band, no honey, no point of living in Seattle at all. I don’t know why I ever stuck around this shithole city. I should’ve gone adventuring around. But I didn’t. I did nothing, besides squander my life and my money.
Pretty quickly after that it got to be the lowest point in my life. I ended up OD’ing on liquid morphine by accident, because I didn’t know what it was. A guy I knew gave it to me. I go, “Oh, well,” and I slammed it. That night I think I was on 30 Valium, 14 scotches, 6 whiskeys, and 8 beers. Used to do that every night. Sometimes I was up to 50 Valium.
I got dropped off in the cab at home. My friends were in the cab and I could hear them laughing, driving away. I realized as I took the next step up my driveway, Oh, fuck, I’ve gone way too far. I was like, What is that? It was the ground and the trees and the hill. I realized I was laying on the ground. And the next thing I know, I woke up five days later. In my bed. Somehow I must’ve made it there.
That was two weeks after Soundgarden broke up. I think. Because ever since we broke up, I haven’t cared about dates. Ever since Chris broke the band up, I don’t even know what year it was, I don’t even know how many months it’s been, because I had no honey anymore, had no band anymore. I didn’t care.
So I’ve lost track of everything, I’m absolutely disorganized all the time. Time is irrelevant.
BARRETT MARTIN The Trees tried to record with Don Fleming again right after we got back from that Alice in Chains tour in ’93. This time, we were recording in Seattle because we all wanted to be there with our wives, girlfriends. Van had a couple kids. We were kinda burnt, and I don’t think the songs were as good as they could’ve been. And Lanegan just couldn’t sing. He tried, but it just wasn’t working, because he had other priorities.
DON FLEMING (producer; singer/guitarist for New York’s Gumball/Velvet Monkeys) They had really been on the road a lot; I think that that was the initial problem. We probably should’ve done what we did with Sweet Oblivion and just demo first, and then go back and say, “All right, let’s work on these, or write six more.” And instead, we went in and just tracked what was available. In my mind, drug use wasn’t the problem; if that was going on, I didn’t see it. The problem was not having a great set of songs.
MARK LANEGAN Everyone wanted to put out the record to capitalize on Sweet Oblivion. The timing was certainly right, but the music wasn’t, and I just thought, You know what? This is not good. And it wasn’t good because of me. I didn’t come to the party, I didn’t involve myself—I went through the motions, but I didn’t invest any of myself into it. I just didn’t have the strength. After all the touring, and because of some other personal problems, I didn’t have anything to give to it. I was empty. I tried, but the end result was: It sucked.
BARRETT MARTIN We had started working with Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein from Q Prime; they manage Metallica and all those bands. They were like, “You know, you guys need a little more time to rest and write more songs, and then let’s revisit this.” So we scrapped the Seattle sessions.
I think that if we had gotten Dust out within a year or two of Sweet Oblivion, it would’ve done better, but four years went by during which Lanegan was battling heroin problems. I went back to work, back to doing construction.
GARY LEE CONNER That was the worst time of my entire life, around ’94, ’95. We had to do something. We weren’t about to break up, because the band was our whole life financially. I rented the bottom part of a house in Ballard, and sat there for two damn years writing songs. And first it was like, Okay, Mark’s going to come over, and Van’s going to come over, and we’re going to work together. And unfortunately, the first few times we tried that, Mark was asleep on the bed in the other room, and every once in a while we’re like, “Hey, how does this sound?” “Okay.”
I wrote literally 200 songs over that period of time, and most of them were utter crap. Sometimes Van would come over, and Van was working on some stuff himself, but he was home with his family, so it was hard for him to work full-time on it.
Every night, I’d get a call at some point from Mark, and it’d be, “What are you doing?” He’d always say, “Bring me a tape.” So then I had to drive across town in the middle of the night. Usually when I’d get to his apartment, a hand would come out, he’d grunt, maybe say hello, and take the tape. I maybe went in his apartment one time that entire two years.
VAN CONNER I don’t want to blame anybody. I was probably carin’ more about drinkin’ then. Lee would have blowups if we’d be fucking around—maybe I’d be drunk or maybe Mark would disappear for a few days—but through it all, Lee just kept plugging away.
GARY LEE CONNER By the time we got to mixing Dust, it was ’96. Things had changed, musically. Nirvana was gone; Pearl Jam was big, but they weren’t like what they were. It was kind of flavor of the week then. What’s going to be next? At the time, it was bands like Prodigy—it was going to be electro, or whatever the hell they were.
Dust ended up selling 100,000 or 150,000 records. Which was good, but we’d always been used to the next record doing better than the last one. We got Lollapalooza, and we were like, Whoa! At that time, that was a big deal. But things had changed, plus Mark was not doing very well. It’s not real fun being on tour with him, because he’s looking for drugs all the time. This is an example of what it was doing to the band: Right before Lollapalooza, we were playing some shows by ourself …
BARRETT MARTIN We were in Cleveland, and the irony was, we played one of the best shows of our careers. We played for like two hours at least, way beyond what was expected, and we were taking requests. Lanegan was in a really good mood. We never took requests, you know? And at one point he was doing question and answer; he was on a bar stool just talking to a thousand people.
Backstage, Van and Lee started arguing about something ridiculous, and I basically said, “Oh, come on, you guys, knock it off. That was a great show.” And I said something like, “Lee, stop whining.”
And every now and then Lee would spaz out and do something. And he threw a beer bottle—a full beer bottle—really flung it at me, and it almost hit me in the head. Except I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and I ducked. It grazed the back of my head and stuck in the Sheetrock. That’s how hard he threw it. If it would’ve hit me in the head, it would’ve done some damage.
GARY LEE CONNER Mark kept wanting to borrow money from me. So I would give him a couple hundred bucks or something, and Van and Barrett were like, “Maybe you shouldn’t give him money for drugs.” At that point, it wasn’t just heroin, it was crack and shit like that. And he’s going to ghettos and telling us about almost getting killed in a knife fight.
I couldn’t tell Mark no, really. He was just going to get mad and stomp off, and it’s not real fun to have him mad at you. I got really upset, and I threw a bottle at the wall. Man, I almost hit Barrett in the head. I just cr
inge when I think what could’ve happened.
VAN CONNER We said something to Lee that made him mad—I don’t know what it was. He threw the bottle at Barrett’s head, and then he picked up another bottle to throw it, so we had to jump on him to stop him, and he fought his way over to the kitchen area of the dressing room.
BARRETT MARTIN Van leaped out of his chair and tackled Lee. And I jumped up, too, but Van and Lee were already on the floor, or starting to fall down. I was somehow in the middle of it, or like right next to them, and the melee knocked this refrigerator over. And the refrigerator fell on me. I probably should’ve just let them go at it and stayed out of the way! The refrigerator did not hurt me—I didn’t break any bones. I just kinda pushed it off me. And then it turns into this urban myth that Barrett was almost crushed under a refrigerator.
VAN CONNER Everybody was tired of dealin’ with drug issues and personality problems. We fought like we always did, but we would fight about things that weren’t real. I remember hearing the answering machine message say something and going psycho-ballistic, and the next day listening to the same message and it said something different. Because I was fucked up, I heard it how my mind interpreted it. Just shit like that, where you get crazy paranoid. A lot of ego, too. And low self-esteem. Ego and low self-esteem at the same time.
BARRETT MARTIN Van and I and Lee agreed that we couldn’t keep touring like this. We’re doing the shortest set we can legally get away with. So I went and saw Peter Mensch in New York and said, “Look, man, if we keep playing shows like this, sooner or later something very bad is gonna happen. Mark’s gonna overdose or worse, and that is the end of the Screaming Trees. We really should not even be on the road at this point.” And he agreed. So we stopped.