There’s no such thing as getting over loss. You grieve, endure and adapt; the last two easier said than done. Everyone goes through the grieving process in their own way. When Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone died from a heroin overdose in 1990, his friend and one-time roommate Chris Cornell, one of the greatest writers and singers in rock’n’roll history, responded by writing about it and singing with enough soul and volume, the dead could hear. Specifically Wood, as part of “Say Hello 2 Heaven” is directly addressed to him. Soundgarden had released Louder Than Love six month’s before, which turned out to be a perfect description for what Cornell accomplished.
He wrote “Say Hello 2 Heaven” and “Reach Down” about Wood. Subsequently, Cornell got his Soundgarden bandmate Matt Cameron, bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard, both formerly of Mother Love Bone, and their pal, guitarist Mike McCready to record these two songs and create more new music. McCready could play wah-wah drenched Fender Strat solos that were reminiscent of his heroes Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He even started to wear “Plateau” hats as a tribute to the then-recently deceased Vaughan.
Ament, Gossard, and McCready brought in a guy named Eddie Vedder, who at the time was surfing and working as a security guard in San Diego, to perform on a few of these tracks, while also having him sing in a new, entirely separate project of theirs. But before that could even get off the ground, they banded together to call themselves Temple of the Dog, after a line in the Mother Love Bone song “Man of Golden Words.” The self-titled album, released in the spring of 1991, was a modern classic. The problem was, barely anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest had heard it.
Cut to Spring 1992: thanks to Nirvana’s Nevermind, Seattle is the nexus of the universe, a musical and cultural phenomenon. Young men like myself grow their hair long and wear goatees, years before Lin-Manuel Miranda. Alice in Chains and Soundgarden reinvent heavy metal, as the latter’s aggressive yet accessible Badmotorfinger becomes their commercial breakthrough, while Ament and Gossard’s new band Pearl Jam’s debut Ten refuses to leave CD players in dorms across America for most of the ‘90s.
Suddenly, MTV realizes they’ve been sitting on “Hunger Strike” for the last year, a video featuring members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden rocking out and screaming in a corn field, among other locations. This was most people’s introduction to Temple of the Dog. In the proceeding two and a half decades that have whisked by, they played the occasional charity concert, but never toured. Until now.
Cheap Trick blasted from the PA, with Robin Zander reassuring everyone searching for their seats that “Everything’ll work out if you let it.” The existence of Temple of the Dog and Pearl Jam is a testament to that notion, a perfect example of enduring and adapting. It was from an obscure film, 1980’s Roadie by Alan Rudolph, who’d been a protégé of Robert Altman. Meat Loaf, Alice Cooper, Blondie, Roy Orbison, and Art Carney were part of the cast. At seven years old, I actually saw this in the theater, around the same time I went to see Caddyshack. The presence of Cooper and Blondie make it likely that Wood, Cornell, and the rest of the Seattle crew, who were teenagers back then, also checked it out.
Wood would’ve turned fifty this year. He left behind many great songs, one of which, “Man of Golden Words,” was played as a piano instrumental by a spot lit man whom I didn’t recognize, as the band made their way to the blackened stage. Stone Gossard’s psychedelic “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” rainy waltz of a guitar riff cut through the darkness. “Say Hello 2 Heaven” started the show, instantly transporting me back to Boston in 1992, where I was an idealistic young man who had transferred to Emerson College. It was an odd dichotomy, since these songs evoke one of the worst moments in Cornell’s life, while reminding me of some of my best.
Along with the affecting opener, “Wooden Jesus,” “Call Me a Dog,” and “Your Saviour” sounded incredible. The first progressively got more heavy as it went on, the second is one of Cornell’s classic ballads that most acts would’ve saved for the encore, and the last a funky condemnation on those who proclaim to have all the answers. Good timing, being that Election Day was just mere hours from now. Cornell managed to retain the sound of the muffled fade-out, where it’s like he’s shouting from the top of a distant, hazy mountain.
Seeing a twentysomething couple wearing purple tie-dye Nirvana shirts made me nostalgic for Boston’s Newbury Comics, practically a second home for music/film/literature/pop culture fanatic college students in the ‘90s. Each visit, you’d see brand new cool shirts displayed all over the store. The Seattle bands, Black Crowes, Smashing Pumpkins, Anthrax, Faith No More, Radiohead, Jane’s Addiction, Living Colour, The Verve, Guns N’ Roses, Beastie Boys, Skid Row, Pantera, Stone Temple Pilots, etc, were our generation and our music. Corny as it probably sounds, we wore their shirts with a sense of pride, like Yankee fans strutting around in Jeter pinstriped jerseys. Although perhaps not quite as obnoxious.
The idealism of youth gradually erodes as time seasons you. But how does a young person, especially a woman, remain idealistic in a century that’s often seemed like a cesspool? We were on the verge of deciding a presidential election between someone who for years had defended her husband of sexual assault accusations by insulting the accusers, and one who actually boasted about sexual assault on tape. The couple in tie-dye were going to have a lot to contend with. We all would.
In the meantime, we were busy watching TOTD cover Mother Love Bone’s “Stardog Champion” and “Stargazer.” Without any disrespect to Wood, these new renditions were superior to the originals. The addition of Cornell, Cameron and McCready helped make them the arena rock spectacles they were destined to be. “Stargazer” in particular was a revelation, the acoustic/electric guitar combination having a similar psych/folk/hard rock dynamic as Led Zeppelin.
“Seasons” could also be described that way. It’s a Cornell song from the Singles soundtrack, originally just his voice and acoustic guitar. The moment you first heard “Seasons” in the summer of ’92, it already felt retrospective, like it had been around for decades. With the passage of almost a quarter-century, the chorus, “As seasons roll on by,” and the line, “My mirror shows another face,” take on a whole new meaning. The song retained its ghostly winter desolation, even as the band provided some raga stomp to make it more intense than usual.
They then covered “Jump Into the Fire” by the late Harry Nilsson, best known for its perfect placement in the Goodfellas “helicopter” scene where Ray Liotta drives around Long Island in a state of cocaine-fueled paranoia. Nilsson raises his voice with each repeated verse, so by the end he’s screaming like a lunatic, “WE CAN MAKE EACH OTHER HAPPY! WE CAN MAKE EACH OTHER HAAAAAAAAAAAAPY!!,” stretching out the last word for what seems like eternity. Not surprisingly, Cornell ably managed Nilsson’s belligerent delirium, adding his trademark soulful fury.
The psychedelic blues of “Four Walled World” was next, Gossard’s “The End”-South Asian riff leading off another one of Cornell’s stellar “isolated man” songs. McCready contributed avant-garde noises on par with another one of his heroes, Ace Frehley, for the verses, and Gossard played fiery slide guitar as Cornell testified, “And I won’t see nothing tonight/But the tears in her eyes and my four walled world!!”
Cornell introduced their cover of Free’s “I’m a Mover” by simply saying, “If you like music, you like this band.” Seeing Chris Cornell singing Paul Rodgers, and Free, the most underrated building block of hard rock/heavy metal get their due, was one of the many highlights of this extraordinary evening. On “Pushin Forward Back,” McCready replicated that memorable Stevie Ray homage in the bridge, and for “Hunger Strike,” the most well-known of the TOTD songs, we all filled in for Eddie Vedder to sing his verse.
David Bowie’s “Quicksand” was an intriguing cover, the lyrics, “I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought/And I ain’t got the power anymore” actually sounding like Cornell could’ve written them. MLB’s “Heartshine” and “Holy Roller” were formidable groove machines, with some Motown influence on the background vocal harmonies. In the middle of the original “Holy Roller,” Wood sounds like he’s speaking from a remote location, and that part was broadcast through the speakers. Albeit not in the manner initially intended, Wood finally had his dream come true of performing at Madison Square Garden.
The late Layne Staley, another lost friend to addiction, was acknowledged with a devastating “River of Deceit” from Staley and McCready’s mid-‘90s group Mad Season. The band turned around to those of us sitting behind the stage, and Cornell talked to our section, dedicating the song to everyone in that area. It was a classy, magnanimous gesture. Same with when Cornell gave a visibly sad McCready a brotherly shoulder rub as he started the Ry Cooder/Dickey Betts country pickin’ licks. Mad Season is haunted by death; both Staley and bassist John Baker Saunders died in, respectively, 2002 and 1999 from heroin. It’s understandable why that could be tough for McCready to get through.
What made “River of Deceit” such a powerful statement is Staley’s clear understanding of his dire situation. It starts, “My pain… is self-chosen” and ends, “The only direction we flow is down.” A few years before, with Alice in Chains, he sang the Wood-inspired “Would?” The tragic example of others and the self-aware wisdom from his own art made his passing all the more senseless and depressing. TOTD did the song and his memory justice with a cathartic performance that felt like a microcosm of the entire evening.
The pre-encore portion of the show concluded with “Reach Down.” They conducted the kind of jam that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the Fillmore East circa 1970. McCready’s extended guitar solo conjured up those phantasmagoric, multi-colored liquid loops the Joshua Light Show would project behind the bands at that storied venue. As he was shredding, McCready would occasionally stop in his tracks, then suddenly run as if he just noticed ghosts were chasing him. Given the reflective, backward-looking nature of the concert, metaphorically speaking, maybe they were.
At one point earlier in the show, Cornell joked about a guy in front attempting to air drum, good-naturedly imitating his futile efforts. That fan had the right idea. “Reach Down” was a complete ass kicker, a big reason being Matt Cameron (Pearl Jam’s drummer since ’98), who along with the rest of the band supplied steady intensity, so McCready could annihilate everyone. This was rock’n’roll at its best, reaching you on a physical and spiritual level. The last lines were the Gospel-infused/Mavis Staplesish, “I gotta reach down and pick the crowd up, carry back in my hand to the promised land.” Mission accomplished.
After a short break, the encore began with only Cornell on stage with acoustic guitar, doing “Man of Golden Words,” throwing in some lyrics from Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” The others joined him for the ballad “Times of Trouble,” with its haunting guitar melody that had also been used for Pearl Jam’s “Footsteps.” The song ends with the admonition, “If somebody loved you and left you for dead/You got to hold on to your time ‘till you break through these times of trouble.” Like Springsteen, Petty, Lynott, Mellencamp, Townshend, Vedder, and all the best bluesmen, Cornell knows his audience because he is his audience.
Speaking of which, Temple channeled their inner-fan with Led Zeppelin’s “Achilles Last Stand.” Cameron brilliantly duplicated John Bonham’s jackhammer drum fills and Ament made playing the galloping “DUN-DA-DA-DUN-DA-DA-DUN” bass of John Paul Jones look easy (It isn’t). Cornell is one of the few singers who could credibly take on Zeppelin, and he managed to match Robert Plant’s eerie wordless vocals. The lyrics, “With all the fun to have, to live the dreams we always had/Oh, the songs to sing, when we at last return again,” seemed appropriate for this long-awaited reunion.
On the surface, The Cure’s “Fascination Street” might seem like a surprise cover. But Cornell and Robert Smith, odd as it may sound, both essentially sing the blues, specializing in songs of alienation. McCready and Gossard captured all the melodic guitar nuances, including Smith’s memorable sparkly refrain throughout the song. The performance was a reminder that the Seattle bands were equally influenced by ‘80s alternative acts as much as punk and classic rock.
When an air-raid siren wailed throughout the arena, I thought it was Cornell. No, just the beginning of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs/Luke’s Wall.” You forget how much of a monster groove this song has. The guitarists copied Tony Iommi’s arpeggios on the “Luke’s Wall” outro perfectly. That section of the song has always sounded mournful, yet defiant. On this pre-election evening, even more so.
After another brief rest, Cornell mentioned that they would play some Joy Division and Slayer. He was kidding, although Temple were such an exceptional band, it could’ve easily happened. They ended up doing the Temple of the Dog closer “All Night Thing.” No one was playing keyboards, although you could hear the funereal organ from the original. Like David Bowie’s “Win,” the ballad was simultaneously sexy and melancholy, a quiet end to a loud night.
What made this concert so special is that TOTD had been a one-time thing, so these songs are rarely played live. Because of this, there’s still a sense of discovery about them, unlike other material from that time. “Missing,” an unreleased tune written when Temple first formed, served as one of the other encores. It suited the night’s theme of absence: Bowie, Bonham, Nilsson, Kossoff & Fraser (Free), Staley & Baker Saunders (Mad Season), and of course, the reason this evening existed in the first place, Andrew Wood (Coincidentally, Leonard Cohen died the day of the show, but it wasn’t announced until later in the week).
Like many music fanatics of my generation, Wood grew up worshiping Kiss. The night before he was to meet Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Wood overdosed on heroin, fell into a coma, and died three days later, only 24 years old. He was a child of the ‘70s with dreams of arenas, stadiums, and total world domination. Instead, his fantasy became the reality of his friends.
In his honor, as part of the long-term process of enduring and adapting, Temple of the Dog destroyed Madison Square Garden. It was a fitting way to be remembered.
Matt Leinwohl