In a brand new interview with Meltdown Of Detroit’s WRIF radio station, Fozzy frontman and WWE wrestler Chris Jericho was asked about the recent passings of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell. He responded: “I didn’t really have much of a connection to Chester; I never met him and I wasn’t a Linkin Park fan. No reason other than it just wasn’t my vibe. [I’m] always sad to hear [about] one of the brothers kind of going out that way. But I will say that Cornell [was] one of my favorite singers of all time. I had the pleasure of meeting him. Actually, I saw him, I think, two days before he passed away at a festival in Minnesota somewhere.”
He continued: “I will say this: it really makes me made when I read people going, ‘The way that he took himself out was disgusting,’ and this, that and other thing. It’s, like, I’ve known two people now who have had suicides that had this immense depression. And I really find that that’s a disease, just like cancer or a heart attack would be. And when you’re saying to somebody, ‘Oh, yeah, he killed himself,’ I think you should use it in the same mindset and vibe as if you say he died of cancer. I don’t think it’s something you can really help doing… [People say] ‘Chester had six kids. How can he do this? What a coward!’ I think he had about as much choice as you or I would have if we dropped dead of a heart attack right now. So that’s the way I feel about it.”
Jericho added: “I never met Chester, I’m not a Linkin Park fan — no disrespect — but anytime somebody is in this business and that happens to, I feel for them, because I’ll tell you this: to be in show business and to be always… to have to be in front of a crowd and always have to be ‘on,’ so to speak, when you go downstairs to have breakfast or have a coffee, it’s not easy. And I can see a lot of people kind of having issues with that. Maybe they’re private people, maybe… I don’t know… We don’t know what happened in his mind. But I just wanna say that anybody out there, if you’re feeling that, please reach out. And anybody who’s judging, don’t, because I really find that depression is a true disease — a mental disease — that’s just as serious as a physical disease can be.”
