Chris Cornell management team member Clare O’Brien wrote a touching tribute to the late Soundgarden frontman for his birthday on her blog. Read excerpts below.
“Chris loved his family profoundly. Whatever he was doing, whatever else was in his mind, he was always a devoted husband and father, as he was always an appreciative friend. Despite his rock star cool, he had a natural gentility which seemed to come from a different age. It’s the little things, really. Stopping to help his wife who was making slow progress in heels down an elderly staircase at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and then opening the door to let me step into the wings ahead of him. Walking with him through the centre of the crowd at Hyde Park after Soundgarden’s wonderful ‘Superunknown20’ show to watch Black Sabbath from the VIP viewing platform, a child on his shoulders like a hundred other dads down on the grass below on that summer evening.
I remember him phoning to cheer me up when the response to his album ‘Scream’ wasn’t all we’d hoped. Carefully spelling out my 12 year old son’s Gaelic name in the cover of a children’s book he was autographing for him, anxious not to get it wrong; then ten years later, writing to congratulate that same son on getting his degree. Doing everything he could to help friends or fans through bereavement, or to send little presents or organise special backstage meetings for those who were sick or disabled. I remember his abundant kindness, his keen intelligence, his all-encompassing warmth for those he trusted and his disdain for those he did not. I remember how little he cared for status, or power, or riches, and how much he cared for talent and loyalty.
On Twitter, which for a while he embraced with all the delight of a kid with a new toy, he could be as surreal as Spike Milligan. He always saw the scope for comic confusion in language – once, he asked me about the Highland Clearances, and then confessed that he’d never been able to shake the mental connection with department store clearance sales.
He was a brilliant mimic, copying or creating characters at will. He once called me and adopted the persona of an extravagantly gay and terminally confused international telephone operator – if he hadn’t dropped the pretence I don’t think I’d ever have got the joke. During a discussion of British gangster films while we were driving to a show in New Jersey, he suddenly became Ben Kingsley’s foulmouthed cockney psychopath Don Logan from Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Sexy Beast’. The language wasn’t a big stretch – Chris swore like a sailor – but all the insane black humour of the character was there in a flash (‘Yes Grosvenor! Yes Roundtree! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!’) before he lapsed back into his usual conversational calm. He had many actor friends, but always insisted he’d never try it himself. Perhaps he should have done.”
She later wrote, “Chris knew all about darkness. It suffused his work and was part of the ocean he swam in as an artist. But darkness is not always destructive. It’s just the other side of light, and that nocturnal imaginative world was part of his nature. It would never have taken him away from the people and the music he loved. The alien darkness around him that night in Detroit was chemical. Drugs change brain chemistry, and I think that in the benzodiazepine delirium that engulfed him, Chris became not-Chris. And he was lost, to himself, his family, and to the world.
This isn’t the place to talk about the evils of prescription drug culture in America. And I don’t think Chris would want us to sit by the side of the road and cry. He’d want us to push on with our lives and make him proud. But I do know that the world is the poorer now that he can’t construct a future for himself, for his songs, for the wife and children he adored, and for all of us.”
