Chris Cornell, Soundgarden and Audioslave singer, dead at age 52

Jimmy Page, Elton John, Nile Rodgers among friends, fans paying tribute online

Chris Cornell, one of the most lauded and respected contemporary lead singers in rock music with his bands Soundgarden and Audioslave, killed himself Wednesday by hanging in a Detroit hotel room, according to the city’s medical examiner. He was 52.

The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office said Thursday it completed the preliminary autopsy on Cornell, but that “a full autopsy report has not yet been completed.”

“There is no additional information at this time,” the Wayne County office added.

His death Wednesday night stunned his family and his die-hard fans, who Cornell just performed for hours earlier at a show in Detroit. Soundgarden’s current tour kicked off in late April and was planned to run through May 27.

Widely respected, Grammy winner

 

Cornell was a leader of the grunge movement with Seattle-based Soundgarden — with whom he gained critical and commercial acclaim — but also found success outside the band with other projects, including Audioslave, Temple of the Dog as well as solo albums. He was widely respected in the music industry: He reached success in every band lineup he was part of it, his voice was memorable and powerful, and he was a skilled songwriter, even collaborating on a number of film soundtracks, including the James Bond theme song for 2006’s Casino Royale and The Keeper from the film Machine Gun Preacher, which earned Cornell a Golden Globe nomination.

“To create the intimacy of an acoustic performance there needed to be real stories. They need to be kind of real and they need to have a beginning, middle and an end. That’s always a challenge in three in a half or four minutes — to be able to do that, to be able to do it directly,” Cornell said of songwriting in a 2015 interview with The Associated Press.

Cornell, who grew up in Seattle, said he was kicked out of school at age 15 and he started using drugs at 13.

“I went from being a daily drug user at 13 to having bad drug experiences and quitting drugs by the time I was 14 and then not having any friends until the time I was 16,” he told Rolling Stone in 1994.

“There was about two years where I was more or less agoraphobic and didn’t deal with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, didn’t have any friends at all. All the friends that I had were still [messed] up with drugs and were people that I didn’t really have anything in common with.”

But at 16 he grew serious about music, learning to play the drums while also working as a busboy and dishwasher.

“That was the toughest time in my life,” he told Rolling Stone.

He eventually became a Grammy winner with Soundgarden, formed in 1984 and coming out of the rapidly growing Seattle music scene, which included Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains.

“There’s something about Seattle, it’s always been a hard rock town, too. I didn’t realize growing up as kid that Seattle had much more of a hard rock focus and a guitar rock focus than other cities did,” Cornell told the AP in 2011.

“It was like a Detroit, only northwest kind of. There’s no reason that I would think I know how to define it, but it’s always been there.”

The band, who had released hit songs and found success, marked a mainstream breakthrough with Superunknown, its 1994 album that launched five singles, won them two Grammys and sold more than five million units in the U.S.

The group, formed with guitarist Kim Thayil and bassist Hiro Yamamoto, broke up in 1997.

In 2001, Cornell joined Audioslave, a supergroup that included former Rage Against the Machine members Tom Morello, Brad Wilk and Tim Commerford. The band released three albums in six years and also performed at a concert billed as Cuba’s first outdoor rock concert by an American band, though some Cuban artists have disputed that claim.