{"id":701932,"date":"2026-05-29T16:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/701932\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T16:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:42:09","slug":"soundgardens-kim-thayil-recalls-unexpected-death-of-chris-cornel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/701932\/","title":{"rendered":"Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil Recalls “Unexpected” Death of Chris Cornel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Soundgarden<\/a> guitarist Kim Thayil<\/a> recalls the shocking death of frontman Chris Cornell<\/a> in his new memoir<\/a> A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond, out June 9th.<\/p>\n

In an excerpt shared on Rolling Stone<\/a>, Thayil describes the awful experience of learning of Cornell\u2019s sudden death after a phone call from drummer Matt Cameron. Cornell died in May 2017<\/a> after taking his own life in a hotel room just after Soundgarden played a show in Detroit.<\/p>\n

Get Soundgarden Albums on Vinyl<\/a><\/p>\n

In the book, Thayil writes, \u201c\u2018We\u2019d been on the road for an hour or two when Matt called me. \u2018Kim, I\u2019m reading a lot of weird shit on the internet. Somebody posted \u2018RIP: Chris Cornell\u2019 on my Facebook page.\u2019 That didn\u2019t seem possible to me. We\u2019d just seen him a few hours ago. \u2018Aw, it\u2019s probably just bullshit,\u2019 I told him. I didn\u2019t want to believe anything could have happened to Chris.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related Video<\/p>\n

The guitarist continues, \u201cWe all got on our phones and computers to see if we could learn anything. It seemed more like a hoax or prank; these kinds of things happen all the time on the internet, where anyone can post anything on social media. Someone\u2019s \u2018joke\u2019 goes horribly awry. This wasn\u2019t a joke. [Band associate] Paul [Lorkowski] finally got confirmation that Chris had died by suicide in his hotel room, not long after the show. I roused [bassist] Ben [Shepherd] to break the news. We still couldn\u2019t believe it, though, like Are you sure? People were panicking and hyperventilating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thayil also ruminated on the changing tenor of Chris Cornell over the years, which made the suicide all the more upsetting and shocking.<\/p>\n

He writes, \u201cI never feared that Chris would harm himself in the way that my mom made me fear as a youth. He was the opposite of my mom. He wasn\u2019t making these proclamations. He never did. Chris\u2019s death and the manner in which he died were so unexpected. It seemed to me at the time to be so out of character in 2017. If Chris had done something like that when the band were younger in the late eighties or maybe even the mid-nineties, on the heels of the deaths of Andy Wood, Kurt Cobain, and Chris\u2019s good friend Jeff Buckley, it might have made more sense. Decades later, at his age, and being a father, it seemed unfathomable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thayil adds, \u201cThe thing that hurts me the most is to be a close friend and colleague and not to have read things that perhaps, in retrospect, I should have read. That\u2019s hurtful. I feel like I let Chris down by not seeing the look in his eyes, or not hearing a tone in his voice \u2014 not being able to read it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The surviving Soundgarden members have been working on finishing up a new album<\/a> featuring the final recordings by Chris Cornell. Kim Thayil\u2019s memoir is available to pre-order from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n \"Soundgarden
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