Chris Cornell's superunknown secret
I was only able to interview Chris Cornell for 20 minutes. This isn't much time, but I just assumed he was busy. And he was--sort of. The 38-year-old Cornell--who's been married for 12 years and is the father of a two-year-old daughter--had to get back to a place that nobody knew about.
Spin: There's a rumor that you just got out of rehab for OxyContin addiction. Is that true?
Chris Cornell: OxyContin? Who told you that? That's a weird rumor, because the truth is that I'm in rehab right now. I've been there for a month. I'm here [at this interview] on what amounts to work release.
What are you in rehab for?
Various things. I'm not picky. [Laughs] Mainly for drinking.
I can see how that could happen, since the whole Seattle music scene was always built around getting obliterated.
Yeah, that was sort of the nature of it. I remember people saying the reason raves never worked in Seattle was because all the kids would drink a bunch of beers and get tired.
Did you drink before playing live?
For most of the Soundgarden tours, I didn't drink before shows. I couldn't sing well if I'd been drinking. But at the end of the 1992 Lollapalooza tour, I decided to drink before we went on. We were ending that tour in Los Angeles, and we hated that because we thought the audience would be nothing but industry people. So I decided to drink to just get through those shows. Well, it turned out
the audiences were great--they were real fans--and it was awesome. I realized that I now had enough experience performing, and it really didn't matter if I was drunk or not. So over the next few years, I would sometimes drink before we played. It wasn't a big deal. It became a bigger deal when I stopped doing the other things I liked to do. I used to ride mountain bikes around with my friends, and we'd keep 40-ouncers where the water bottle was supposed to be. But once I removed the mountain and the bike, there was just the drinking.
Are you trying to quit drinking completely or just trying to get back to social drinking?
I don't think I want to drink the way I used to. In my early twenties, I was actually worse. I could drink a lot, and I tended to have violent outbursts. I mean, I'm Irish: If I could get the cap off something, I would drink it. And drinking was really an extension of becoming isolated from all my other relationships. That started the first time we were on MTV. I can remember the very first day "Outshined" was played on MTV, because that night--at four in the morning, in the middle of Mississippi--I was recognized by a butcher. So that was the beginning of me becoming isolated. I used it as an excuse, I think. I never liked being recognized to begin with, and I was never much of a social person, so this gave me a chance to play the "I don't want to go out" card. I would just stay in and drink.
What's rehab like?
I actually like rehab a lot. It's like school; it's interesting. I'm learning that I can be teachable at age 38.
