Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil has revealed how he learned the shocking news of his friend and bandmate Chris Cornell's death.
Thayil's autobiography A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond is set for publication on June 9 via William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and an exclusive excerpt from the book has been shared on RollingStone.com today (May 29). The preview of the book is centred on a chapter titled Like Suicide, in which Thayil shares emotional memories of the night he learned of Cornell's death by suicide on May 18, 2017, just hours after the quartet had performed at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan.
With the band scheduled to headline the opening night of the Rock on the Range festival in Columbus, Ohio on May 19, Thayil, bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron had left Detroit in the early hours of the morning with their crew, while Cornell opted to get a hotel room post-show. Thayil recalls that the touring party were an hour or two into their journey to Columbus when he received a disturbing phone call from Matt Cameron, who was travelling on a different bus.
"Kim, I’m reading a lot of weird shit on the internet," Cameron said. "Somebody posted ‘RIP: Chris Cornell’ on my Facebook page."
Initially, the band and crew thought that they were being pranked, that the rumour was just another internet hoax, a pitch-black online joke. But before long, the news of Cornell's death was confirmed.
"I didn’t see it coming," Thayil writes in his memoir. "The 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’s hurtful. I feel like I let Chris down by not seeing the look in his eyes, or not hearing a tone in his voice — not being able to read it. But it’s hard to read things like that, because you don’t get a lot of chances at it. You can only look in ret-rospect and go, Ah, here’s an indicator. There was nothing that was on my radar that I could read at that time. And then I looked at the paper trail and it was like Fuck, the paper trail goes back to the be-ginning."
