![]() He has the best seat in the house.” And during some of the sets, namely the Foo Fighters’ when Dave Grohl performed “Everlong” solo in tribute to Chris, there was a spotlight on an empty part of the stage.Ĭornell’s spirit, in all its many guises, was perpetually present. I heard his voice, and I found my strength. “I didn’t feel like I had the strength required to pull it off. “When the idea of a tribute concert for my friend Chris Cornell was presented to me, I was torn,” he said. To kick off the evening, the three surviving members of Soundgarden addressed the audience, and drummer Matt Cameron explained how the event came together. It was a dark and rainy, Seattle-esque night outside the Forum, but it would have already felt like that inside judging from the sea of grunge T-shirts the audience was wearing, including many Soundgarden shirts (and even one for Citizen Dick). It was the sort of star-studded Hollywood tribute you might expect for Tom Petty or David Bowie, but instead it was honoring someone who was somewhat of an unsung hero. “Those are some hard songs to sing.”īrad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Tom Hanks, Courtney Cox and many others showed up too to pay their respects and celebrate Cornell’s talents, and Jimmy Kimmel served as the night’s affable host, keeping the mood light as the production attempted to change between performers quickly. “All I gotta say is it takes some balls to get up there,” one fan said mid-show. There was also a litany of notable guest singers: Miley Cyrus, Fiona Apple, Chris Stapleton, Miguel and Adam Levine sang a mix of Cornell’s solo material and works with bands. The core group of performers was a who’s who of the Seattle grunge scene ”“ enough members of Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Melvins that they could have gone rogue and started their own rival Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the spot.Ĭornell’s former Audioslave bandmates also played, as did Metallica, Foo Fighters and Ryan Adams. You know that wasn’t just some studio magic.”Ĭornell’s vocal acrobatics and unique magic may have been absent at the five-hour event, officially dubbed I Am the Highway: A Tribute to Chris Cornell, but there were plenty of singers who came close, and many of his former bandmates and friends summoned his quintessence, as they pulled from all corners of his songbook. Like, maybe it was probably a real note ”“ it was probably a C-flat ”“ but it was the way he sang it like it ripped a portal to another dimension. “Sometimes would sing a note that was between two real notes, and it would open a portal into another dimension. “Sometimes Chris Cornell would sing a note that didn’t exist,” he told the sold-out crowd. Armed with just an acoustic guitar and his sumptuous, acrobatic voice, Cornell stripped back his trademark arena-sized theatrics in favor of subtlety and intimacy, and weighed in with some of the most compelling music of his career.Chris Cornell’s friends and family offered up many heartfelt tributes at Los Angeles’ Forum Wednesday night, but the one that captured his essence best improbably came from Jack Black. Rather like Nirvana’s widely-acclaimed MTV Unplugged In New York, Songbook was a revelatory experience for the listener. It was all about feeling and sounding just like it did in real life.” “So there are songs with mistakes – I hit the wrong chord or something like that. “My only criteria for picking these songs was that they needed to sound on tape just like they sounded live in the room, theatre or club,” Cornell told Spin. In fact, he enjoyed these intimate shows so much that he later performed gigs in South America and Australasia, though the recordings which appeared on the Songbook album were sourced from a half dozen of the dates on his initial U.S. and Canada during that year’s spring and early summer. Cornell turned his vow into a reality in 2011 when he embarked on an extensive 25-date acoustic tour of the U.S.
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