Temple Of The Dog – Temple Of The Dog

Temple of the Dog begins with a cassette tape containing two songs that came out of the loss of Chris Cornell's friend and roommate Andrew Wood (lead singer of Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone). Wood had great talent, but people are complicated, and he struggled with cocaine and heroin, which landed him in rehab in 1989. In March 1990, Wood suffered a relapse and died at the age of 24. It was, as Cornell would say, "the death of the innocence of the scene". Cornell was devastated. "Chris and Andy had a very deep relationship," noted Matt Cameron of Soundgarden. Soundgarden was on tour when the news broke.

Out of this deep tragedy came life, and new musical connections. What Cornell initially thought was a tribute song with the surviving Love Bone players developed into a larger song cycle. Songs like "Say Hello 2 Heaven" and "Reach Down" were mournful elegies, but like Andy Wood himself, they were fearless. "I had no goal for these songs," Cornell reflected. "I was compelled to write them, and there they were - written in a vacuum as a tribute to Andy. My thought was that maybe I could record these songs with the remaining members of Mother Love Bone and maybe we could release them as a tribute."

Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament of Mother Love Bone began playing with Mike McCready, who had previously played in a band called Shadow, while Matt Cameron of Soundgarden was brought in to play drums on some demos. Three of these songs, written in collaboration with Cornell, found their way onto the album Temple of the Dog. That's how it was in Seattle back then: creative sparks flew all over the city, regardless of who was in which band. Cornell wrote a few more songs to round off the material for the rest of the album.

The project became a true collaboration. The group went into London Bridge Studio with no commercial expectations and recorded ten tracks in fifteen days. It was, as Gossard later remarked, "the simplest and most beautiful record we've ever been involved in". Cornell added: "Temple was about making an album just for the fun of it. We didn't worry about what anyone outside our circle of friends would think of it. It was the first and maybe only stress-free album we all made.

Gossard, Ament and McCready formed a new band at the same time, which would become known as Pearl Jam more than six months later. A singer from San Diego named Eddie Vedder, who was bidding to lead the Gossard/Ament/McCready project, came into the studio to do background vocals on three of the Temple songs. When Cornell felt that another song, "Hunger Strike," needed a duet, Vedder was brought in, and the result is magical.

Cornell is often praised for welcoming Vedder to Seattle with open arms. "He really embraced Eddie," Cameron says in the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary. "I know Eddie felt a real mentorship, and I think that gave him a lot of confidence."

"It was the first time I heard myself on a real record," Vedder later said. The duet worked musically in a way that no one could have predicted at the time. Cornell and Vedder's vocals in this particularly melancholy lament made the song infectious. It would later become a hit single. "It might be one of my favorite songs I've ever been a part of," says Vedder. "Or the most meaningful."

The Temple lineup performed a few times in Seattle, in late 1990 and early 1991, and those performances are among the most legendary Seattle concerts of all time. A&M Records released the album on April 16, 1991, a significant date because it also illustrates that at the time, no one knew what would happen to Seattle music in the marketplace the next year. "We were guys in bands who were on the cusp of something that could change their lives," says Cornell. Everyone involved in Temple of the Dog would become superstars the next year. Soundgarden released their platinum-selling album Badmotorfinger in 1991, the first in a string of hit albums. Pearl Jam released their debut album in 1991, which became a huge success in 1992. A year later, after the Seattle scene went national, A&M re-released the Temple album and released a music video for "Hunger Strike".

It's important to remember Temple of the Dog because they made their mark on music history. Rolling Stone wrote that the album deserved "immortality".

It was an album, Cornell later said, "that nobody had any expectations for, so it felt very fresh from start to finish. We learned to just live in the moment and be open to the idea of collaboration. At the end of the day, that was the great gift Andy left us, and I've thought about that in every situation I've been in writing and performing since.

Temple of the Dog is ultimately so successful because it doesn't have the slick finesse that soon followed as the rest of the nation tried to emulate what had happened organically in Seattle for commercial purposes. "We all learned this really important lesson that we could make something special as a group that had never made a record together," Cornell says. "I knew Soundgarden was special, but until then I didn't necessarily know that I could do something special outside of Soundgarden. That made me open to the idea that art for art's sake can lead to something special."

The connections that emerged from Temple of the Dog have proven to be enduring. Andy Wood may never have been a member of Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, but in some ways he was always part of their story.

The songs on the 1991 album Temple of the Dog were written by Andrew Wood as well as Chris Cornell and the rest of the band. The album's lasting impact and the robust individual musical journeys that followed are the result of fully embracing the spirit of collaboration in both music and life - that's the Temple of the Dog lesson. And as with everything in Seattle, those words, that music and that loss belonged to everyone. They still do. And always will.

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