Corbin Reiff - Total F*cking Godhead: The Biography of Chris Cornell

Advance Praise for
Total F*cking Godhead

Total F*cking Godhead brings Chris Cornell, the voice of a generation, alive on the page. Impressively researched and compulsively readable, Godhead pulls no punches in recounting Cornells remarkable life and prolific career. Its an inspired chronicle of an impassioned soul. Read it!

Greg Renoff , author of Va n Halen Rising

For those of us still trying to sort out the tragedy of Chris Cornells death comes this loving look back at the mans life and music. I wrote my own book about grunge, and I still learned a lot from this excell ent biography.

Mark Yarm , author of
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge

From his days as a struggling Seattle musician at the forefront of the grunge scene to becoming a global icon, Total F*cking Godhead thoroughly chronicles the life story and prolific output of one of the greatest and most influential singers of all time. You will discover the man and his music a ll over again.

David de Sola , author of
Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-64293-215-7

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-216-4

Total F*cking Godhead:

The Biography of Chris Cornell

2020 by Corbin Reiff

All Rights Reserved

Cover photo by Chris Cuffaro

Cover art by Donna McCleer. / Tunnel Vizion Media LLC

Author photo by Jenna Reiff

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the authors memory.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

For Paul Fowler

For Adam King

F or Tyler Yeoman

For Grant Smith

Table of Contents

I ll never forget that terrible morning on May 18, 2017. I woke up just before seven oclock and reached for my phone. The number of push notifications that greeted my tired eyes tipped me off that something unusual had happened. I quickly typed in the passcode and was rendered speechless by the terrible news.

Chris Co rnell was dead.

For several minutes I sat there shocked and numb. Then eerily cold. I was the senior music writer for Uproxx at the time, and my editor quickly tapped me to gather tributes from other artists expressing their own mix of overwhelming grief and disbelief. I did my job in a fog before logging off in the late afternoon. After that, I went for a walk around my neighborhood, with Like A Stone blasting in my headphones. I suddenly started tearing up as a version of Chris from sixteen years earlier lamented his own cob web afternoon.

Growing up, I was a massive fan of pretty much all Seattle rock music from the nineties, and Soundgarden specifically. The Black Hole Sun video left an especially terrifying, but exhilarating, impression on my developing mind. Later on, I moved to the Pacific Northwest and became even more enamored with that citys music history as I caught shows at places like the Paramount, the Moore, a nd the Showbox.

Id seen Chris Cornell perform onstage as both a member of Soundgarden and as a solo artist on multiple occasions around Seattle and had always come away with a deeper appreciation of his artistry. The Mad Season performance I caught at Benaroya Hall in 2015 when he reunited Temple Of The Dog and crooned and screamed his way through Call Me A Dog, is something I wont forget. They had the audacity to play Reach Down right after that, which was equal ly mindblowing.

One of the greatest nights of my life, however, took place at the Ace Hotel in LA when Chris and Led Zeppelin mastermind Jimmy Page chatted onstage together for two hours about the legendary guitarists life and music. Just two of my musical heroes chopping it up like the two thousand strong in the audience werent even there, hanging onto their every word. If only they had formed a band.

Chriss passing affected me in a profound way that other celebrity deaths never had before. It felt like part of my own past had just been ripped away. In the weeks that followed I wrote about other topics, but I couldnt shake Chris Cornell. I remember feeling pissed off that there was a myriad of books about grunge, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice In Chains, but none about Chris, and only one about Soundgarden, a woefully out-of-date biography. It seemed like a miscarriage of musical justice, but at that point I didnt expect it would be me who would set out to right that pa rticular wrong.

I had just recently finished writing my first book, Lighters in the Sky , and was talking to my editor about Chris when he asked, How do you feel about writing a book about him? The question took me by surprise. I told him all the reasons why I shouldnt, and we l eft it at that.

A few weeks later I flew out to Los Angeles and visited Chriss final resting place at Hollywood Forever Cemetery to finally pay my respects. As I stood there gazing at the black granite fixed in the perfectly manicured grass, I felt an overwhelming wave of emotion. It suddenly felt real. Chris Cornell was truly gone.

I drove out to Joshua Tree the next day, listening to Superunknown and Audioslave the whole way, and got pissed off all over again thinking that a songwriter of his magnitude and a singer with his supernatural abilities had seemingly been taken for granted by so many over the last several decades. I called my editor shortly after flying home and told him that I thought I wanted to do it. I wanted to write a biography of Chris Cornell. Looking back now, I was blissfully nave to the amount of time, effort, frustration, and catharsis I was signing up for.

Over the next three years, I did hardly anything besides think about Chris Cornell, listen to Chris Cornell, read about Chris Cornell, and speak to people who knew and loved Chris Cornell. I flew to New York. I flew to Los Angeles. I flew to Seattle multiple times from my home in Chicago, and eventually moved back to the a rea altogether.

I pored over hundreds of different interviews that Chris had given over the course of thirty years from every phase of his life. I read thousands more from his friends, bandmates, and loved ones to try to understand both the man himself and the challenges he faced during his time on this planet. I watched hundreds of hours of grainy concert footage and listened to practically every note of music he ever recorded several times over. The Seattle Public Library became a home away from home as I dug through the archives to find any scrap of paper that contained the words Chris, Cornell, or Soundgarden. The Museum of Popular Culture on 5th Avenuethe Frank Gehry-designed building with the bronze statue of Chris out frontand their oral history collection was also a treme ndous resource.

I also spoke with as many people who had known Chris as I could. I accumulated dozens of on-the-record interviews with collaborators and friends and had many off-the-record talks with those who knew him best. But, as legal issues surrounding Chris and his estate arose, I could feel peoples eagerness to speak about him at length tighten up. Interviews that had been months in planning were re-scheduled, then cancelled altogether. People who had been eager to share their memories and provide additional sources stopped returning my texts, phone cal ls, and emails.

It was frustrating and disappointing, but as a onetime paralegal in the US Army, I understood that nothing quiets people faster than the threat of impending litigation. There was little reason to believe that the issues at the heart of these conflicts would sort themselves out any time soon, but I remained hopeful. I dont begrudge anyone for their silence; and to those who shared their stories with me, I offer my ete rnal gratitude.