Reflecting on Chris Cornell and Soundgarden

Hi, you're listening to NPR's book of the day. I'm Alyssa Advorney. Today is Music Friday. I've got two books for you about bands. In a minute, the story behind Sound Garden and their legacy as a grunge band. It's called a screaming life . But first , a book called The Rolling Stones, the biography. It's a deep dive into the lives and music of the iconic group. Here and now's Indira Lakshman spoke with author and musician Bob Spitz. Rolling Stones fans get excited. I know I am. The band just announced they're releasing a new album . Foreign Tongues Drops july tenth mark your calendars, and here's a taste of the first single in the stars. For more than six decades, thelling R stoones have produced hit after hit. They've sold upwards of a quarter billion albums since the band formed in nineteen sixty two. Along with the hits though, there were drugs and women, so many drugs, and so many women , tax evasion, rifts between bandmates , and deaths. The Rolling Stones didn't just cultivate the bad boy rock and roll image, they lived it. Author and musician Bob Spitz has published a comprehens ive new biography of the band called The Rolling Stones. He joined us recently to talk about the book. I began by asking Bob Spitz, what made the band unique when they first burst onto theitrock B screne in the early nineteen sixties. They were a blues band and they attached jumper cables to the blues and they created a song that was rock and roll. It was almost like the next generation. There were the Delta Blues players , then there was Chuck Berry who took blues and electrified it. But the Rolling Stones gave it a rock and roll beat . They actually created a new sound. They are the ultimate rock and roll garage band and that formula has never changed. Well, we have to give listeners the treat of hearing one of their earliest hits from nineteen sixty five in, my humble opinion , maybe the best rock song of all time. I can't get no satisfaction. Let's listen. Sance fucking sensitive because I try try You talk about how the song is an example of how lead singer Mick Jagger and guitarist and vocalist Keith Richards were a symbiotic writing team . Talk about how this song came about . Well , Keith was asleep and he left his tape recorder running all night . And I guess at some point in the night he woke up, he had this idea and it had three chords. He said into the mic, I can't get no satisf action and he went back to sleep. And for the next thirty five minutes on that tape was just Keith snoring . And so when he when he got up in the morning, he had to go back in the tape and look what he had and he realized that he had a gem and not only a gem , as far as I care, it's the national anthem. Well, over the years there were difficulties between Mick and Keith, who were definitely the foundation, the, you know, beating heart at the center of this band explain to us the sort of complex nature of their relationship. Mick and Keith, they, you know, they have just a unique situation , even when they were not speaking to each other . When Keith was slagging Mick off in the press, calling him Her Majesty, and he used to call him Brenda Jagger . When Keith got married on his fortieth birthday, who stood up for him, his best man? It was Mick, even though they weren't talking . They have a commitment, and that commitment has kept the stones together for sixty years. Let's hear another one of their early hits from nineteen sixty eight Sympathy for the Devil . Please allow me to introduce myself . I'm a man and place . I've been around for a long, long ago stole many a man's sold . I was around when Jesus Christ at his moment was doubted of pain Me damn sure the pilot washed his hands to seal his face . Please to meet you . Hope you can't you guess my name ? But what slid you is the nature of my game ? When you see it performed on stage, I've been lucky enough to see them three times. There's literally like fire on the stage and Mick comes out with a cape and it's just an incredible performance. But I was surprised to learn from your book that this song was actually inspired by a novel by a Stalin era Soviet dissonant writer named Mikhail Bulgakov. It's based on his book The Master and Margarita. Tell us more about that. Well, Mick had been dating Mary An Fanithful during this time, and she was reading the Master and Margarita and gave it to Mick one night and said, You don't think about this . And it caught fire with him right away. When you listen to that song, it's so different from anything the Stones had done . And I think it caught listeners by surprise. It certainly created flames. When the stones were recording it, the studio caught fire and burned to the ground. So, you know, this song had some legacy behind it. Well, it also plays into their image of the band as creators of chaos. And often that was good chaos , but sometimes it would go off the rails and I want to listen to another song Gimme Shelter . Give me shelter So the backing vocals that we're hearing there are by an astonishing blues singer gospel singer named Mary Clayton who the Stones actually didn't know when she laid down the tracks for this song . Tell us she came into their orbit at two o'clock in the morning, and then there's a harrowing aftermath to the story. Yeah, and they had been working with Bonnie Bramlet, who was a rock and roller and she wasn't cutting it. And somebody knew Mary Clayton called her at two in the morning, her hair was in curlers , she was pregnant . They put her in a cab, they brought her into the studio and she cut that lacerating vocal in two takes Unfortunately, she went home that night. Really just she had let it all come out on that song and she suffered a miscarriage the next day. Now Gimmy Shelter was also the name of a nineteen seventy documentary about the Stones free concert that they gave at the Altamont Speedway in California in december nineteen sixty nine . The Stones had asked the Hells Ange'ls B'ikers gang to handle security , and the consequences were disastrous including the death of a fan. I think many of the Stone's younger fans will not even have heard of this or know about what happened att Ulamont. Can you remind us how it all played out? Yeah, the stones were coerced by the press into giving a free concert. It was terrible. They put the whole thing together in two days . The stage was practically on the ground . The drugs were intense , and the Hells Angels created a nature of violence. It was violence from the Word Go. It was an unfortunate situation and it really dealt the stone's reputation a severe blow. Another aspect of the stones that has dogged them over the years is how the perception of the band changed with the rise of the women's movement in the nineteen seventies. There were many songs like nineteen sixty six's Under My Thumb that came under increased scrutiny. A lot of people just felt they were misogynist ic . A girl has just changed her away . Is that a me ? Yes it is the way she does what she sold down to make the change as guns man . Talk about whether they were meant as m isogynistic, whether they were meant as ironic, and how did the band address this criticism? They weren't ironic at all. They were misogynistic from the word go. The Stones always had that problem. You know, they are the consummate bad boys , they have their stick, and they just feel that they're going to sing what they're going to sing. It's hard to reconcile, but if you're a Stones fan, you kind of have to take it as it goes. Let's just finally end by talking about their longevity. Throughout the years, the band continues to sell out shows, play areas. They were touring as recently as twenty twenty four. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are in their eighties. What is your explanation for their appeal and their longevity over the years? Well, it all comes down to those songs. Those songs are magnificent. They're the songs that for fifty years have defined rock and roll. And when you go to a Stones concert , it's all the hicks, all the time, Mick and Keith, the original Bad Boys, even though they've been collecting social security for the last twenty years , they still are able to pull off that excitement . Bob Spitz is the author of the new book The Rolling St ones The Biography. Bob, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. Thanks and Darum. Okay , now onto some grunge music, committed to the pages in a new memoir called A Screaming Life. It's by SoundGardens lead guitarist Kim Fyle and it,'s focused on how the band rose to the top and brought grunge music into the mainstream. File talked with NPR's A Martinez for Morning Edition. Before the nineteen nineties, record labels almost never scouted the Seattle area . In isolation, a local scene developed. The music was dark, it was loud, and for a short while, it changed rock music. The band that opened doors for everybody in the grunge scene was Sound Garden. They were the first to sign to a major label, and their story is told in a new memoir by founding guitarist Kim Thyle. From their indie beginnings to their peak with black hole sun to the death of lead singer Chr is Cornell The book is called a screaming life, and one note before we go on the sub,ject of suicide does come up later in the conversation. Tyler writes about that six week period in nineteen ninety one when three of the pillars of grunge were released Pearl Jam's album ten , Nirvana's Never Mind, and Sound Gardens bad motor finger. We didn't have that initial commercial success. I mean, there's a meteoric ascension for Nirvana that overshadowed everything else, which was just fine it must have been very stressful to have to understand the change in your status. And for us , we grew very slowly off the success of that record and I'm sure we benefited to some degree from Nirvana success and then Hurl Jam success . So we were able to just hang in there under the radar and maintain career as cension in a much more manageable way. Soundgard's biggest hit, black hole song. I mean, I think most people will agree with that . You write that you didn't like the song at first and you almost killed it. Why? What did you like about the song? I recognized the song as a good song and I liked it as a creation of Chris . I didn't recognize it as a sound garden song. Does that make sense? It's like yeah I love songs by Johnny Cash and I love songs by Slim the Family Stone and if I heard them I, might not say , let's learn that and record it. You know, it may not fit into the super unknown album, which is where we did Black Hole Sun. I didn't see it as a viable contender for that album initially . Black holes come away in black holes In nineteen ninety seven, Kim Sound Garden broke up. Bando did get back together new album in twenty twelve, King Animal. Five years later, though, Chris, Chris Cornell took his life. In the book you write, I didn't see it coming. The thing that hurts me the most is to be a close friend and a colleague and not to have read things that perhaps in retrospect I should have read . Do you think things were clear enough for you to have read them were I don't know. That's one of the things that is hard to understand. I don't know what to have looked for. In retrospect, there are things that can be identified or seen , but those may not be as obvious or present. I think there is that fraternal sense of responsibility towards your friendships and duty towards each other, you know , in terms of managing and maintaining that . And so of course if something goes wrong or someone's in pain or is hurting , you feel that's your responsibility to address it and help them . And sometimes at least in this case , whatever was happening with Chris was not on our radar or it was something that we missed. And that 's not just myself. I mean, I'm none of our bandmates or our crew , friends or family really aware in any way to expect this kind of outcome And then I just think about a lot of the other people involved in the Seattle Rocks I mean Kirk Cobain, Andrew Wood , Ben McMillan. I mean, all died pretty young. I mean, how do you keep your head straight when you see your colleagues? Maybe in some cases, I'm sure close people fansiers that, you know , that this happens to you know, we often talk about this, you know, my colleagues and friends. It's very unusual. I mean, you can add Mark Lanigan and Lane Staley to that list. But yeah, I mean Stephanie Sargent. Yeah. There's a lot of things that are kind of hard to wrap your head around because it seems very strange. Yeah. This guy that I used to argue with about this would say that listen to the music, listen to the lyrics, you know, you can't get out of this cycle of depression when you listen to all these grunge acts. And I'll be like, you know, okay, I mean, we'd argue about this and go back and forth. But I agree there's there's somewhat of a paper trail, but you know, suicide isn't the only assailant here . I mean, there's also substance abuse, there's misadventure, but I think you're correct in pointing out the fact that there is a bit of a paper trail. We're not writing songs about parties and cool cars Now you're working on one last Sound Garden album with Chris Cornell's voice. What can you tell us about that? We're in a process of writ ing for an album and we were in the process of recording material for the album when Chris passed. Chris was demoing vocals for these songs to share melodic and lyrical ideas . So we had a lot of things to work with. We didn't have a complete set and it required that the surviving members of the band all complete their work. We're very proud and it's easily the most evocative emotionally of anything we've ever done and at the same time , we're very proud and very satisfied with what we're doing. Well, we'll look forward to it when it comes out. That's Kim Thyle, guitarist with Sound Garden, his new memoir is called A Screaming Live Kim. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, if you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at nine . That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think. You can write to us at Book of the Day at nprot org . I'm Alyssa Adworney. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and Ivy Buck and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Eric a Ryan, Christopher Integliata, Adriana Guillardo, Lily Kiros, Diana Douglas, Danica Panetta, Ashley Brown, Diantha Parker, Catherine Fink, Emiko T,omagawa, Todd Munt , and Phil Harrell. Thanks for listening.