CHRIS CORNELL WINNING BACK FANS ONE GESTURE AT A TIME
Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 2:00pm by Gary SuarezLos Angeles’ Hotel Cafe is a 165-person capacity venue, a seemingly unlikely place to find a world famous rocker with millions of record sales under his belt. And yet last Thursday it hosted noneother than Chris Cornell for an “intimate” sold out performance. As expected, YouTube has amateur footage of songs from the setlist, which included “Euphoria Morning” and Audioslave’s “Doesn’t Remind Me”, as well as covers of The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Of course, the track that stands out the most for me was “Call Me A Dog”, a song from the Temple Of The Dog album. The project, a tribute to the late Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood, reformed somewhat during a recent Pearl Jam concert in L.A. The solo acoustic performance above (audio quality trumps video quality) is naturally much more subdued and somber, which helps to remind us all that Cornell is a gifted songwriter, even despite his misguided dalliance with Timbaland. With a reworked rock version of Scream in the planning, the former Soundgarden frontman might just earn back the respect of fans who balked at his attempt to mimic Justin Timberlake.
In other news, Timbaland’s upcoming Shock Value 2 album features vocal contributions from Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger and Chris Daughtry. Yeah, you read right…
-GS
[Gary Suarez is going hungry. He usually manages WHOLLY DIVER (a Dio tribute site) and the consistently off-topic No Yoko No. Say, why don't you follow him on Twitter?]
6 COMMENTS on “CHRIS CORNELL WINNING BACK FANS ONE GESTURE AT A TIME”
Timbaland’s not the WORST rapper out there. I mean, in our world, Cornell STILL committed suicide; from a metaphorical standpoint, he only really hung himself. Had he worked with someone like “Lil Wayne” I think his career suicide would have been more like taking a chainsaw to his own testicles and dying from loss of blood.
So, he made a mistake.. a huge mistake.. so what. We shouldn’t dwell on it. He’s coming back!
Chad Kroeger should stick with doing rap music in his career. Better at doing that since it doesn’t involve the same obvious, unoriginal music that Nickelback does. Heard the song that Chad was in and it was better than Nickelback (not to say it to piss people off but get real, is Chad Kroeger good for any reason?). Didn’t hear the one Chris Daughtry was in.
My problem with the Cornell disaster is that he so obviously had no clue about R&B music and was just listening to the wrong people, there ARE artists who could have done something cool along these lines, but Cornell just had no clue. Glad to see him coming back, this clip sounds fantastic!
He has no need to “come back”, he’ll just continue being who he is, genre-blind and genuinely brave. Whether or not you like Scream, R&B has been part of his sound through most of his career – listen to the Temple of the Dog album or much of Euphoria Morning (which is an album, by the way, not a song). As for the “reworked rock version of Scream”, get real – that was pretty obviously nothing but some Canadian journalist’s wet dream.
Oh man, gary. I bet you just CAN’T WAIT to get your hands on a Timbaland song with Nickelback and Chris Daughtry. That sounds RIGHT up your alley. Are you going to give it an unauthorized 5-star review and then adamantly maintain that you were being serious?