Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 2:00pm by Gary Suarez
Los 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…
Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 3:30pm by Gary Suarez
Some months back, Chris Cornell took the first step to undo the self-inflicted damage caused by his god-awful Timbaland-produced solo album Scream: he re-recorded one of its songs as a straightforward soft rock tune. Since then, the former Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman has taken some considerable steps towards restoring his rocker reputation, including performing John Lennon’s “Imagine” on the September 11th episode of The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien and unexpectedly reuniting grunge rock one-off Temple Of The Dog at a recent Pearl Jam concert.
Now comes news that the much maligned Scream will receive a full-blown “rework” to better reflect the rest of Cornell’s easily digested radio-friendly solo discography. Though, Cornell has yet to make any public statement about this, the existence of another re-recorded Scream cut says it all. Listen to this new version of “Never Far Away” and imagine just how positively banal Scream (Naked) will ultimately sound.
-GS
[Gary Suarez is simply irresistible. He usually manages the consistently off-topic No Yoko No. Say, why don't you follow him on Twitter?]