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Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil has spoken about the loss of his friend and bandmate Chris Cornell.
Soundgarden frontman Cornell decided by suicide in his hotel room in Detroit, Michigan on May 18, 2017, just hours after the Seattle quartet had performed at the city's Fox Theatre.
"I could never have anticipated the vacuum, the absence, and how profound it is," Thayil tells The Guardian. "The loss is not just in missing the companionship, the creative partnership, and everything I learned from him. I also miss that sense of duty, as a big brother, to protect him. I still feel that sense of, ‘What could I have done?’ I’ve had to recognise my own mortality, my vulnerability and my impotence. You can’t save everything you love. Perhaps you can’t even save yourself."
Thayil's autobiography A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond is set for publication today, June 9, in the US via William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Recently an exclusive excerpt from the book was shared on RollingStone.com, in which the guitarist revealed how he learned of Cornell's death.
Initially, the band and crew thought that they were being pranked, that the rumour was just another internet hoax, a pitch-black online joke. But before long, the news of Cornell's death was confirmed.
"I didn’t see it coming," Thayil writes in his memoir. "The thing that hurts me the most is to be a close friend and colleague and not to have read things that perhaps, in retrospect, I should have read. That’s hurtful. I feel like I let Chris down by not seeing the look in his eyes, or not hearing a tone in his voice — not being able to read it. But it’s hard to read things like that, because you don’t get a lot of chances at it. You can only look in ret-rospect and go, Ah, here’s an indicator. There was nothing that was on my radar that I could read at that time. And then I looked at the paper trail and it was like Fuck, the paper trail goes back to the be-ginning."
Soundgarden's surviving members are currently putting the final touches to a collection of unreleased songs based on Chris Cornell's final demo recordings.
“I always take responsibility for the things I love,” Thayil tells The Guardian. “And I can’t imagine ever not loving Soundgarden.”
A UK publication date for Thayil's memoir is yet to be confirmed.
