Eight months passed between the tragic death of Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood and Chris Cornell, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament and Mike McCready entering the studio to record their tribute album to the Mother Love Bone frontman.
A lot went on in that time, a stark lesson for these young musicians that even though their world had ended with the death of their friend (and for fellow Mother Love Bone members Gossard and Ament, their bandmate), it certainly kept spinning. It’s for a reason that Cornell, who himself died in 2017, described Wood’s passing as “the death of innocence” for the burgeoning grunge scene. “The impossible suddenly was happening irrevocably in front of us,” Cornell recalled in the official Pearl Jam biography Pearl Jam Twenty, “and we were all sitting there having really no tools to deal with it.”
Cornell, who shared an apartment with Wood, barely had time to process the whole thing before he had to head out on a European tour with Soundgarden. Gossard and Ament, meanwhile, wondered if they even wanted to start another band.
When Cornell was away with Soundgarden, though, he channelled his grief into writing two new songs in tribute to Wood. Titled Say Hello 2 Heaven and Reach Down, one a direct tribute and the other creating an imaginary dialogue between him and his late pal, their writing represented a moment of catharsis for Cornell. The problem was he wasn’t sure what to do next.
“I felt like, ‘Why am I writing these songs and what am I going to do with them when they don’t sound like Soundgarden songs at all?’,” he said. But, thinking about how these songs were about Wood and how the singer’s death had affected his closest friends, Cornell came upon the idea that he could record them with his ex-Mother Love Bone bandmates.
By the time Cornell dropped off a cassette of the two songs at his manager Susan Silver’s office to find its way Gossard and Ament, the former Mother Love Bone pair had already begun the process of throwing themselves into a new group, the band that would become Pearl Jam. Silver shared an office space with their manager Kelly Curtis, and when Ament popped in to see him, she passed on the tape.
“I listened to them and I was like, ‘These are amazing’,” Ament told YouTuber Rick Beato. “I could tell both songs were about Andy’. They were both really complete demos and I remember saying, ‘You should put those out’ and he said, ‘Well, I was hoping I could get you and Stone to play on these songs’.”
Ament was up for it and initially had the idea that maybe they could turn it into an EP or album by recording some of Wood’s unreleased solo work to go with it. But when that idea was met disapprovingly by some of Wood’s other friends and family, concerned that it might look like they were exploiting the singer’s death, Ament had another idea. Why don’t they write enough material to make their own album?
And so what would become Temple Of The Dog’s sole album was rolling, Cornell augmenting the material he’d already written with a few more and Gossard and Ament adding a couple of their own – they were in the middle of a period of fruitful creativity at the time, working with their new band on the songs that would make up Pearl Jam’s debut Ten.
Gossard insisted that Cornell also bring Pearl Jam’s guitarist Mike McCready into the fold too, whilst their prospective vocalist Eddie Vedder, fresh off the plane from Seattle, was also in and around the sessions. He would end up making a big impression on album standout Hunger Strike, duetting with Cornell on a song that would become a battle of the grunge singer heavyweights. It was his first go at singing on a proper recording.
It was a period that demanded some juggling schedule-wise at Galleria Potatohead, a practice space in Seattle, Ament revealed. “We’d rehearse then take a little break and go eat,” the bassist said. “And then we’d have a Pearl Jam rehearsal. Over the course of a week, we were doing both rehearsals.”
Titling their project Temple Of The Dog, taking the name from a line in the Mother Love Bone song Man Of Golden Words, the band played one show, at the Off Ramp club in Seattle in mid-November 1990, and then got to work on laying down the record over a number of weeks at the city’s London Bridge Studios.
For Cornell, it went some way to helping him through the loss of his friend. “What came out of a tragedy gave birth to something that was really impactful and hugely positive in my life, which would never have existed if we didn’t have that trust and camaraderie with each other,” he said.
Temple Of The Dog would reconvene in 2016 for a series of triumphant US live shows. Cornell would leave us just a year later but here he got to bring the poignant project he’d instigated to honour his friend full circle. “I’ve always had a really difficult time with loss,” he told The Guardian at the time. “I would look out the window and I thought I saw him. It would take me five minutes to update to the moment and realise, ‘No, he’s actually dead’. This tour, in a sense, is the dealing. It’s facing the reality.”
It was a record that left behind some of the most emotive and epic moments of Cornell’s career.
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