ABC/Randy HolmesSoundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil has shared his remembrances of the band’s show in Detroit on May 17, 2017, the night before Chris Cornell died by suicide. Speaking with Billboard, Thayil rejects any idea that there was something visibly wrong with Cornell during the show.
“I thought the show was good,” Thayil says. “I remember Chris had just gotten in [to town] and was a little tired and his voice was a little rough, but by about the fourth or fifth song it kicked in and then it was just, like, super amazing — beautiful, clear and strong and, I thought, particularly emotive.”
During one point in the show, Cornell was absent from the stage for an extended period of time, but Thayil says he was just waiting for a guitar to be tuned, and told the rest of the band to jam while they waited for him.
“People speculate, and they get causality in reverse,” Thayil says. “I guess it’s natural to try to fill in the blanks to explain a particular mystery. I think it’s natural to say that, ‘We know something terrible happened, so we know there must have been some sort of problem. Let’s see what that problem might be. Well, come to think of it, the show was kind of messy.'”
Following Cornell’s death, Thayil stayed mostly out of the public eye, but now he’s back on the road as a part of MC50, a band put together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the legendary proto-punk band MC5. Thayil, a big MC5 fan, says the tour allowed him to “come out of the fetal position.”
“The timing was pretty good, I think,” he says. “I was allowing myself to be ready.”
The MC50 tour begins tonight in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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