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 deat
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.
