If you’re writing alternate histories of rock, Andrew Wood has to come into play. The frontman of the Seattle band Mother Love Bone died just before his band’s debut Apple came out in the summer of 1990. The black and white video for the album’s first single, the churning “Stardog Champion” appeared a couple of times on “Headbangers’ Ball,” but the band was no more, copies of Apple relegated to used-bin purgatory.
Wood very well could have been a huge deal in the world of early-’90s hard rock, which at the time was just starting to bring sounds more off the beaten path than the usual power ballads and studded-jacket anthems into its mainstream. Soundgarden, fronted by Wood’s former roommate Chris Cornell, was gaining “Headbangers’ Ball” airplay for tracks like the chasm-spanning eco-anthem “Hands All Over” and the groaning “Loud Love.” Their tilted view of rock’n’roll kept the heavy riffs but placed every other element in front of a funhouse mirror, magnifying its ugliest aspects while keeping its tongue firmly in its cheek.
Wood’s persona was a bit more mystical than Cornell’s: He was a gutter preacher who could name-drop Marc Bolan andput his own spin on Freddie Mercury’s larger-than-life antics, but who could also hold his own against the dark, muscular rock laid down by his bandmates. His sneering vocal resembled the popular depiction of a lightning bolt, narrowing to a point while illuminating everything else around it. That runny-eyeliner fabulousness pushes Apple onto the list of great nearly lost ’90s albums; the tales of life on the fringes he spins on tracks like the cold-road chronicle “Mr. Danny Boy” are animated by Bruce Fairweather’s guitar squalls and the rhythm section’s alacrity, and love songs like the psych-tinged “Heartshine” sound like hearts breaking in real time.
After Wood died, Cornell went into mourning, and music resulted. “I started writing songs; that was the only thing I could really think of to do.” Cornelltold the Seattle radio station KISW in 1991. “The songs I wrote weren’t really stylistically like something my band Soundgarden would be used to playing or be natural for us to do, but it was material that Andy really would have liked, so I didn’t really want to just throw it out the window or put it away in a box, y’know, put the tape away and never listen to it again."
Cornell eventually hooked up with Mother Love Bone rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament, who had been playing with eventual Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready; Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron also joined the mix. And a singer named Eddie Vedder, who was trying out for Gossard and Ament’s next project, was around for some vocal contributions, too.“The whole situation was just so non-pressure filled, nobody expected this to be anything, so when we just went in and did it the record company wasn’t around, we basically paid for it ourselves to start out with and are still in the process of getting reimbursed for that,” Gossard told KISW.
The project that resulted, Temple of the Dog, came out in April 1991. In the context of Soundgarden’s larger-than-life pyrotechnics, Temple of the Dog sounded like classic rock, a resemblance that was even more striking given that Cornell had written the music for seven of its 10 tracks. Opening elegy “Say Hello 2 Heaven” bears a strong melodic parallel to Aerosmith’s ghostly 1974 ballad “Seasons of Wither,” while “All Night Thing” is an abashed come-on where back-of-the-bar piano tinkling breezes in. Even the stretched-out “Reach Down,” a 10-plus-minute jam that unspools from a dream about Cornell spotting Wood in full regalia (leather coat, purple glasses, “a ribbon in your hair"), is grounded by a wheels-spinning-in-mud blues riff.
“Times of Trouble” is the closest Temple of the Dog gets to a power ballad. Cornell’s impassioned vocal makes the lyrics—aimed at a friend who’s finding solace in a needle and its accompanying “world in black"—absolutely wracked with pain. “Four Walled World” turns depression into a jail cell. “Pushin’ Forward Back” and “Wooden Jesus” simmer with anxiety and anguish at the world in a way mirrored by the activist booths at Lollapalooza and other like-minded tours.
Initially the project garnered little fanfare, selling about 70,000 copies in its initial run. (I bought a copy almost immediately upon release, thanks to being well into my Seattle deep-dive and having an after-school job located next door to a record store.) The video for the album’s initial single, the politically charged “Hunger Strike,” didn’t get a lot of airplay; this might be because it opened with a gnarly shot of ants going to town on an empty plate. Vedder, who provided the deep-voiced counterpoint to Cornell’s wail, operated largely in the shadows. But once Pearl Jam hit it big with “Alive” and their debut Ten later in ’91, Temple of the Dog had new life breathed into it. A less-gross version of the “Hunger Strike” video, which axed the ants for brooding shots of a shoreline and upped the Vedder quotient, went into heavy rotation on MTV. The two bands from which Temple of the Dog had been borne toured together on Lollapalooza ’92—something Temple of the Dog won’t get around to doing until this fall.
Last week’s news that Temple of the Dog has reunited in time for their eponymous album (which eventually went platinum) to turn 25 is an opportunity, in a sense, to see what happened to rock in the ensuing quarter-century. Pearl Jam became a huge deal, their wrestling with fame in real time becoming a sort of road map for bands who dreamed of if not upending the system from within, at least unraveling some of its seams. Soundgarden, meanwhile, trended more toward big-tent arena rock, keeping it weird but not too weird for “Black Hole Sun” to not cross over even to pop radio. Both were, perhaps inevitably, eclipsed by acts who did what they did a little more obviously or dunderheadedly—you could program an entire radio station with meathead lyricists who lost the subtlety of “All Night Thing,” or with vocalists who mimicked Vedder’s vibrato-heavy style so poorly that they helped create the dreaded affectation known as the yarl.
As the midpoint between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog helped chart the course for what was once alternative rock to become The Man—or, at least, a subgenre worthy of inclusion on classic rock radio’s airtight playlists. The higher-strung and flashier Apple, which played with glam signifiers and was giddy on rock-star ambition, existed on a side street off the Sunset Strip. But classic rock playlists have only brought glam’s excesses into the mix when they’re put forth by locks for the pantheon (Bowie, Thin Lizzy) or later acts whose tendencies toward the fab were snuck into more “serious” music (Stone Temple Pilots, and, uh… Stone Temple Pilots).
Temple of the Dog, though, exists between ’70s blooze-rock bravado and alt-era agita, making it an excellent—and incredibly obvious, in retrospect— summation of where rock was about to head, as the flashy solos and big-dumb sexiness of “Headbanger’s Ball”-era pop-rock fell out of fashion. Its ground zero is the riffs and rhythms spun into gold by Aerosmith and Zeppelin; musically they aren’t flipped inside-out, but instead tweaked just enough to reflect their more youthful players. Lyrically, meanwhile, the focus on mourning brought gravity to the proceedings, meaning that sly winks like those found within Soundgarden’s 1990 “cover” of John Lennon’s “One Minute of Silence” or grunge godfathers Green River’s demi-entendre “Swallow My Pride” were largely absent.
Temple of the Dog may be a commercial footnote in the wake of Pearl Jam’s mega-success and Soundgarden’s shrewd crossover, but their reworking of the masters helped chart the course for a memorialized version of the ’90s that was marked by top-notch playing, steely-eyed seriousness tinged by pre-Clinton optimism, and the twin voices of Cornell and Vedder, each charting distinct courses out of the darkness.