Temple of the Dog is one of those records that sounds different once you know when it was made.
Not when it became famous.
When it was made.
Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose on March 19, 1990. Chris Cornell had been close to Andy — they're usually described as having been roommates for a time — and afterward Chris wrote two songs for him: "Say Hello 2 Heaven" and "Reach Down."
Those two songs were the beginning of Temple of the Dog.
Chris got in touch with Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, which made perfect sense. They'd been in Mother Love Bone with Andy. Matt Cameron came in on drums from Soundgarden, and Mike McCready, who was already playing with Stone and Jeff in the new thing they were putting together, played lead guitar.
Then the two-song idea grew into a record.
Even the name came from Andy. "Temple of the Dog" was pulled out of "Man of Golden Words," one of the songs on Apple.
And somewhere in the middle of all this there was another guy who'd just come up from San Diego.
Eddie Vedder.
That part still gets me.
By the time Temple of the Dog were recording, Eddie wasn't just some stranger wandering around the studio. He'd come to Seattle after getting Stone's demo tape, written vocals to some of the music, and started playing with Stone, Jeff and Mike. Their new band had already played its first show as Mookie Blaylock.
But he was still the new guy.
Think about that for a second.
Temple recorded at London Bridge in November and December 1990 with Rick Parashar. Chris had written "Hunger Strike," and he was working out the high and low vocal parts when Eddie took the lower part.
That's the story everybody knows now, and the basic story is true. I wouldn't pretend I know exactly who was standing where or what second Eddie walked up to the microphone. Memory turns these things into movies after enough years.
What matters is what ended up on the tape.
Chris:
"I'm going hungry."
Then Eddie's voice underneath him.
Two voices that would be fucking unavoidable a couple of years later, together on a record before almost anybody knew what the second one sounded like.
And Eddie didn't just parachute into "Hunger Strike" and leave. He's also singing backing vocals on "Pushin Forward Back," "Your Savior" and "Four Walled World."
That's another thing hindsight does to this album. It turns Eddie's appearance into a cameo by Eddie Vedder.
It wasn't.
There wasn't an Eddie Vedder to cameo yet, at least not the one everybody means now.
There was a new singer from San Diego working with Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament and Mike McCready in a band called Mookie Blaylock.
That's who walked into the Temple sessions.
And those sessions made a stranger record than the family-tree version of the story sometimes suggests. If you only know the names involved, you might expect something halfway between Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. It isn't really that.
Chris is all over the thing, obviously, but Stone's riffs are there, Jeff's bass is there, Matt Cameron keeps the longer songs from floating away, and Mike McCready gets enough room to make "Reach Down" sound like somebody forgot to tell him the solo had to end.
Eleven fucking minutes.
I almost never skip it.
"Reach Down" stretches and stretches, but it earns the space. Mike is just tearing through the middle of it while the rhythm section keeps the whole thing upright. It's heavy, but not in the same way Soundgarden was heavy. There's blues in this record. There's old hard rock, gospel, psychedelia, acoustic stuff, organ, harmonica. Chris even plays banjo on "Wooden Jesus."
It's not ten versions of a funeral song.
That's important.
Andrew's death is why the record exists, but not every lyric is literally about Andrew Wood. "Say Hello 2 Heaven" is. "Reach Down" came out of that same loss. But "Hunger Strike" isn't an obituary, and as the project expanded, it became a real album instead of a collection of memorial songs.
"Pushin Forward Back" has music from Jeff. Stone wrote music that became "Times of Trouble" and "Four Walled World." Rick Parashar added piano and organ in places. Eddie's voice appears around the edges. Everybody leaves fingerprints.
But Chris is still the reason the room exists.
Temple of the Dog played publicly at the Off Ramp on November 13, 1990.
I was still in Queens.
Of course I was.
Great timing again, Nate.
They played again in different circumstances after that, including the Moore in December, so the nice clean story about Temple playing exactly one show and disappearing isn't quite true. Later, once everybody's other bands got bigger, "Hunger Strike" would occasionally surface when the right people ended up on the same stage.
But in late 1990 none of that future existed yet.
Soundgarden were already a real national band by then. They were on A&M and Louder Than Love was out. Mother Love Bone had been signed to a major too. Seattle wasn't some undiscovered logging village where nobody outside Washington had heard an electric guitar.
But it wasn't 1992 either.
That's the difference.
Nobody was treating Seattle like the center of the fucking universe yet.
Temple of the Dog came out on A&M on April 16, 1991.
And basically nobody cared.
Okay, that's unfair.
People cared.
Just not very many of them.
The album didn't hit the charts when it came out. It sold some records, got reviewed, existed in stores, and that was about it. There wasn't a giant "SUPERGROUP!" sticker you could slap on the front because the group wasn't made out of superstars.
Then everything happened.
Ten.
Nevermind.
Badmotorfinger.
MTV.
Seattle.
Suddenly A&M looked back at this record sitting in its catalog and realized Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder were singing a duet on it.
Funny how that works.
The important distinction is that they didn't make a new Temple of the Dog album in 1992. They didn't suddenly reform the band. A&M pushed the existing record again.
And this time people noticed.
"Hunger Strike" became the obvious way in. The video, shot out at Discovery Park, put Chris and Eddie together on MTV just as those two faces were becoming recognizable everywhere. The album finally hit the charts. "Say Hello 2 Heaven" got another life too.
By the time I moved to Seattle in September '92, Temple of the Dog wasn't some forgotten A&M curiosity anymore.
That's around when I bought my copy.
"Hunger Strike" was the obvious one, but "Say Hello 2 Heaven" is the song that really got me.
Still is.
There's no clever trick to that song. Chris is singing goodbye to somebody he loved, and that's enough. Knowing what his voice could do sometimes makes people talk about the size of it — how high he could go, how hard he could push — but that's not what gets me there. It's how exposed he sounds.
Then there's "Reach Down," which is grief turned into this enormous psychedelic guitar workout.
And "Times of Trouble."
If that one sounds familiar, there's a reason.
Stone had written the music before either version had its final identity. Chris wrote "Times of Trouble" over it for Temple of the Dog. Eddie independently used the same Stone Gossard composition for "Footsteps."
Not the same recording.
Same bones.
Completely different song.
I love that because you can actually hear how tangled together all these bands were without drawing one of those ridiculous family-tree charts. The same piece of music goes in two directions because two singers hear something completely different inside it.
People sometimes call Temple of the Dog the bridge between Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam.
I understand why.
Stone and Jeff are there. Mike is there. Eddie enters the picture. Andy is the reason everybody came together in the first place.
But calling it a bridge makes the record sound like its only job was getting everybody from one band to another.
It wasn't.
For one thing, that leaves Soundgarden standing outside their own fucking record.
Chris started the project. Matt Cameron is behind the drums. Chris wrote most of the lyrics, sings the thing and plays guitar and other instruments all over it. Temple of the Dog isn't some missing Pearl Jam demo with Chris Cornell guesting.
It's also not Soundgarden with some friends sitting in.
It's its own record.
And maybe that's why it has held up so well after the novelty of seeing all those names together wore off. There was no five-year plan for Temple of the Dog. No second album waiting. No career strategy. By now it's still basically what it started as: a one-off project that happened because somebody died and the people around him wanted to make music together.
Everything that happened afterward changed the way the world heard it.
It didn't change why they made it.
That's why I try not to hear it backwards.
Put the record on and forget what all those people became.
It's late 1990.
Andy is gone.
Chris is writing for his friend.
Eddie is still the new guy.
Pearl Jam doesn't have that name yet.
Nobody knows what happens next.
That's the record.
