Becoming Chris Cornell

Years before he was minted as a proper platinum-selling star, the late Soundgarden frontman tore off his thrift-store T-shirts and wailed like Robert Plant, transfixing a fledgling Seattle scene with little use for rock gods.

- Mark Yarm

Evan Schiller didn't know Chris Cornell very well — when it came down to it, few people really did — but the drummer for the ’90s Seattle band Sad happy cherishes one particular memory of the late Soundgarden front man. It was December 1991, and their mutual friend Soozy Bridges was throwing a party at her beachfront house in West Seattle. On what was perhaps the coldest day of the year — “19 degrees out, snowing,” in Schiller’s recollection — he and about 10 others gathered outside around a roaring bonfire. At about midnight, Cornell showed up.

“He didn’t make a big production of it, but he proceeded to rip off his shirt and pants and jump into the pitch-black Puget Sound,” says Schiller. Cornell quickly swam out so far that no one could see or hear him. “We were all freaking out, going, ‘Holy shit! What do we do? Call 911?’ ” recalls Schiller. “Then Soozy says, ‘Oh, he always goes out swimming in the Sound at night.’ But he was out there for five minutes, then 10, then 15 or 20 — it could have been as long as half an hour.”

Schiller couldn’t imagine how anyone survived that long in those frigid waters. “Finally, Chris emerges like Neptune,” he says. “And then he starts picking up people from the party — he was lifting 200-pound guys and carrying them down to the water and throwing them into the Sound, laughing maniacally the whole time.”

This was Chris Cornell in what Van Conner, guitarist for Cornell’s contemporaries Screaming Trees, calls “commando mode.” Two months earlier, Soundgarden had released Badmotorfinger, its third album — and the first to hit the market post-