Hello, Chris

Cornell hits the yellow brick road

by Ted Drozdowski

The post-grunge era now has its Elton John, in Chris Cornell.

With his likable new solo album, Euphoria Morning (A&M), and his first tour as a bandleader, which began in Cambridge a week ago Monday, Cornell has made the transition from king of angst to prince of romance. Sure, the teeth gnashing and soul searching that were part of so-called grunge's principles are still intact in his lyrics. But the steely exterior of his former band Soundgarden's wall of guitars and metal-edged thud has been chiseled away. Cornell is now a dependable singer of mid-tempo ballads full of characters who grow weary waving goodbye, who long for sweet euphoria. And he lets it be known that even those who can do anything at all and have anything they please can't change him.

If this last scenario -- essentially the text for Euphoria Morning's catchy opener, "Can't Change Me" -- doesn't sound like the plot of "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," that's only because you haven't heard Sir Elton's 1973 smash. Maybe you were just too young. Maybe Cornell was too. After all, he was a pup when the Sex Pistols first took the stage. And Soundgarden's history makes him an unlikely reviver of heart-on-sleeve balladry.

Soundgarden were the outfit who introduced the recycled metal sound of Seattle and its Sub Pop record label to the world in 1987 with the Screaming Life EP. The group's first album was on another diehard indie, SST. Even when the majors came calling and Soundgarden released Louder Than Love on A&M, in 1989, their sound was a speedball of superheated scrap-iron aggression. In their mid-'90s commercial triumphs Superunknown (storehouse of the psychedelic mega-hit "Black Hole Sun") and Down on the Upside, Soundgarden retained their dark edge, plying inverted chords and low-tuned guitars through a wall of amplifiers.

In the wake of Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and all that arose through their influence, it's easy to forget what was the key to grunge's ability to cut to the bone for so many listeners. Although the music was cast in a post-punk/post-metal world, its bedrock was classic pop songwriting. These bands embraced the values of plain-vanilla rhythms, hooks, and lyrics that speak to the population at large. It's a formula that Kurt Cobain, Hank Williams, and the Gershwins all understood.

Chris Cornell and Elton John know it too. It would require more than a three-day vodka binge for me to insist that Cornell used John's enjoyable '70s classics as a template, or even a point of inspiration, for his solo debut. (Maybe four days?) But parallels strike the ears like velvet hammers, both on his CD and in his Sanders performance.

If you can find a copy of John's 1975 hit "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," play it against Cornell's similarly redemptive "Preaching the End of the World." Listen to how his florid singing in the choruses -- a constant, as it is in John's catalogue -- arches up to near-falsetto, how his melodies curve high until there's no choice but to follow another pleasing curve down. Cornell's "Flutter Girl" is colored by the kind of clean-toned creamy guitar that Davey Johnstone used to decorate some of John's best songs. (That number's wah-wah and rhythm-guitar layers also recall the late-'60s/'70s guitarist Terry Kath of the group Chicago.) "When I'm Down" is the sort of unabashedly romantic piano-based ballad that was a staple of John albums like Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water, replete with another Johnstone-style break. "Sweet Euphoria," with its religious imagery and portrayal of the singer as a holy innocent in search of redemption, explores the same notions as John's 1972 "Levon." And so it goes.

Live at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, there were, of course, differences. Cornell is thinner than John ever was, and he still prefers his all-black-jacket/T-shirt/jeans costume to feather boas. But the same delicious smell of ham lingered in the air after each song's climax found Cornell emoting like a wanna-be Wagnerian. Sanders Theatre's acoustic doesn't make it ideal for a rock show, even one with few crashing guitars. Loud volumes tend to create distortion as sounds reflect from its walls, so the meaning got drained from Cornell's lyrics. It was, though, easy to see what he was singing about as he clutched the microphone stand at center stage, closing his eyes each time he pushed his voice up to reach for the emotional brass ring. Cornell's message was that there's heavy personal stuff going on in his new songs. The delighted audience agreed -- as, I'm sure, will young romantics at every turn of life's yellow brick road.