(Credit: Far Out / Andreas Eldh)

As the grunge explosion that dominated the alternative world and thrust Washington’s little logging city to the musical map began to ebb by the mid-1990s, there was little doubt about who boasted the greatest bellow in Seattle.

While Nirvana became the unwitting figurehead and Pearl Jam forged a commercial bridge to stadium appeal, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell possessed a primal howl that could be heard across all of rock, everybody from Axl Rose, Ronnie James Dio and Alice Cooper candid about their admiration for the late frontman.

Following Soundgarden’s first break-up in 1997, Cornell released a string of moderately successful solo records and fronted the collaborative Rage Against the Machine side-project Audioslave. For his third album, Cornell sought to embrace the pop trends of the day, teaming up with R&B producer Timbaland for 2009’s electropop club-tinged Scream. While Cornell and Timbaland both expressed huge pride in the record, critical reception didn’t agree, unanimously deeming the ‘experiment’ a bizarre misfire whose disparate backgrounds never gel.

Further notoriety was added by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor’s excoriating tweet: “You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell‘s record? Jesus”.

During Scream‘s production, Cornell and backing band guitarist Pete Thorn thought to reach out to one of hard rock’s biggest names. “I produced a couple of versions of a song called ‘Long Gone’ and ‘Scream,’ the title track from the album, in a very stripped-down kind of acoustic way, with brushes on the snare drum and upright bass and stuff, and me playing acoustic guitar,” Thorn revealed on The Mitch Lafon and Jeremy White Show in 2022. “So Chris listened to them he’s like, ‘I love this, man.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘What do you think if we got Eddie to work on this, if we would ask him to play on it?’”

Cornell and Van Halen had been friends since the late 1990s, and Eddie professed to be a huge Soundgarden fan. It didn’t take much convincing for Eddie to lay down a guitar part for the album’s title track: “… I would listen to it and just be like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening. This is myself and Eddie on a track”.

While no doubt a fun moment, the recording never progressed, Cornell never added his vocal and Eddie wrapped up in producing Van Halen’s final A Different Kind of Truth LP. The cuts have yet to see the light, the original 24-track reel reportedly still deep in Van Halen’s famous 5150 Studio in Los Angeles.

Cornell and Van Halen would cross paths years later. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2024, drummer and older brother Alex revealed that, along with Ozzy Osbourne, Cornell was considered as the band’s frontman. “I got behind the drums, and he started playing bass,” Alex stated. “We played for 45 minutes. This motherfucker got so into it he started bleeding. I said, ‘This is the man you want.’ And then he died.” What could have been? Sadly, Cornell died in 2017 with Eddie passing three years later.