Corey Taylor, the frontman of Slipknot and Stone Sour, joined Halestorm onstage to perform Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike.” The collaboration happened at the Quicken Loans Arena during the second Alternative Press Music Awards in Cleveland, Ohio.
If you are wondering who Temple of the Dog was, or where they fit in with the Seattle scene of the early 1990s, you are not alone. Although, the band was comprised of members of, both, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, the supergroup’s April 1991 self-titled debut did not become a hit until the members’ main bands’ began to gain notoriety. And, to really understand the story of how this super group came to be, listeners have to go back to March 19, 1990, which was the day that Mother Love Bone and Malfunkshun vocalist Andrew Wood passed away from a heroin overdose. He was 24.
Prior to his untimely death, Wood had become friends with fellow vocalist Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. And, after hearing the news, Cornell – who was on tour at the time, according to Loudwire – wrote “Reach Down” and “Say Hello 2 Heaven” about Wood.
In conversation with Seattle radio station KISW-FM, Cornell said, “I figured it would be this great thing, because I would be away from home and I wouldn’t have to look at places where I saw him or see things that would remind me of him and I thought it would be really great but it was awful because I couldn’t talk to anybody. So I started writing songs. That was the only thing I could really think of to do. 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.”
Then, he approached Mother Love Bone’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament to get their thoughts on the burgeoning project.
According to Loudwire, Ament stated the recording process and subsequent album was “a really good thing at the time for us too, because Stone and I were still trying to figure out what the hell we were doing. It kind of put us in a band situation where we could play and make music, and I think in some ways it was so much fun that we didn’t want to stop.”
And, the men that would become known as Pearl Jam were also beginning to assemble in Seattle, too. Cornell, Ament, and Gossard would go on to bring in Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, Pearl Jam’s guitarist Mike McCready and their vocalist Eddie Vedder to play and sing on several tracks.
So, how did this now-legendary collaboration come to be?
Loudwire reported that Chris Cornell addressed the duet, stating that “[Eddie] was at one of our rehearsals for Temple of the Dog because he had flown up here. It was the week he was trying out for [Pearl Jam] I guess, and he told me afterwards that he really liked that song and the thing about that song among a couple of others that were stylistically the vocals really weren’t anything that I had done before, on a record anyway. It wasn’t really the way I was used to singing, and I thought his voice suited that song really well and I thought it would be a great duet … He sang half that song not even knowing that I’d wanted that part to be there and he sang it exactly the way I was thinking about doing it, just instinctively.”
On a related note, Halestorm had previously recorded “Hunger Strike” on their ReAniMate: The CoVeRs eP.
Check out a video of the collaboration between Taylor and Halestorm, below.
Apart from this collaboration what have Halestorm and Taylor, respectively, been working on recently?
In 2015, Halestorm released a video of their single, “Apocalyptic,” from the band’s latest album, Into The Wild Life. Into The Wild Life is the follow-up to Halestorm’s 2012 Grammy-award winning album, The Strange Case Of….
What was it like to make the third Halestorm album?
“It was a lot of fun,” Halestorm frontwoman Lzzy Hale said in an interview with The Pulse of Radio, according to Blabbermouth. “It was such a freeing process ’cause it really didn’t feel like we were — ‘we’re recording an album now, guys!’ It just — we were in this big, overhauled church, you know, so it didn’t feel like we were in a studio and there was just every instrument everywhere. There was a piano and everything was all set up so it’s like, whatever you wanted to do, you could just do.”
And, after playing a series of festival dates this summer, which included stops at Rock On The Range and the Loudwire Music Festival, the band announced that they will be hitting the road, again, in September.
And for his part, Corey Taylor has been flexing his creative muscles through print. His third book, “You’re Making Me Hate You: A Cantankerous Look At The Common Misconception That Humans Have Any Common Sense Left,” was published on July 7th, 2015, via Da Capo Press. His book is described, according to Blabbermouth, as “Taylor’s take on Peter Griffin’s ‘You Know What Really Grinds My Gears’.” In “You’re Making Me Hate You,” the musician and author offers a commentary popular culture and modern society. He supported the release with in-store events at a series of bookstores, along with a number of solo dates, which Blabbermouth described as being “one-of-a-kind shows featuring readings from the book, acoustic performance, and audience discussion.”
Lastly, Taylor will be onstage with Slipknot as the band is playing a series of festivals, including Heavy Montreal in August, and Knotfest in October.
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