If you’ve been searching for the album that has the worst cover art quality relative to its audio quality (i.e. it looks like shit but sounds fucking phenomenal), you’ve found it. Temple Of The Dog is was a heartfelt one-off project formed to honor the life of lead singer Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone who died of a heroin overdose in the spring of 1990. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (who was roommates with Wood at the time) was gutted by his death and ended up writing two songs as a means to help him work through the loss. However, after connecting with Mother Love Bone members Stone Gossard (guitar) and Jeff Ament (bass) in the weeks following, the trio decided to take the project a step further and expand upon the material. Ament and Gossard saw the situation as therapeutic and added Soundgarden’s drummer Matt Cameron and Wood’s childhood friend Mike McReady to join the band and complete the five-piece.
The recording process took a mere 15 days and features a style of grunge that feels much more free-form and organic than many of the releases that would come in the mid-90’s. Whether it was due to the lack of a record label breathing down their necks, the joy of making music to deal with heartache, or a combination of all the above, Temple Of The Dog has stood the test of time for both its songwriting prowess (some of Chris Cornell’s finest career singing comes on this album, which is truly saying something considering how I feel about him) as well as the fact that another great 90’s grunge band emerged from the sessions– Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder had flown up from San Diego to audition for a band Ament, Gossard, and McCready were putting together and ended up being present at one of the Temple Of The Dog rehearsals. He jumped into the sessions and was a perfect fit for the iconic “Hunger Strike” which ended up being a duet between him and Cornell and earned the distinction of being Vedder’s first featured vocal on a record.
The wildest thing about the record is that it only sold about 70,000 copies in its first year and the band played two shows in support of it. And that was that, before the band went their separate ways to their projects with Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. It took over a year (once Pearl Jam blew up with their 1991 album Ten and Soundgarden released Badmotorfinger) before anyone outside of the Seattle market even knew who Temple Of The Dog was and A&M Records realized they were sitting on a record that was effectively a supergroup of two increasingly popular grunge bands. The label released a previously-filmed music video for “Hunger Strike”, promoted the album, and it went platinum and the rest was history.
Besides the occasional one-off show, Temple Of The Dog never toured outside of a small boutique tour of 8 shows in 2016 in celebration of the album’s 25th anniversary. The timing of that final tour was almost oddly prescient, as Chris Cornell would be found dead only a few months after those shows from a death by suicide. A tragic ending to one of the greatest rock singers of all-time.
Standout Songs: “Say Hello 2 Heaven”, “Hunger Strike”, “Pushin’ Forward Back”, “Times of Trouble”, “Four Walled World”
