Temple of the Dog

Temple of the Dog was never supposed to be a band so much as a wake. Soundgarden's Chris Cornell put it together in Seattle in 1990 as a tribute to his late friend Andrew Wood, the singer of Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone, and he brought in Wood's old Mother Love Bone bandmates Stone Gossard on rhythm guitar and Jeff Ament on bass, along with Mike McCready on lead guitar and his Soundgarden partner Matt Cameron on drums. A young singer named Eddie Vedder dropped by as a guest and ended up singing some of the lead and backing parts.

They cut the record at London Bridge Studio in Seattle in November and December 1990 with Rick Parashar producing, and A&M released the self-titled Temple of the Dog in April 1991. It's a big, grieving, generous record, heavier on soul than on sludge: slow-building songs like "Say Hello 2 Heaven" and "Wooden Jesus" where Cornell's enormous voice gets all the room it wants. "Hunger Strike" is the one everybody remembers, and for good reason: it circles and gathers like a storm rolling in, and it never stops sounding like a goodbye.

Critics liked it at the time, but hardly anyone else noticed until 1992, when Vedder, Ament, Gossard and McCready broke big with Pearl Jam, whose debut Ten had come out just 4 months after Temple of the Dog. Suddenly this odd little tribute looked like a supergroup in hindsight, and people went back to find it. Cameron eventually joined Pearl Jam too, after Soundgarden first broke up, drumming for them from 1998 to 2025, which meant that for years Pearl Jam was Temple of the Dog minus Cornell.

The band got back together in 2016 to mark the album's 25th anniversary and hit the road for the first and only time. It was one record and one tour, and it still hits like a eulogy you can headbang to.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.