Chris Cornell knows how to say no. When musicians ask him for advice, he tells them to be clear about not just what they want, but what they won't be willing to do. So when Cornell, the erstwhile lead singer of Soundgarden, met with three former members of Rage Against the Machine to discuss forming a supergroup, he laid out the deal breakers: He wouldn't write political lyrics, and he wouldn't be the new lead singer of Rage. As usual in his life, he got his way. "It's just easier to say what you want," Cornell says. Audioslave seemed as unlikely a union as Prince and the Ramones. Soundgarden and Rage were both multiplatinum rock bands in the Nineties, but Soundgarden were heavy psychedelic grunge, while Rage were rock-rap innovators, known for their left-wing politics as much as for their science-fiction guitar sounds. Cornell's vocal role model was Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, while Zack de la Rocha's was Chuck D of Public Enemy. Their fans weren't clamoring for this merger; the idea came from producer Rick Rubin. He was right: The music brings together many of the best qualities of the two bands, showcasing both Cornell's impassioned yowling and Tom Morello's mad-scientist guitar playing.

Audioslave's music is a lot better than their name, which, frankly, is terrible -- the group's first choice, Civilian, was already taken. Cornell picked the current name, and the other members gamely claim that it has grown on them, carefully emphasizing that it's not meant to imply that they're slaves to music. "I remember days when I would come up with twenty cool names for a band when I had no band to name," says Cornell. "Once it was time to name a band, I couldn't come up with anything."

After almost two years of recording and wrangling over business issues, Audioslave have now released their CD, Audioslave, and the time has come for them to give interviews to dozens of publications, from Finland to Japan. They do this in an upscale hotel on the Santa Monica beach outside L.A., each member in his own room. This has the advantage of press-junket efficiency, but it underscores a certain degree of separation among Audioslave's members. Although they have a warm professional regard for each other, they don't really hang out together.

Bassist Tim Commerford splits his free time between his family (he has an infant son) and mountain biking; he talks with the enthusiasm of a sports fan calling the local talk station. Looking back at Rage, he says, "We went to the Super Bowl, and we won. But Zack got a contract with another team, so now I just want to beat him like all the other teams." Commerford and de la Rocha were childhood friends but haven't spoken in two years; in a more serious moment, Commerford admits, "I hope that one of us will be a big enough man just to say, 'This is bullshit. I love you.' "

Guitarist Morello, a Harvard graduate and the nephew of the first elected president of Kenya, is quick-witted and infectiously cheerful. He speaks passionately about axisofjustice.org, where he has funneled his political activism. He's also now going without his trademark baseball caps, revealing his stylishly bald head. Brad Wilk is the rock-steady drummer who's been spending his spare time reading books on Buddhism and Siddhartha.

And Chris Cornell? He's a rock star. Or at the very least, at thirty-eight he still looks the part: frosted tips in his hair, red undershirt, leather jacket and a steady flow of American Spirit cigarettes. He lights them with wooden kitchen matches that you half-expect him to strike on the soles of his motorcycle boots. He doesn't make much eye contact, and he'd clearly rather be discussing silent movies or his white German shepherd than Audioslave. ("Her pedigree was listed, with her ancestors. I think it was her grandfather who was Sir Hitler's von Schwartzbald. And another relative was called King Cocaine. And I thought, 'What's wrong with these idiots?' ") But he's genuine and acidly funny.

Cornell has been splitting his time between the Seattle area and Ojai, California; he and Susan Silver (formerly Soundgarden's manager) have been together for seventeen years, are now married and have a two-year-old daughter, Lillian Jean. "It's really difficult to imagine the relationship you'll have with a person who doesn't exist yet," Cornell says. "But it turns out she's very charismatic and strong-willed. I notice when she pays attention to adults, it would be as if you were at a party and a rock star paid attention to you."

Looking back at his former band, Cornell says, "There's no more Soundgarden worries. I like all the music, I like the fact that our integrity was always intact. And now, save us getting back together someday and destroying what we did, nothing can affect that."

Cornell was small until puberty, which he says came late for him. But he learned to fight back with "psychological warfare," which proved handy with Soundgarden, he says. "I learned a lot from Kim [Thayil, Soundgarden's guitarist] -- like how to win an argument without being right." With Audioslave, the flash point came on March 25th, 2002: Three days after the band announced it would be touring with Ozzfest, Cornell left the group and went back to Seattle. "My dog looks at me wrong, I'm outta here," Cornell says. "I pretty much live my whole life that way. The last time I walked away from my wife in an argument, she had this metal cone-shaped arrangement holding her hair together, and she threw it at me like Bruce Lee throwing a Chinese star -- and hit me from thirty feet! You have to be careful what you walk away from."

The main reason Cornell quit Audioslave was that the band's business issues were still in turmoil, primarily because he and the former Ragers had each kept their own management companies, who hated each other. The other members called him as soon as he left, to re-establish communication; Morello says, "We've made a concerted effort to learn from some of our past mistakes with both bands." About six weeks later, when the mix for Audioslave was finished, Cornell returned to the fold; everybody fired their former management companies, and they collectively hired the Firm. Similarly, Epic and Interscope resolved their claims on Audioslave by agreeing to take turns releasing their albums.

The reason the other guys were fighting so hard to keep Cornell? "We had a great vibe," Morello says. "We wrote and recorded more new music in eight months with Chris than we did in the previous eight years with Rage Against the Machine."

Their debut album is drawn from a nineteen-day jam session during which the band wrote twenty-one songs. After the first day, Cornell chose not to play guitar, feeling that it smeared the rhythms and frequencies, making the music less heavy. "I like playing guitar," Cornell says, "but if it's not needed, I don't make more work for myself than necessary." Still, whenever the band members got stuck with how to make a song work, they would thrust a guitar into Cornell's hands, who ended up writing a lot of bridges.

The former members of Rage had to learn how to play with a vocalist who sings melodies rather than cadences: Epic ballads such as "The Last Remaining Light" required more delicacy than they had previously employed. Or, as Rick Rubin told them, "You need to learn how to come soft."

Early on, Cornell noticed that some of Commerford's bass playing was clashing with his melodies. Cornell remembers his concern: "How am I going to tell this guy, who I don't know well and who has a tattoo over his whole body, that he can't play that note? Well, I'm pretty good at being assertive to anybody, so I said, 'Tim, you can't play that note.' " Cornell was expecting a confrontation, but instead found that Commerford wanted to know how his bass playing could best work with the singing. "From that moment, everything transformed," Cornell says. "Everybody felt comfortable bringing in things that they had never done with each other."

"Like a Stone" synthesizes a lot of those disparate ideas; it careens from belting Cornell vocals to acoustic passages to a great Morello squeegee solo. Although the title makes it sound like an answer song to Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," Cornell says, "It's a song about concentrating on the afterlife you would hope for, rather than the normal monotheistic approach: You work really hard all your life to be a good person and a moral person and fair and generous . . . ," Cornell pauses, thinking about the afterlife he's made for himself, and he grins. "And then you go to hell anyway."

GAVIN EDWARDS
(November 5, 2002)