Temple of the Dog — the Seattle
supergroup featuring Soundgarden’s Chris
Cornell, Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament,
Stone Gossard, and Mike McCready, and drummer Matt
Cameron(who plays drums with both Soundgarden and Pearl Jam) — has reunited
and will tour for the first time ever since forming in 1990. The band will play
five cities, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle,
in November.
A special
ticket pre-sale for fans signed up to the Ten Club, Soundgarden, and Chris
Cornell email lists begins immediately and runs through July 27th. Tickets
will go on sale to the general public at 12:00 PM local time on Friday the 29th.
$1.50 from each ticket sold
will benefit the Chris and Vicky Cornell Foundation and an additional $1.50
will benefit Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy Foundation.
The
tour marksthe 25th anniversary of the release of Temple of the Dog’s first
and only album, a self-titled set that was released by A&M Records on April
16th, 1991. “We wanted to do
the one thing we never got to do… play shows and see what it feels like to be
the band that we walked away from 25 years ago,” Cornell says of the 2016 tour.
On September 30th UMe will release
a special Temple of the Dog 25th anniversary reissue collection of
their landmark album,newly mixed by Brendan O’Brien. The collection will be
available in four configurations, including a four disc Super Deluxe, a double
LP, a two CD Deluxe, and a single CD. Physical pre-orders are available today
along with a detailed list of the contents of each configuration HERE.
Temple
of the Dog came together from the ashes of Mother
Love Bone following the death from a drug overdose of its frontman Andrew Wood, Cornell’s close friend and
roommate. Cornell wrote future TOTD songs “Say
Hello 2 Heaven” and “Reach Down”
to help process his grief, “but the songs didn’t have any destination,” he
says. “I was compelled to write them and there they were – written in a vacuum
as a tribute to Andy. My thought was that maybe I could record these songs with
the remaining members of Mother Love Bone and that maybe we could release them
as a tribute.”
Mother
Love Bone’s Gossard and Ament began playing with McCready, and they brought in Soundgarden’s
Cameron to drum on demos. Because this was a collaboration, and a tribute,
there was no commercial expectation for the Temple of the Dog album. It would
be, Gossard would later observe, “the easiest and most beautiful record that
we’ve ever been involved with.” Adds Cornell: “Temple was about making an album
simply for the joy of doing it. We weren’t concerned what anyone outside of our
group of friends would think of it. It was the first and maybe only stress-free
album that we all made.”
Gossard,
Ament, and McCready were also simultaneously forming a new band, which more
than six months later would be known as Pearl
Jam. A singer from San Diego named Eddie
Vedder, who was vying to lead the project, came into the studio to sing
background vocals on three of the Temple songs. When Cornell thought another
song, “Hunger Strike,” needed a
duet, Vedder was enlisted. “Hunger Strike” became a hit single, peaking at No.
4 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock
Tracks chart.
Temple
of the Dog performed live only a handful of times, most notably in Seattle, in
November and December of 1990. Those shows have become some of the most
legendary Seattle concerts of all-time. Their 2016 shows mark the first time
the band has ever toured. (Cornell joined Pearl Jam in 2014 at the Bridge
School show and for two nights at PJ20 in Alpine Valley, WI, and the Temple
line-up played “Reach Down” and “Call Me
a Dog” at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall in January 2015.)
“This is something no one has ever seen,”
Cornell says of the official reunion. “We wanted to stop and recognize that we
did this and pay homage.”
Temple
of the Dog’s upcoming tour dates are as follows:
11/04 Philadelphia, PA Tower Theater
11/07 New York, NY Madison
Square Garden
11/11 San Francisco, CA Bill Graham Civic Center
11/14 Los Angeles, CA The Forum
11/20 Seattle, WA Paramount
Theater
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