ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS: Temple Of The Dog

When Pearl Jam followed Nirvana out of Seattle and onto world domination, Kurt Cobain gracelessly called them sell-outs who were just cashing in on grunge, which was as wildly inaccurate as it was unfair. Indeed, Pearl Jam were much more entrenched in the Seattle scene than Nirvana ever were, because guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had been in some of the bands who helped lay the foundations for the success that Nirvana had, like Green River and Mother Love Bone.

In March 1990, Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose just before their first album came out. That left Gossard and Ament to start setting up another band, initially called Mookie Blaylock (catchy name, eh?) while their friend Chris Cornell from fellow Seattle band Soundgarden went off on tour just after Wood's death and began writing some songs as a tribute to him. Those songs were called Reach Down and Say Hello 2 Heaven.

Cornell approached Ament and Gossard about getting together a group to record and release these songs as tribute single and they added Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron and a guitarist called Mike McCready, who had known Gossard since high school. Cornell had continued writing songs, meanwhile, and it was decided there was enough to make a full album, particularly as most of this material was much more melodic than he would normally be writing for his day-job band.

And so Temple Of The Dog was born, taking their name from a line in a Mother Love Bone song. The self-titled album came out in April 1991, and while it didn't particularly garner much attention at the time, its importance in the grunge timeline is unmistakeable. One of the best tracks and the only single released from the album is Hunger Strike, a duet between Cornell and an at-the-time-unknown singer called Eddie Vedder, who had been in town auditioning for Mookie Blaylock.

His now-unmistakeable vocals work perfectly alongside Cornell and make it one of the best and most significant songs in Seattle music history. Temple Of The Dog went their separate ways after the album came out, with Cornell and Cameron carrying on with Soundgarden until they split up in 1997 and Ament, Gossard, McCready and Vedder forming the band that soon became known as Pearl Jam. Fittingly, after Soundgarden's implosion, Cameron joined his former Temple mates as the full-time Pearl Jam drummer.

At a show in 2003, Cornell joined them for a show and performed Reach Down and Hunger Strike, while he also delighted this writer at an Audioslave show at the MEN Arena in 2005 when his solo acoustic mini-set included the beautiful Call Me A Dog, even if virtually no-one else seemed to know what it was. The effect that Temple Of The Dog had on Cornell as a songwriter can't be underestimated, as this period seems to be the pivotal moment in Soundgarden's career, where they stopped being a heavy metal group and moved towards becoming a hugely-popular grunge group with hits like the melodic Black Hole Sun.

For that reason alone, this is an important album, even without the effect it had in bringing all of the current members of Pearl Jam together for the first time. And, more than that, it's also a fantastic album on its own merits, and a fitting tribute to a now-mostly-forgotten talent in Andrew Wood. With rock supergroups like Audioslave and Velvet Revolver crashing and burning in recent years, Temple Of The Dog is a reminder of how something special really can happen when members of your favourite bands get together and make music...