Chris Cornell: 6 Degrees of Separation

There’s a misconception that it takes a lot of people to come together to create a viable music scene…not true… The original punk scene in New York consisted of a few dozen weirdos who hung out at places like CBGB, the mudd club and Max’s Kansas city in the uglier end of town… The UK punk scene started with a similar number in the fall of 1976, pretty much every London punk fit into a single club on oxford street for a two-night music festival…capacity at the 100 club was official 350, but there was plenty of room to move around… The start of the english technopop scene focused around the few people who hung around the blitz club in Covent Garden… The same can be said for a dozen other scenes that resulted in sounds that eventually spread around the world…that includes grunge… Grunge started with maybe a dozen people in and around Seattle…that’s it…but within a few years, it expanded to became the dominant sound of western rock for much of the 90s… To become this in such a short period of time, this required a swift and steady change reaction…among those dozen or so people were artists who were not only to form successful bands but multiple successful bands…and every one of these groups exploded with a force great enough to prompt other neighbouring music to do the same… To prove my point, i would like to trace one of those chain reactions…and for the purposes of this show, we will call the singularity of this chain reaction “Chris Cornell”…a lesson in grunge physics coming up…