AUDIOSLAVE Frontman Talks About His New Gig As Paris Restaurateur

Gene Stout of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently conducted an interview with AUDIOSLAVE/ex-SOUNDGARDEN frontman Chris Cornell. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

On his pre-SOUNDGARDEN job as a fish handler for a Ballard, Washington seafood wholesaler:

"I did it for years, from my early teens on. My job was to wipe up the slime and throw away the fish guts. I met pretty much every sous-chef in town because they would come in and look around at what we had. I think we had the best wholesale seafood in town. The owner was impeccable about it."

On his new gig as a Paris restaurateur along with his wife, Vicky (a Paris-based publicist),and brother-in-law Nicholas Karayiannis (also known as DJ Nick Blast),the offspring of a renowned New York restaurant executive:

"[It's a] restaurant-slash-bar where you're going to hear rock music."

"It's also very European. There's nothing really like it in Paris. It's a place where you can go and be dressed up or be in jeans. It doesn't matter, either way you'll be comfortable. Though it fits into the classic French-European atmosphere of Paris, it's not really about that."

"When Nicholas and I started talking about it, it went from a discussion to something happening very quickly. Real estate is the key, and once you find a place, you have to make up your mind. Are we going to do this or not? Because this isn't going to be here if we wait too long.

"We thought, 'Let's have this experience. Let's do it.' From there it was about just getting out of our own way."

"When we were renovating the restaurant, we pretty much gutted it and discovered a beautiful fresco on the ceiling that someone guessed was from around 1780. That predates Lewis and Clark. That's fascinating to me."

"Nick and Vicky were raised in a restaurant family and they have a very familial Greek way of doing things. Nicholas was the one in charge at first, but bounced ideas off other people, particularly Vicky and I and my mother-in-law."

On a period of depression and alcoholism that followed SOUNDGARDEN's breakup in 1997:

"I went through a serious crisis with depression where I didn't eat a whole meal every day. I was just kind of shutting down. I eventually found that the only way out of that was to change virtually everything in my life. That was a very frightening thing to do, but it was worthwhile. ... "

"But I felt there was something on the horizon that was going to be very big and I didn't know what it was going to be, but I felt like it was out there somewhere."

On going through rehab for alcohol abuse about 3 1/2 years ago:

"It was something I didn't want to do and I guess I was intimidated by it. I thought I was smart enough and that it wasn't really necessary. But it got to the point where I had to do something."

"I mean, I would not have met [my wife Vicky] and we would not have had a relationship. The long and short of it is that she wouldn't have had anything to do with me."

On embracing Paris as his new home:

"Paris is everything I never had growing up in Seattle. Which is a vast history, incredible architecture, and art everywhere that is age-old.

"It's the polar opposite of Seattle, where what was inspiring to me was the terrain, the mountains, the trees and water. I feel lucky to have grown up around that."

Read the entire interview at this location.