CHRIS CORNELL Talks About Touring With GUNS N' ROSES

Rolling Stone magazine recently conducted a question-and-answer session with AUDIOSLAVE frontman Chris Cornell. An excerpt from the chat follows:

Rolling Stone: You toured with GUNS N' ROSES in 1991. Got a good Axl story?

Chris Cornell: "He was always hidden somewhere having a personal crisis — always. One time I was in the room when he was talking to his manager, Doug Goldstein, about wanting the Goodyear blimp for the show. I said this as a joke — even though it was true — that the Fuji blimp was the largest blimp in the world. Axl was like, 'That's it! It's gonna be the Fuji blimp!'"

Rolling Stone: What's the worst injury you've seen from the stage?

Chris Cornell: "I saw a girl with her arm on the retaining wall — someone came down on it, and it cracked and flopped back like it was made of balsa wood covered with rubber. . . ."

Rolling Stone: OK, enough.

Chris Cornell: "And at Wembley, with G N' R, I saw a guy die and be resuscitated. It was an enormous fat guy. While he was dead, he pissed in his pants. Paramedics were banging on his chest, and one of them hit him good, and he woke up swinging. I remember thinking, "I don't like this."

Rolling Stone: What recent song do you wish you'd written?

Chris Cornell: "The last was maybe 'Karma Police', from RADIOHEAD. There's something so simple about it."

Rolling Stone: If you punched "Most Played" on your iPod, what would come up?

Chris Cornell: "I don't know about most played song, but most played record would be BOB DYLAN's first one. I'm not a huge Dylan fan — he only wrote a couple of songs on that album — but they're all Dust Bowl, Depression-era hobo songs that are really fresh. It's almost like punk rock. Incredible. And be careful with headphones: When he hits the harmonica, it rips your head off."

Read the entire interview at this location.