During a chat on BBC Radio, Foo Fighters drummer spoke about his late-friend and inspiration, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell. Ultimate-Guitar.com transcribed portions of the interview, in which Hawkins was pressed to name his “rock god,” and answered, “My rock god is Chris Cornell, whom sadly we don't have anymore, which is really, really a bummer; I'm really bummed that I don't get to see a Soundgarden show ever again. They were a great, amazing band — Matt Cameron's one of the greatest drummers to walk the planet Earth, and Chris Cornell was so powerful and beautiful-looking and sounding.”
Hawkins went on to say, “His voice was unbelievable, his range was unbelievable, his lyrics were thought-provoking, dark, mysterious. And I'd send him a track every once in a while and he'd listen to it, and really give me feedback on it. And I'm thinking, 'Well, Chris Cornell doesn't need to do that. He's just being a sweetheart.'”
He went on to shed light on what separated Soundgarden from the rest of their grunge-era peers: “They were that first band to have the chops of a band like — dare I say Rush or Yes or something like that, prog chops, but they weren't a prog-rock band, they were a punk rock band. Cornell could sing as low as Lou Reed or (David) Bowie and then all of a sudden he could be up in the stratosphere as (Ronnie James) Dio or frickin' Axl Rose or whatever. He had this range, and the band had a range. So, Chris Cornell is who I pick as my rock god right now and I miss him dearly.”
Not long before his 2017 suicide, Chris Cornell himself told us a while back why Soundgarden was key in making alternative music commercially successful: “We were, I think, the first band that was on 120 Minutes and Headbangers Ball at the same time, and that was this moment where you could look at that and think, 'Well, what does this mean? It means something, but we don't know what that is yet.' What it meant was commercial rock was gonna change a lot, and it was gonna include what was already included in college, alternative, indie music. Indie music was suddenly going to become the mainstream.”
