Chris Cornell and Van Halen: Jam Session Stories
Alex Van Halen sure dropped a ton of juicy revelations in his recent Rolling Stone interview. One of those revelations involved Chris Cornell.
AVH shared that he, Eddie Van Halen, and Cornell jammed together at some point, but he wasn’t positive on when exactly this happened. Alex described Cornell as being “in a very fragile part of his life.” He added that this jam session had Cornell on bass, and things go intense over the course of a 45-minute jam.
“The motherf—er got so into it he started bleeding,” said Alex. “I said, ‘This is the man you want,’ And then he died.”
Cornell died in 2017, so whether or not this jam happened near his death is unknown, despite it being sort of implied in Alex’s quote. However, it’s not the only known instance of Cornell getting together with one of the Van Halens.
In July 2023, guitarist Pete Thorn shared on The Mitch Lafon & Jeremy White Show that Eddie almost appeared on one of Cornell’s solo albums. Thorn played on Cornell’s 2008 solo album Scream. During the aughts, Thorn said Cornell and Van Halen were friendly acquaintances. While working on Scream and listening to various tracks, Cornell asks Thorn what he thought about getting Eddie to play on the album. Thorn was very intrigued and excited about the idea and told Cornell to reach out to the guitar icon.
After a few weeks of no follow-up on the idea, Thorn says he ran into his friend Dave Friedman. Friedman had some various tech work for EVH. Friedman was going to Van Halen’s 5150 Studio to do some work for Eddie. Thorn asks Friedman to float the idea of working with Cornell by Eddie.
“45 minutes later, he texted me and said, ‘Ed wants you to call him, here’s his cell phone number,’” says Thorn. “So, I called and I left him a message and… he called me back a couple of days later. We spoke and he said, ‘Well how soon can you come up the studio and play me this stuff?’ …So, we set up a date, I drove up the 5150, and he was just so cool.”
Thorn did make it clear that there isn’t a completed song somewhere “in the vault.” He said, “I don’t want to get anyone excited about this thinking it ever got finished because it didn’t, but he did work on it.”
Thorn noted further, “I would go up there over the next couple of weeks, and he had played on it, and I’d be like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening, myself and Eddie on a track.’ But it’s a long story, but it never got a vocal on it by Chris. And Ed got busy doing the next Van Halen album right about then … it just never ended up getting finished.”
