Product Description

On the eve of up-and-coming Seattle rockers Mother Love Bone's full-length major label debut (1990's APPLE), singer Andrew Wood succumbed to a drug overdose. Longtime friend ChrisCornell, the singer of Soundgarden, wrote several songs in Wood's memory. These were rooted more in classic rock than his full-time band's metallic sound. Cornell recorded them with ex-members of Mother Love Bone guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament, Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, and then-unknowns Mike McCready and Eddie Vedder, in a project called Temple Of The Dog.
The project's self-titled 1991 debut fell on deaf ears. While such songs as the sullen albumopener "Say Hello 2 Heaven" and the epic jamfest "Reach Down" have lyrics that deal with Wood's passing, most of the tracks deal with other topics, such as the album's high point "Hunger Strike", as well as the organic-sounding "Wooden Jesus", the hard rocker "Your Saviour", and the drowsy album closer "All Night Thing". A year after its initial release, the Seattle rock scene exploded and the massive success of themembers of Temple Of The Dog prompted A&M to re-release both the album and the video for "Hunger Strike". Both were immediate hits the second time around.

Track Listing

1. Say Hello 2 Heaven
2. Reach Down
3. Hunger Strike
4. Pushin' Forward Back
5. Call Me A Dog
6. Times Of Trouble
7. Wooden Jesus
8. Your Savior
9. Four Walled World
10. All Night Thing

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5574 in Music
• Released on: 1991-04-30
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 55 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
This 1991 Seattle supergroup brought together Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron of Soundgarden with the surviving members of Mother Love Bone (Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard) and Eddie Vedder, later of Pearl Jam. The experiment worked. Cornell shines, seeming more comfortable here on this tribute to his former roommate and deceased MLB lead singer Andrew Wood than with his own band. "Hunger Strike" and "Say Hello 2 Heaven" combine glam and grunge better than anything in Love Bone's catalogue, while "Wooden Jesus" is less didactic than anything in Pearl Jam's oeuvre. Most of the songs may be about loss and addiction but this is compelling music for dark days. --Charles R. Cross

Customer Reviews

Definitive Grunge
Before Pearl Jam and Soundgarden exploded on to the world stage in the early 90's came this well crafted and moving tribute to Mother Love Bone front-man Andrew Wood.
Born out of ideas from Chris Cornell (Wood's room-mate) and Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard (ex-Mother Love Bone), this is an exercise in how to pay hommage to one of your friends.
At times dark and moody, the album is never anything less than reverential toward the memory of Wood but with sincere and poignant pose and grace.
It can be mellow, it can be balls to the wall rock n roll, but with songs as good as "Say Hello to Heaven", "Pushing Forward Back" and the bon-fide grunge classic "Hunger Strike", it doesn't really matter. The music wraps around you, cossets you and takes you away to a different place.
You will recognise many of the feelings that this album will arouse in you, and you will ally yourself with the feeling of loss and the emptiness left when a friend is taken.
This is an album that taps into what makes us all human...friendship, love and pain.
For anyone who has even the slightest liking for the "Seattle Sound" of the early 90's, this is a must-have album....worth it just for the vocal pairing of Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell on the mighty "Hunger Strike"...just a great, great album.

A final nail in the coffin. Bang it in.
I can't come down too hard on this one because I'm afraid I'm not passionate about this kind of music anymore. As the years have passed, and as I've moved on to other types of music and other bands it's become rather too easy to appear smug and pompous in my opinions of the music known as grunge, the music that frankly coloured most of my tastes from age 15-20, but that now seems self-indulgent and humourless.

I had wanted the Temple of the Dog album for many years, but I didn't get it until recently. Once a girl in a club told me she was going to bring a tape of if in, and leave it behind the bar - all I had to do was go back and ask for it. I never did. I didn't believe she'd actually leave it there. Maybe it's still there now. Maybe if I had gone and collected it, I would have gotten some enjoyment out of this album.

Well, I haven't. I might have once. I used to be a massive Pearl Jam fan, but I don't really listen to them anymore. I was never a massive Soundgarden fan, though Superunknown, I feel, is one of the grunge albums that still holds up today. And this record sounds exactly how I expected. The songs, mostly written by Chris Cornell, are slow and grinding. Soundgarden's trademark unusual time signatures are intact, and handled ably by Matt Cameron on drums. The record was produced by Rick Parashar (and Temple of the Dog), and as a result the production sounds like Pearl Jam's Ten. Mike McCready provides his usual lead playing.

There are a few things that I don't like about the album. The guitars sound like they were plugged into FX units, and thence directly into the recording console, so to me it sounds like some dynamic richness has been lost. Cornell's vocal is a little over the top at times, and wouldn't sound out of place at an American Idol audition, and while the band plays competently and the subject matter and intentions are worthy, I'm afraid these songs fail to connect with me on an emotional level, and worse, fail to illicit the excitement that a great album should. I've read a few testaments to the excellence of the solo at the end of "Reach Down", but to my ears this solo is average at best. It just makes me wonder what made them think it was a good idea to let McCready solo for so long. He can only do one solo anyway - Alive, State of Love and Trust... - they're the same!

Ultimately it may be me that's missed out here. Perhaps I should have heard it around 12 years ago. There's little from the "grunge" genre that I consider to be quality these days, despite some excellent records being recorded in the early 90s, and this for me may just be the final nail in that genre's coffin.

An absolute pearl (jam)
We know everyone involved in the making of this album is an outstanding musician but it doesn't always follow that collective tallent will come up with the goods, however 'Temple Of The Dog' is a very special piece of work. It deserves a place at the top table of rock classics. For those of you, like me, who are long in the tooth and have been listening to music of a similar calibre for the last 36 years please try this. Your mission isn't complete until you do. You'll love it, cherish it and adore it until you croak. I think I can best describe 'Temple Of The Dog' as a hybrid of Audioslave and Free both at their very best. Hard rock with a drizzle of the blues. In my dreams this is Free's final album. The original line up continued making music throught the 70's and 80's and in 1991 they bowed out with this. In dream world you can re write rock music history. In the real world this didn't happen but we did get the album. The world continues to provide us with musicians as good as any who have gone before, we just have to hope that fate brings them together and they can keep producing musical gems like this.