#spoonman

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eight years ago today , the world lost a beautiful soul .

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for me , it's always strange to know that your idols are simply just people like me . they live and breathe , and they die and bleed . chris was a beautiful person inside and out , and he seemed so otherworldly and amazing , but he still had flaws like everybody else . he struggled with addiction , relationships , and his mental health . he was human , and i think that is a beautiful thing . i miss him a lot , even though i never knew him personally . he left a lasting impact on millions , and his legacy will live on for a long , long time . when i didn't have much , i had chris' music . it really shaped me . there is a tiny , chris—sized hole in my heart .

Studio footage of ARTIS THE SPOONMAN recording on SOUNDGARDEN's Spoonman during the sessions for Superunknown in 1993. SOUNDGARDEN released Spoonman as the first single from Superunknown on February 15th, 1994.

Artis The Spoonman, a street performer and musician from Seattle, Washington, who uses spoons as a musical instrument, has been active as a street performer since 1972. Before Soundgarden, his first collaboration with a major artist was appearing on stage with Frank Zappa in Eugene, Oregon and New York's Palladium in 1981. In 1994, Chris Cornell spoke to Rolling Stone and explained how Artis

The Spoonman had inspired him: "He changed my life in that the only thing I do outside of Soundgarden is this one-man acoustic show that I tour with. He was a big inspiration for me. I remember sitting in a room, probably with eight or 10 people, and he walked in with the leather satchel he always carried with him and took out spoons. Everyone’s jaw dropped. I thought, ‘It’s amazing this guy performs at festivals, fairs and street corners.’ This guy can walk into a room and get a reaction."

Cornell continued, "Suddenly, I felt embarrassed and smaller, ’cause I felt like I call myself a singer, a songwriter, a musician, and I’ve sold millions of records and toured the world, but I can’t do what he can. I can’t just walk into a room, pick up an instrument, perform, and entertain everyone, and their jaws drop. So that stuck in the back of my mind, and at some point, I started to pursue that. He was the main inspiration for that.”

Superunknown producer Michael Beinhorn recalls recording Artis The Spoonman on the Spoonman sessions: "It was one of the most memorable events I've ever had in a recording studio in my entire life. He shows up at the studio with this, like, bedroll or something like that, and he opens it up, and it's just all these metallic implements, and we're, like, 'What the hell does he do with this?"

"So we set up mics to ambiently mic him - I think it was a pair of 67s - and he said, 'Make sure you got a video camera rolling; you're going to want to see this.' The song starts, he takes his shirt off, he starts picking random bits of metal and beating the shit out of himself, like, all over the place with the spoons and everything else.

"It was incredible. All in time, by the way, and everyone in the control room is sitting, watching this - we've never seen anything like it. He was literally beating himself hard with these bits of metal, I'm not kidding."