It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a person as private as Cornell doesn’t want to talk about songs he writes. Part of his refusal makes sense—what part of “get on the snake” is it that you don’t understand?

The other part is predictable self-defense. “When you write your own lyrics,” Chris says, “you tend to be overanalytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid.

“One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button.”

An hour before Soundgarden is supposed to fly to London for the beginning of a six-month tour, Chris Cornell is standing on a mussel-encrusted rock at the end of a jetty protruding into Santa Monica Bay. The air is alive with the stink of rotting kelp, and Chris is staring manfully at the skyscrapers of downtown Santa Monica in the distance. He seems like the only man in the world.

About five or six feet away, a photographer, makeup artist, stylist, and a couple of photo assistants are working furiously to make him look even more craggy, brooding, and alone than he already does. The camera crew maneuver around a couple of Mexican dudes surf-casting for croaker, struggling to keep the expensive photo equipment above the surging tide. A woman, incongruously shod in platform heels, almost loses her balance between the biting sand flies and the slippery rocks; an assistant shoos spectators from the jetty.

Breakers, two to three feet high, churn around Chris’s ankles, crush his black boots with salt water, drench his form-fitting trousers, dampen his coat with spray. It must be slippery where he’s standing. But he barely moves, doing his part for the perfect shot—the one of the reluctant rock star, the guy who doesn’t need your or anyone’s attention, the guy who’s never tried to be famous, or ever really wanted to pose for a picture. The guy who just wants to be by himself. Cut off on one side by the image makers, on the other by the vastness of the sea, for the first time this week Chris seems free, alone, alive.

Jonathan Gold is now the Pulitzer Prize winning restaurant critic for the LA Times.