In 1994, Soundgarden climbed the Billboard charts with “Spoonman.”
Written by Chris Cornell, the song was the first single from the album Superunknown, and its title was inspired by Seattle street performer Artis the Spoonman. But Cornell didn’t come up with the name of the song—and he didn’t even know the street performer who played percussion with spoons when he penned it.
Instead, the song’s title came from Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, who was doing graphic design work for the Cameron Crowe film Singles. Ament created a mixtape for one of the movie’s characters, Cliff Poncier (Matt Dillon), and he included fake song titles on it—one of which was “Spoonman.”
Cornell’s song featured a hard-driving blend of Seattle grunge and heavy rock built around an urgent, thumping guitar riff and gritty vocals. The real-life Spoonman also contributed to the track and appeared in the music video.
“Spoonman” reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart in May 1994, and won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1995.
Cornell, who died in 2017, once spoke about the inspiration for the song in a video interview.
“Jeff had done some graphic design for the [Singles] film set,” he recalled. “The cassette packaging that Jeff did… said ‘Poncier’ on the front and then there were song titles, and Jeff just made up the titles. And one of those titles was ‘Spoonman.’ One of those titles was ‘Seasons,’ there was one called ‘Flutter Girl.’ They were all really inspiring to me, and I remember seeing it and thinking… wouldn’t it be great to take that home and actually write those songs based on those titles?”
“So I did that, and I spent a couple of hours on each song. It wasn’t long, I kind of rushed through it,” Cornell continued. “And it was really a fun experience because I learned that writing songs just for the fun of it, for no particular destination, can have songs that can have a life that lives on and on and on.”
Cornell also explained writing the song without even knowing who the real Spoonman was.
“The lyrics aren’t specifically about Artis the Spoonman,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2014. “I didn’t know Artis yet… I had known there was this guy Spoonman… but it was an ode to an imaginary person in my head, because I didn’t know him yet. And the song was based entirely on the title, so what’s happening musically is the attitude of supporting this guy who stands on a street corner and plays the s— out of some spoons. Then the song became a reality, and we got Artis to actually play spoons on the song.”
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Crowe later spoke out about how “Spoonman” evolved from a fake track list.
“Obviously the music really holds up,” the filmmaker told Rolling Stone. “He went and recorded ‘Spoonman’ with Soundgarden and it was a big hit. It’s a statement about how when you’re not worried about somebody judging you or looking over your shoulder sometimes you do great stuff.”
More than 30 years later, “Spoonman” remains one of the most well-known Soundgarden songs, an inspired classic that Cornell played up until his last show in May 2017.
Related: 1990 Grunge Track Featured in ‘Singles’ Had an Iconic Guitar Riff That Started Out as a Joke
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