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May 18, 2017 By Christopher Roberts Soundgarden

Earlier today we reported that Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell had passed away last night in Detroit after the band’s show at the Fox Theater. Cornell, who was only 52, was found unresponsive in his hotel room at the MGM Grand Detroit last night. Now the Associated Press reports Detroit police social media manager Dontae Freeman has told the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News that Cornell committed suicide by hanging. Cornell’s wife Vicky was concerned and had asked a family friend to check on Cornell and they found him lying on the bathroom floor, with “a band around his neck.” Earlier Detroit police spokesman Michael Woody had said that the police were investigating the death as a possible suicide. Cornell’s publicist Brian Bumberry had previously called his passing “sudden and unexpected.”

Soundgarden were due to perform at Pointfest on Saturday in Maryland Heights, Missouri, outside St. Louis, but now the entire festival has been cancelled because of Cornell’s death. On Friday they were due to headline the Rock on the Range festival in Columbus, Ohio and that three-day festival will still go on without the band.

Soundgarden formed in 1984 and were one of the three main pillars of the early 1990s Grunge movement in Seattle. Fueled by the Grammy winning hit singles “Black Hole Sun” and “Spoonman,” 1994’s Superunknown brought the band much commercial and critical success. The band broke up in 1997, but reunited in 2010. In between, starting in 2002, Cornell joined with some of the members of Rage Against the Machine to form Audioslave and released three albums with them. Below is the video for “Black Hole Sun.” Also below, via Stereogum, is fan footage of the last song Soundgarden performed in Detroit last night, “Slaves and Bulldozers.”

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