I recently got the chance to sit down with singer/songwriter/guitarist Peter Cornell and bassist/songwriter Keith Mannino over at the fabled Montana rehearsal studios to find out more about the events that brought them together and the nuts and bolts behind their creation known as Black Market Radio.

PC: That’s not even there anymore is it?

KM: No, it’s gone. It’s such a bummer. A piece of history, gone…

CN: Well, before it was Coney Island High it was a gay bar, so...evolution.

KM: When did Coney Island start?

CN: I’m not exactly sure. I remember it [meaning, the building] was Boy Bar, like in ’85, and I’m not exactly sure--some time in the early ‘90s… [Note: It was technically started by Howie Pyro and Jessie Malin back in their DGeneration days from the ashes of their notorious GREENDOORNYC parties.]

KM: That’s some time before the time I started working there. I started there some time in ’95 or ’94—a whole bunch of years.

CN: So, you were doing studio engineering stuff?

KM: Well, I was mixing live sound then, and I had a studio [Shout NYC]. So I was doing recording and live sound, bands, and it was just like, I was pinned to the wall. “I can’t take it anymore! I want to do just me!” (laughs)

CN: Ah, the ego came screaming out.

KM: Oh, no, sort of—not. (laughs)

PC: Hhhmmm.

CN: Of course it did. Of course it did. And Peter, when did you move here?

PC: I moved here in uh, in 2000, right at the very beginning, Christmas of ’99.

CN: Why?

PC: I had been on the road. I wanted—one of the reasons I started playing music [was that] I wanted to travel. I wanted to play everywhere, and I had a little taste of it, touring the west coast with one of my bands [Inflatable Soule], and I had put another band on tour, myself, to support airplay that the band was getting in Atlanta and New Jersey and a little bit in New York at the time [Grace], and I just had reached the end of my rope in Seattle and the music and probably personally as well. It was the end of the scene. I had never really been, stylistically, like what was going on there in the ‘90s, and I really wanted to keep growing. And I just kind of was—all I knew was that I needed to collaborate. I had never collaborated. I had always written most of the songs that my band had played, in fact, all the songs. And I needed to spread out in that direction and try and maybe see if that was the answer to some of what I hadn’t experienced. And I came through New York and played a couple times, and it just seemed like this was gonna be the best place to kind of start over and reinvent.

CN: So you guys met in, what? A studio situation?

PC: Yeah. I was doing a record—a different record—and I needed a good studio to work in. And I was playing a show that Keith had booked in New Jersey, and uh, he was booking the club and I played the show and that’s where we met. And then I needed some studio time and he’s like, “Here’s my card. Get in touch with me.” And I did. I was doing this record with these guys from Tennessee [Somnambulist]. And they were in Tennessee and I was here and neither party was gonna go in the other direction.

CN: So you had to do that, “I’m sending you stuff.”

PC: Yeah, exactly. We did it in the mail. And so I recorded with Keith, and at the end of that project he was emphatic that we sit down and, you know, just exchange some ideas. And that was where Black Market Radio started, right there. We listened to a couple things. I had another project that I was committed to after this one was finished, and I ended up starting that project, too. And Keith and I just kind of worked on things when we could, and we were happy with what we were coming up with.

CN: That’s good. (At this point I lean in and check the recording levels on the computer screen for the microphone.)

PC: Is it not getting it down?

CN: No, no. It’s still going. I’m “Nervous Nellie”. Don’t mind me. (we all laugh at me)

KM: Have you ever done an interview where it wasn’t recording?

CN: Um, not through this. Not through this. On tape, yeah, that’s happened. It usually happens where it’s recorded and I’ll get rushed and I’ll stupidly put the tape recorder back in my bag without taking the tape out or popping the tab or taking the batteries out or something stupid and things would get hit on the tape recorder and there would be blank spots.

PC: Erase it?

CN: Yeah, yeah. So, I’ve learned, over the years.

KM: The hard way. It’s how everybody learns.

CN: Yeah. Did you ever have that happen in the studio? (laughs)

KM: (gets cagey grin) Uuummmm…there would be a couple times where I would miss some takes.

PC: Most of the great takes are where you’ve been at something for a while and—“That’s the one!”—and we didn’t get the [take].

KM: We didn’t capture it or it was a little off.

PC: Yeah.

KM: I always blame it on the computer. “I don’t know why that didn’t go into record on time.” (laughs)

CN: Can’t be human error, noooo…. (laughs)

KM: (laughs) That’s exactly what we used to call it. We used to go “H.E. That was an H.E.”

CN: (laughs) So, you wrote the one song together, “Better Than a Killer”. How long did it take you to write the rest of them?

PC: A couple years.

CN: Really? That long?

PC: Yeah, we banged out that song together, the skeleton of it…

KM: …that first night.

PC: …and then I had to go to L.A. And I spent the better part of the next year in L. A. going back and forth working on a project I had out there. And after a year, we had done a couple things when I was home for whatever break and then I’d go back out. So we had a couple things here and I had a couple things there recorded song-wise. And after about a year, I came back to basically pack my stuff and commit to this thing in L.A. And we compared songs and, (chuckles) in a year I think I recorded five songs in L.A., and in the meantime, Keith and I, through various stages, had recorded probably about the same amount with very little amount of time spent. And we sat down and compared the two and there’s no comparison. The stuff that we had worked on together, briefly, when we could, was so much better than anything else than I was working on. And there was actually money involved in the other project [a development deal w/Virgin working on songs with guitarist Steve Solis], and I had to choose, and I chose to stay here and really commit to this. So it took a long time. And that really added time to the project, because it took us a year of kinda halfway working on it to decide that we were going to go full speed ahead and really do a record. And because Keith had the studio, we were able to write and develop the songs as we went, so we wouldn’t move off of a song abruptly. We spent a lot of time developing songs, which was a really cool luxury to have.

CN: Yes.

KM: One of the best learning experiences for me in my writing, and I know for Pete, as well.

PC: I think, for a couple guys, and certainly I speak for myself, that needed to develop their writing skills, that afforded us the opportunity to do it. We didn’t have a back end. We didn’t have a clock ticking or somebody waiting for our stuff. We really didn’t have that kind of a goal, and I kind of always had that kind of a goal or that kind of an influence when I was writing or performing, or making demoes, or any kind of recordings. There was always somebody there, somebody in the industry who’s toe was tapping and they were waiting to hear something. And for the first time, and also, too, I knew that there was something lacking in the way that I had written songs for the previous seven or eight years, and I needed to try and find the answer. And that’s what we got to do. So, we were able to take our time. And then once we finished the record, we really had never played the songs. We had written them in the studio and played them in the studio playing everything on them, and so we had to take the second amount of time to find the right kind of band. We knew they’d be fun songs to play, and that they might be a little bit difficult to do them the way we wanted to do them, so we had to find the right guys. And that was tough to do. So it’s—everything that we’ve done has taken two years. You know? Every time we decided to do something it took forever to get it done.

KM: Yeah, well, this is definitely not an overnight success.

PC: No, and nothing ever is.

KM: No. We’ve put a lot of time and effort into it. Finding a guitar player was a real pain in the ass. We’ve been through, (looks at Peter) how many guys? Six, seven?

PC: We played probably with twenty guys in the last two years through rehearsals and auditions and actually playing. We’ve played several shows with three different guys. Now that the record’s out and we’re starting to play, we could do the next two records in an eighth of the time, [grins as Keith snickers next to me], because we know what to do now. We didn’t have a style. I didn’t have a style. I left Seattle in 2000 without a style. I did two tours of the US with a band that I ended up leaving in 2000, and then I did a tour by myself just playing songs that I had had for a while—mostly songs that other guys that I had played with wouldn’t let me play. And then we started, you know, I started to try and hone my craft and part of that was the sound of it—becoming a better singer, becoming a better guitar player.

CN: That’s a good one.

PC: Yeah! That stuff was so different.

CN: What about you, Keith?

KM: I was turned onto music by my parents. My parents were kind of like, hippie-ish, and their friends and stuff would have parties every weekend. And so, I would hear Pink Floyd; Neil Young; The Dead; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; James Taylor… And so, my first record I bought was Dark Side of the Moon. I bought it at a garage sale, and it came with the original Pink Floyd poster, but the sleeve of the record was Yes, Fragile. I’ll never forget that.

CN: (laughs) How did that happen?

KM: I guess because it was a garage sale.

CN: Yeah, I guess, because back then people would pull them out and kind of look at them and stuff. I was really influenced by album cover art.

BOTH: Yeah.

CN: It’s a sad state of affairs that we have a CD that’s 3” x 3” or 4” x 4”…

PC: Yeah.

KM: Not even. Now you have downloading and you don’t even have to buy the record.

PC: Everything just goes right to the hard drive. You don’t have any of that. I know people still are into it. I just think that they get caught up in the simplicity of the download and it cuts that part out of it. But I think if you ask most people, they get off on album art and credits. I mean, everybody wants—who doesn’t want to be thanked on a successful record? Everybody does.

KM: Absolutely.

CN: So, uh, what was your first attempt at making music? How old were you?

PC: Um I was in my 20’s. I was in my early 20’s, and I started—I was sailing around in the South Pacific one winter, just kind of bumming around, being a sail bum, and I had a guitar and I was really interested in writing songs. I knew my brother and Andy Wood [nee: Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone] at that time were becoming, you know, like, prolific songwriters, and their songs were starting to get published like crazy. And I was so curious, more than anything, I was curious about how that phenomenon happened—how you write a song. That simple thing seemed really profound to me. And kind of glossed over, people don’t really think about it, but where does that come from? What motivates that? And then, once it’s motivated, how do you actually construct it? So, I had that, and I had a guitar, and I had a lot of time. And I was out at sea for long periods of time, days and days at a time, and I started just making up little things. And then I would have an experience that kind of reminded me of that little song guitar part thing that I had, and they kind of wrote themselves. And I got and knew that it was possible to write a song and that I could do it, and I just started writing songs. And after I had enough songs together, I had never played in a band, and I had never had this body of work, I think I had about 30 songs that I had written in a short period of time. And I returned back to the mainland and uh, I did’t know what to do with this body of work. And at that point, I think, uh, I think my brother’s first record was out, and so obviously he was in the game. He was involved in something, you know, that was very specific, It was like, “This is what you do, you know? You get a deal and your record comes out and you go on tour.” And I was like, “Wow. This is really cool.” I saw that in its simplest form. It was like, “Follow the steps and this is what will happen.” And I was really interested in that. And he just—so I said, “So what do I do? Maybe you can hook me up with a publisher or something, somebody can take me songs and…” Because I had never performed. And so he said, “Get in a band and start playing.” And that was what I did. So late ‘91/early ’92 I started playing live in Seattle. There was a lot of clubs and it had a lot of buzz and it was so easy to get a good show.

CN: That was a good scene at that time.

PC: It was. And there was a lot of different kinds of bands. We were kind of a hippie rock band, my first band, I mean, it was jammy and a lot of nonsense and, you know, a couple of my sisters sang backup in the band, so you can imagine, it was more circus than anything else, but it was at a time—

CN: Was that Inflatable Soule?

PC: Yeah, exactly. It was at a time when anything went. You could get away with anything in Seattle at that time. And God, there was performance art bands and metal bands and guys in makeup and guys throwing meat from the stage and there was one band—what the hell were they called…they had a great name, and they had two girls that, you know, were essentially strippers, on stage with them all the time, and their shows were packed. I mean, you could imagine, their shows were packed, and everybody had a serious thing they were going for and it wasn’t all the same. And there was a number of clubs and you could go out on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday night and see shows two and three deep. I’m not making this up. It was crazy.

CN: It sounds like New York [was] before Seattle was the scene. Remember?

KM: Yeah.

PC: I could pack out a show on a Tuesday night, and if you wanted to play on an acoustic show, there was little clubs for that, and—you can’t even imagine. It was so easy to play, and there was a circuit that spiraled out of Seattle that included Vancouver, B.C.; and Sun Valley, Idaho; and Moscow, Idaho; and Pullman, Washington and all these college towns and San Francisco and Los Angeles and, you know, these college towns in Oregon to connect the dots in-between. And you could play that stuff like crazy. We played out every weekend for about five years, and continually, and everywhere we went the reception was great, and that was all within five to twenty hours of Seattle. And what was going on in Seattle was so magnificent, so powerful, that it reached that far out. It reached out to all those places. And the same enthusiasm was felt when you’d get in a van—we’d get in a van Thursday night and drive all night and hit soundcheck Friday afternoon six, seven hours from home, and play to 1800 people or 2000 people. I remember playing a festival in the middle of nowhere at this college in Eastern Washington State, this little farm town. And I remember this one festival this one year--it was the first year I played, too, it was phenomenal—5000 people camped out on the side of this hill and the stage was at the bottom of this very, very steep mountainous hill and looking up the hill at night playing, and everybody had candlelights and lanterns and it looked like stars dotting the side of this hill. And that was hours from home. You could do that every weekend without—you could “go on tour” every weekend and go back and do your day job during the week. It was a really strange adventure. But the simplicity of it all, if you do this, if you have your record and you have a deal and you go on tour, you’ll get on the radio, you know? And that was what I did. That was the path I was intending to follow, and to a certain extent, did.

CN: So Keith, what about your first attempt at making music?

KM: I guess I was like, 11 or 12, I got an acoustic guitar and just started to kind of hack around on it. (chuckles softly to self) And then somewhere along the way I decided to play bass. I mean, quite honestly, I decided to play bass, because um, I liked Motley Crue and Nikki Sixx. So, I went out and got a bass. And I vowed, I remember one New Year’s Eve with my friend Dan Curroccia, that we were gonna start a band, and so I went out and bought a bass. I learned “Iron Man” and started playing rock. So then I was in several bands through high school. Towards the end of high school I was in this band called Shadowbox. We had a small deal with Epic, like a demo deal that didn’t go through. And basically, I think a lot of it had to do with the guitar player’s father was the producer. His name was Ed Stasium, and that’s kind of how everything kinda came together. But we didn’t have the material. We were coming out. We were on Epic, Rage Against the Machine was on Epic, and we didn’t stand up to that. We were kind of a hippie rock band wanting to be rock but not having enough oomph to be rock. (laughs) We were still not being quite a bit grown-up enough, so to speak, um, to be rock, so we were kind of like lite hard rock. So, it didn’t fly. We moved to California and lived out there for a while, and then I came back. And then I was doing studio work, as I said, and I was working for Lenny Kravitz, and then I was, “Wow!” Kind of the same experience as Pete had. “You really kind of have to be a lot better than I thought!” I realized how good these guys were that came through.

PC: Yeah.

KM: And I was like “So, okay, that was like what was kind of missing!” So I just locked myself away and started to practice even harder to hone in on my craft. And I swore off making music with other people until I could find somebody. And I was looking and playing and tinkering around with people, and it wasn’t until like, five years after that that I met Pete. And then I wouldn’t let him out of my sight. (Both laugh) I was like, “This guy can sing. That’s the guy.” And that’s basically, that’s exactly how it all went down. But yeah, it’s been a long go at it, for both of us, so it’s finally nice to have some recognition as well as, you know, the beginning of what we hope is some great success with this.

CN: It says on the record you play percussion, too.

KM: Yeah, I do play guitar, percussion, and bass, but um, not a great guitar player. I can play enough to write. A lot of it, a lot of what we write comes out of some sort of a riff somewhere, so, we can write riffs all afternoon.

PC: Yeah.

CN: So, tell me about this sailing thing. You have a big chunk between church and your 20’s.

PC: (laughs)

CN: You said you were sailing. Tell me how that happened.

PC: I’ve sailed since I was young. When I was in high school I started sailing just kind of by accident. Somebody I knew from grade school I ran into again at the end of high school and he was actually trying to get a job where I worked. And he was trying to bribe, I think the manger, with a sailing trip, like, “Come and go sailing, and I’ll get this job.” And I was like, “I’ll go.” And he was an old buddy of mine. And that was how I got into it. After that first night I went sailing, I think I sailed every day for the next couple, three years. And I learned how to, we started racing. We started racing sailboats, and I raced in a lot of different races. Locally around, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Seattle, but there’s a lot of water to choose from, and there’s always a race going on. Almost year-round you can get into something. And so I raced for a lot of years, and then I just kind of ended up in Hawaii one winter to go fishing, trying to find a job that wasn’t, you know, (chuckles) boring. And I ended up fishing for a while, and then found a sailboat that needed crew and sailed around for a while.

CN: I have a friend who does that. She went from like, Panama to Europe or something. That’s how she met her husband.

PC: Yeah. There’s a lot of people out there doing it, that’s for sure. It’s not hard to do. I’d love to get at it again. After that, I went back to Seattle and when I started playing, I eventually got in—I stayed connected to sailing. I bought a boat and lived on it for a while—just an old beat-up boat that I called home, but it was great. But I sold that when I moved here. I miss it. Since I’ve lived here, I’ve learned how to scuba dive. But sailing’s great. I look forward to getting back to it a bit more once we sell a bunch of records and I can buy a big boat.

KM: Buy a big ‘ole boat. Yeah, that’s the next step for me. Not so much to be on a boat, but to be on the beach, own a house on the beach. That’s my next. I love the city, but God, even the other day, it was just like, I got out of the town for the day and went to Coney Island to the beach and just sat on the beach all day. There’s just something so calming when you get right near the water, and just the smell of the water and it totally centers me because, man the city is just, fucked up.

CN: Peter, what’s your greatest musical influence?

PC: I’d have to say, since we’ve been working on this project, Led Zeppelin. That was where I started as a kid. It was probably the first rock band I ever heard, and I never was really a huge fan growing up, and then in the last couple years since I’ve been in New York I’ve really gotten into them, I’d have to say. That, and—a combination of that and the truly eclectic and unique songwriting and singing and everything about David Bowie. I don’t think that I emulate it in any way, but I think that, I think that it definitely speaks to me, hugely. I think that guy is probably, singly, the most unique songwriter of all time. Stylistically, and just how he’s spanned the years and he’s never really afraid to continue to do what he does without it conforming to “Is it gonna fit into the parameters of what’s popular at this time?” And I think there’s others…I won’t name a big name…I think there’s other artists that have been around for 20 or 30 years that are still successful and songwriting—they’re songwriting hasn’t burnt down, but they have a tendency to fit into what works. And Bowie never does. He just continues to do what he does and be himself. And I think it’s profound. I’d love to be that profound, you know, and that interesting. I think just riff-wise and rock-wise, I think that’s starting to come out in the songs that we’re working on, as part of my influence, as far as Led Zeppelin goes. Maybe some Seattle… I wouldn’t say specifically what part of Seattle, but maybe all of Seattle, maybe all. You know, I like the accessibility of Pearl Jam, the passion the guys deliver, you know? And I like the just sadness and just, God, the just—you listen to Alice In Chains and it’s just—it just feels to me like a big, sad monster that will, it’ll just kick your ass, you know, just KICK it! You’ve got no—like, it’s scary. Shit’s scary. Alice In Chains is scary to me, and I think that I’d like to have a certain amount of that sort of edgy, scariness come through.

CN: It comes from that place that you’re at when you do all those chemicals.

PC: Yeah, for sure, just being in that hopelessness, but when you channel it through loud instruments like that, it just becomes this beast, you know? I think Cantrell is probably the most underrated guitar player of the last 20 years, truly. He’s a phenomenally good player, unique style, great lead player. He just always has something to say in that era.

CN: Underrated vocalist, too.

PC: For sure, I agree.

KM: Yeah, a really good vocalist.

PC: But yeah, I guess that answers the influence question…and the Beatles. I mean, my God, the Beatles influence everybody somehow. But God, I bet Jimmy Page, I bet he used all the guitar riffs, and what we have now is just derivatives of what he made up. But I love that style of playing, that hook-y guitar, and a lot of guitars. When we record, we record with A LOT of guitars. “One more guitar! One more guitar! Double them all!”

KM: (laughs) There’s 30 tracks of guitars!

PC: They don’t have to be tight, just as long as you feel it. You know? If you listen to Zeppelin records, you can hear mistakes.

CN: Oh, all over the place…

PC: But there’s always like, four guitars playing at once, different things, or doubles of things, so you get fat and you get riffs and I love that. I think it’s great.

CN: What about you, Keith?

KM: For me, my first influence, hands down, was Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. I was so blown away by those records. And that was really my first introduction. I mean, granted, like I said, it had come down from my parents, but that definitely was a huge influence for me, and certainly, lyrically, Roger Waters’s lyrics were great. So, I was really, really influenced by Pink Floyd. And then, like I said, I got into a little harder rock so I started to listen to, like Metallica, and who else…? Maiden, Black Sabbath, of course, Ozzy, and then, you know, then I started to get into Zeppelin. It was one of the first three, “The Ocean” was the third song that I think I learned. It was “The Ocean”, “Iron Man”, and “Smoke on the Water”. Yeah, so those were the people that influenced me. Now, I seem to have Jimi Hendrix stuck in all, on every iPod list I have.

CN: Well, you could do worse… (laughs)

KM: The three bands that I’m constantly listening to right now, it’s Jimi Hendrix, The Government Mule, which is Warren Haynes’s band (from Allman Brothers). I love Warren Haynes. What a great band. I just saw them a couple weeks ago at the park, and they’re just amazing. Great rock band…and um, the other band, Ben Harper is someone else that I listen to a lot right now...Oh, man. I honestly would, I’ve got to go out and say, [Warren Haynes] he’s probably THE best guitar player that’s out there right now. He’s just so amazing. It’s just all in his hands. I mean, the touch that he has, and he’s got the greatest tone, the greatest tone… But um, yeah, so those are my influences. Pink Floyd, certainly is probably the biggest influence, really, really. And I listen to tons of Led Zeppelin. So those are all the influences. I get caught in different spells. Like I said, Jimi Hendrix is stuck in my player, not that I didn’t like him before, but I get this renewed love. And then it’s just like I can’t stop listening. It’s just like, every record it’s just like, “Play it over again. Play that song again and again and again and again.”

CN: Peter, do you think it’s gonna be difficult for you with the whole “shadow of your brother” thing?

PC: It always has been.

PC: For the first time, I feel like I have a—I’m involved in a project and it has songs and the delivery and the performance of the songs, and the ability to write and record the songs and sing and play and everything about what we’re doing now, I think is at a level that finally holds its own in the arena or on the playing field that my brother has the ability to play on. I think that’s part of the problem that I’ve experienced in the past is the project I was in and the way I sang and the songs that I wrote, or wrote in, or sang on, they weren’t great. And to me, my goal was completely re-inventing my musical self so that I would be able to be involved in something that people would say, “Wow, this is great!” And then it kind of takes care of itself, I figure. I should hope that Black Market Radio gets a chance to be Black Market Radio and not “the band that Chris Cornell’s brother is in” or whatever, you know? And it won’t unless it’s good stuff, so…

CN: I know that Axl’s brother, Stuart had a real hard time. He was a good singer, had a good band, but never could get out of his brother’s shadow.

PC: But if the stuff isn’t, you know, great stuff at the right time, then it doesn’t deserve anything. It doesn’t deserve to get out of any shadows or it doesn’t deserve to do anything, you know?