Too volatile a mix to last?

Audioslave’s first album has been in stores only two weeks, so why is everyone already predicting that this invigorating new hard-rock group will break up?

“Audioslave probably won’t be a long-term commitment,” declares Blender magazine in a review of the band’s self-titled album.

“This may be the only album Audioslave generates as a unit,” warns Spin in its review.

The reason for the pessimism goes to the history of the four members of the band. They came together early last year, still numb after high-profile divorces from their old bands, and they almost split apart themselves last summer during a six-week “separation.”

All this matters because Audioslave has great rock genes. Three members are from Rage Against the Machine, the Los Angeles quartet that defined rap-rock in the ‘90s. There’s Tom Morello, a Harvard-educated guitarist whose playing invites descriptions rarely associated with hard rock: eloquent and graceful. Bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk form a rhythm section whose cannonball force made Rage frontman Zack de la Rocha’s raps about social and cultural oppression all the more electrifying.

Rage is the band that attracted national attention when it staged a protest concert outside the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles -- and came apart two months later when De la Rocha left the group for a solo career that has yet to surface.

Audioslave singer Chris Cornell is equally heralded. With Seattle grunge architects Soundgarden in the ‘90s, the strikingly handsome singer established himself as one of the great voices in modern rock, someone who could match Robert Plant’s wail but brought to his music an intelligence and introspection rarely evident in Led Zeppelin.

Cornell’s reflections on insecurities and doubts spoke to a generation of fans with much of the urgency of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but Soundgarden broke up in 1997 after more than a dozen years together, partially because Cornell wanted new challenges.

Now, with the new band, Cornell, 38, has the most stylish backing of his career, and the Rage alumni can stretch out musically in ways that are fresh and liberating. Cornell’s lyrics sometimes rely on images that are overly familiar and vague, but there is a strong sense of soul-searching in his themes that is ideal for the drama and ambition of Audioslave’s sound.

In “Like a Stone,” one of the most powerful tunes from the new album, Cornell, perhaps acknowledging the death of Kurt Cobain and others from the grunge scene, sings about waiting for death to catch up with him. “For all that I’ve blessed / And all that I’ve wronged / In dreams until my death / I will wander on.”

The Epic Records release entered the U.S. sales chart last week at No. 7, selling more than 162,000 copies in its first week. The explosive single “Cochise” is lighting up rock radio request lines.

“This is a band, not a one-off,” Morello, also 38, says, somewhat wearily, during an interview at the Casa del Mar hotel in Santa Monica, where the band members met with media from around the world for two days to stress that they are committed to the band.

“I understand where people could wonder about what’s going on, and no one knows what the future holds,” says Morello. “But I couldn’t be happier. From the moment we got together with Chris, it felt like a runaway train, an incredible, liberating burst of creativity.”

Rising from the ashes

It’s easy to get caught up in the speculation over how long Audioslave will be with us, but the more fascinating story may be how they got here. The arrival of Cornell is really Chapter 2 in Audioslave’s story. Chapter 1 begins with De la Rocha’s exit.

It was a painful time, and Rage’s three instrumentalists turned to a motivation counselor for help -- a man who had worked with the St. Louis Rams during their Super Bowl march in 1999. His message for the musicians: Keep the lines of communication open.

“There had been so much tension in the band that we needed to find ways of making sure everyone felt comfortable saying whatever was on their mind,” says Commerford, 34. Drummer Wilk, also 34, also says he went through a period of self-doubt. “When your band falls apart, you really question yourself,” he says. “Do I still want to do this? Can I do it? You worry about your abilities.”

Also on the table were three key questions: Do the three stay together? If so, do they stick with the name? And do they keep the rap-rock style?

“The worst thing would have been if Rage got another rapper and tried to be Rage with someone else,” says record producer Rick Rubin, who oversaw “Audioslave.” “Even if they found someone who was phenomenal and we made an album better than any Rage albums, it could be viewed as artificial.”

So Rubin suggested Cornell, who had done a directionless solo album after Soundgarden split up.

“Chris was also perfect from a songwriting standpoint,” says Rubin. “The distinctive thing about Rage was they played in one chord, not the more typical three chords of rock. One chord is fine for rapping, but it doesn’t leave much room for melody.

“With Soundgarden, Chris wrote melodies around a single chord, which is very unique. I can’t think of another songwriter in rock who could make a melodic song out of a one-chord riff.”

The Rage trio was thrilled by the suggestion, but would Cornell set aside his solo aspirations and return to a band? Early in 2001, he told Morello that he would be interested in exploring music with the guitarist, whose work he had admired -- especially Morello’s ability to create sounds on the guitar that others could find only through synthesizers or tape loops.

But Cornell was taken aback when Morello suggested that Wilk and Commerford should also be involved.

“Nothing against them, but it didn’t sound like a good idea to step into an existing band that had such a unique sound as Rage,” Cornell says. “Were they going to expect me to rap or write politically motivated lyrics like Zack? I had no intention of doing that, and I was very upfront about it.”

Cornell was still wary when the four musicians went into rehearsals in Los Angeles in February 2001.

“I didn’t take anything for granted,” he says, weighing his words much more deliberately than did Morello. “For all I knew, I might not be able to stand them and the music might sound like crap. That’s my nature. I’m the kind of person who worries about everything.

“But they were gracious, open to my ideas. I was also encouraging to them, which I don’t think they were used to. It seemed like they were used to a lot of internal scrutiny and tension, and I think that is crippling to creativity.”

The Rage team was thrilled.

“We were pushing ourselves in ways we hadn’t imagined before,” Morello says. “There was a tremendous release of tension.”

They came up with almost a song a day for three weeks. Music, however, was only one challenge for Audioslave. There was also some baggage left from their previous band marriages. They were under contract to two record labels and signed by two separate managers.

The labels, Interscope for Cornell and Epic for the ex-Rage trio, worked out an agreement under which Epic would release the first album and Interscope would release the second.

Everything, including the record, was pretty much in place by last summer, when Audioslave planned to make its concert debut on the Ozzfest tour.

But the management situation had become so draining that the band bowed out of the tour. Cornell thought there was a real chance the group might just put out the album and then call it quits during a six-week break.

“I went home to Seattle,” he says. “I said, ‘Unless we resolve the management issue, I don’t see how we can move forward.’ I don’t think it was a matter of putting my foot down as much as just kind of breaking the concrete in terms of reaching a solution.”

To end the impasse, they severed ties with their rival managers and signed with the Firm, the massive management group that handles Korn, Limp Bizkit and the Dixie Chicks, and Epic finally set a release date for the album.

Uneven reaction to the debut

Reviews have been mixed. Some critics have complained that Audioslave feels too comfortable -- that its music fails to open a new chapter in rock the way Soundgarden and Rage did a decade ago. “In their past lives, the members of this band were enraged,” wrote Rolling Stone “Now, fierce as they might sound, Audioslave just seems sorta engaged.”

But that view fails to recognize that a decade has passed. This band doesn’t need to create a new sound to deserve our attention. In Audioslave, music from the Rage alums shows new splendor, and Cornell’s writing is more personal, reflecting some of the changes in his life (his first child is 2 1/2).

In “Show Me How to Live,” Cornell, who went through some trying times as a youngster, searches for the wisdom and strength to be a good father.

Morello matches Cornell’s vocals with guitar lines so closely aligned emotionally that the guitar and voice seem like partners in a duet. And Morello’s crusade to find new guitar textures results in some striking moments, none more so than passages in “Gasoline” in which he shapes sounds it took a synthesizer to achieve on the Who’s “Who’s Next” album.

Entertainment Weekly lauds “Audioslave,” calling it a “music-world example of opposites supremely attracting.”

The opening-week sales figure of 162,000 was less than half the first-week total of Rage Against the Machine’s last collection of original material, 1999’s “The Battle of Los Angeles.” Still, that’s impressive considering it’ll take some time for Rage and Soundgarden fans to realize the connections in Audioslave. The group, which will make its first concert appearance Saturday as part of KROQ-FM’s annual Almost Acoustic Christmas series at the Universal Amphitheatre, hopes to escalate that education process by touring extensively during 2003.

Audioslave would surely have come closer to the Rage sales total if it had kept the old name, but that would have been short-term thinking, and this band insists that it’s in it for the long run.

“As delicate as it was when Zack left, I don’t think we ever thought about breaking up,” Morello says. “We had lost a singer, but we hadn’t lost our love of playing together. I’m still proud of what we did with Rage. My only regret is that we didn’t make more music together. I don’t want to make that mistake again.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com

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On the Web

To hear samples from Audioslave’s album, visit www.calendarlive.com.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A look at Audioslave’s origins

From Calendar’s archives, a sampling of the excitement Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden generated with their most celebrated albums.Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine

*** 1/2 “Rage Against the Machine” (Epic, 1993). A striking, politically conscious debut. Zack de la Rocha is a bona fide star who combines on stage a Bob Marley-like charisma and a Chuck D.-style rap command -- and the music itself is as tough and relentless as his raps.

-- Robert Hilburn

**** “The Battle of Los Angeles” (Epic, 1999). The breakthrough here is that Rage finally begins to add some surprise left jabs and right hooks to its musical arsenal, giving us music that is both richer texturally and, in some places, warmer and more convincing.

-- R.H.

Soundgarden

*** 1/2 “Badmotorfinger” (A&M;, 1991). Soundgarden’s inevitable climb to primacy in the new-metal realm continues right on schedule with its second major-label album. In this visceral, wide-ranging panorama, the heavy stomp competes with an impulse to soar, stretching the musical architecture into taut, fanciful shapes.

-- Richard Cromelin

*** 1/2 “Superunknown” (A&M;, 1994). Soundgarden’s roots remain firmly in the Zeppelin-Sabbath realm, but with its sheer invention and willingness to experiment, the band comes on as the Beatles of grunge. Or its Pink Floyd.

-- R.C.