@larsman: Before Cornell put together The Mondo Hotpants Orchestra, he and MHO bassist Frank Roeber had a 3-pc group named The Ragg Brothers. The 3rd member was lead guitarist Kim Muscatel (Cornell played rhythm on an acoustic guitar, like Dan Hicks), the same guitarist who was later in The South Bay Swing Band.
A lot of San Jose’s most interesting musicians (the uninteresting ones formed bands like The Doobie Brothers ;-) passed through The Mondo Hotpants Orchestra, like Kim Winn (my travelling companion to Austin as mentioned above), Gary Dulleck (later the pianist in The South Bay Swing Band), Lyle Pratt (with whom I had been in a band in ’69), Jack Sanford and Larry Stokes (the sax players in The South Bay Swing Band), Joel Crawford (a very interesting guy whom I met in a class at De Anza College. We bonded through our love of The Hollies. He is a fanatic about that group), and of course Cornell’s younger brother Drew, also a member of The South Bay Swing Band. San Jose is a small city ;-) .
So as you can see from the above, though I was never a member of Cornell’s band, I was in bands and groups with a lot of guys who were. For a reason I never understood, he kept Patrick Hennessy---a terrible, terrible drummer (he used Roto-Toms in place of mounted toms ;-)---in his band for years. It’s even more confounding as Cornell was himself a drummer.