Soundgarden
Nobody captured the sound and spirit of Seattle quite like Soundgarden. From super-unknowns to grunge godfathers, from their acrimonious split to their imperious re-formation, to their sudden, tragic end, this is the inside story of a band apart.
From superunknowns to grunge godfathers, from their acrimonious split to their imperious re-formation, to their sudden, tragic end, this is the inside story of a band apart.
Night’s falling over the Rimini coastline and it’s been a long few days for Soundgarden. The band have been snaking their way across Europe, playing their Louder Than Love shows in a mixture of clubs and small theatres, which will eventually culminate in a sold out show at London’s Astoria. Two nights ago, the brakes on the tour bus gave out as they were descending a steep mountain road. By the time they’d reached the bottom, the handbrake was a smoking mess, the bus perched precariously at the edge of a sheer drop. Imagine the end of The Italian Job, but with less gold bullion.
To compound their misery, drummer Matt Cameron is taken ill with suspected appendicitis the next day and, fleetingly, they think Chris Cornell might have to drum and sing at that night’s show in the northern Italian town, just as he did in the very early days of the band.
We’re sitting in a hotel room that has bare concrete walls and steel bunk beds. Soundgarden might go on to much greater things, but for now they’re literally sleeping on top of one another in a room that looks like a cell. It’s the least of Cornell’s concerns.
“All the guys here keep grabbing my ass. Is it some
Dionysian thing?” he asks.
“I’ve got bruises.”
He is, to be fair, still rockstar gorgeous and on stage has taken to wearing nothing more than long shorts and Doc
Marten boots. He’s olive-skinned and has hair that makes you want to ask him what shampoo he uses.
It’s a look quite at odds with the music they’ve made on Louder Than Love, their major-label debut for A&M, a sludgy sounding record filled with crashing
nods towards Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. It’s arch, funny and self-aware. Big Dumb Sex addresses all the bands from the late 80s that would write about sex in their songs but never tackle it head on (sample lyric: ‘Hey I know what to do/I’m gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you/Fuck you ya I know what to do’ ).
But Soundgarden were always a band with many sides: they had a tour manager called Eric, whom they christened Gunny Junk as a nod to the LA hair bands they’d almost unwittingly trodden into the ground, and they’d cover Spinal Tap and Cheech & Chong in their live shows. Guitarist Kim Thayil would happily discuss the metaphysical aspects of Viz comic characters as much as he would the local cultural nuances of whatever town they happened to find themselves in.
Most bands spent their days off in bars or hunkered down in their hotel rooms; Soundgarden once spent an afternoon fighting through the bush and undergrowth to get to the actual banks of the body of water that gave Salt Lake City its name. Little wonder, then, that history would bear out the fact that they were the most pivotal, enduring and interesting of the bands that broke out of the Pacific Northwest. Eventually, too, they’d become one of the most confounding and tragic.
One more vignette from that Italian trip: Chris Cornell leaving some venue and ripping down one of the band’s posters and tearing it into four pieces so he has something to write that night’s set-list on. He spends the next two days explaining to journalists that it wasn’t symbolic and it doesn’t signal the end of the band. “Man,” he says one night as we sit on the bus, “I just needed something to write on.”
Douglas Hollis’s sculpture A Sound Garden overlooks Lake Washington in Seattle. Wait for the wind to pick up and the 12 steel towers emit long, understated tones as the pipes shift and turn at the whim of the passing currents of air. They’re strangely stark given the beautiful sounds they’re capable of making. After Cornell’s death it became an impromptu memorial to the singer. But for now it’s 1984, and Cornell and bassist Hiro Yamamoto are jamming with guitarist Kim Thayil. Cornell is still singing and drumming until Scott Sundquist joins to play drums.
“Seattle was pretty isolated in the eighties,” says Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron. He was still playing in Skin Yard in 1986 when they and Soundgarden contributed songs to the now famous
Deep Six compilation album – about as pivotal in its own way as Metal For Muthas was in broadening NWOBHM’s appeal. The album would do
little in the way of sales until it was reissued in
1994, but it showcased a series of bands that were turning one corner of the Pacific Northwest into a rapidly expanding bubble of talent.
“When a lot of our bands were developing, we would go watch bands like The Melvins,” says Cameron. “Bands like that were as influential as any big stadium rock bands at the time. The environment was key to us. We all came from the eighties underground. That was a performancebased society. We had to get out there and play shows. There was no internet or YouTube so we had to prove it every night on stage.”
Cameron would join Soundgarden in time for their first Sub Pop EP, 1987’s Screaming Life. It was hardly the shot heard around the world, but the EP did pique the interest of major labels that were starting to look to the US north-west for inspiration.
Screaming Life’s lead song, Hunted Down, was an early template of the sometimes mournful thunder that, juxtaposed with Cornell’s pained howl, would come to typify those early Soundgarden songs. The band, however, had no lofty ambitions.
“Absolutely not,” Cameron tells Classic Rock. “We were just living in the moment. We were all inspired to make music and create art. That was always the goal for me at least. I am in this to make good music. I think that was always the goal for all of us.”
Many years later, Chris Cornell is sitting across from me in a London hotel room. Soundgarden have reunited for 2012’s King Animal, and he’s talking about returning to Seattle and Soundgarden years after he left for Los Angeles. “I took my brother-in-law back up there with me,” he recalls. “He’s a screenwriter, and after a few days he couldn’t work, the city was getting to him – the low sky, the continual rain, this feeling that things are pressing down on you. I’d forgotten that feeling, or maybe I’d got used to it?”
In 1988, however, it was hard to hear that heavy weather in the music Soundgarden were making. They were on a creative tear with their cover of the Ohio Players’ Fopp, which can best be described as playful. Two months later they released their debut album Ultramega OK on the SST label. But despite their bold ideas, the results were a little thin. The songs were punchy and taut – Flower, All Your Lies and Beyond The Wheel would still make occasional appearances in their set decades later – but Drew Canulette’s production was at odds with the sound the band were trying to create. Even though they’d travelled south to Oregon only to record part of the album, it felt as alien as the sound they were hearing through the studio speakers.
“We left our home surroundings and people we’d been involved with, and used this producer that really did affect our album in a kind of negative way,” Cornell reflected years later. “He was a guy suggested by SST. I still regret it. In terms of material, it should have been one of the best records we ever did.”
It might not have been exactly what the band had envisioned, but Ultramega OK was enough of a progression at a time when the American college gig circuit was a viable step up out of the underground. REM had begun leapfrogging their way towards fame through those very halls, while the must-see show on MTV – once the preserve of lipstick, leather and lace in the shape of Headbangers Ball – was the indie showcase 120 Minutes, its polar opposite in terms of presentation and tone. Flower, an early proponent of what would become Soundgarden’s tropes (fuzz, Black Sabbath notes, Led Zeppelin’s posturing and a lovely swirl of psychedelic colours) became something of a staple on the MTV show.
Seattle was, to the outside world at least, starting to happen. Like almost every overnight success, the truth was actually years of unseen hard work: bands rising and falling, members jumping
“there was no internet or Youtube so we had to prove it every night on stage.” Matt Cameron
from one project to the next, trying to find that irresistible combination and connection, that lightning-in-a-bottle moment.
Cameron remembers the scene as something akin to a support system. “We were all fans of each other,” he remembers. “I think we learned from bands like Black Flag – we loved their whole music scene. We loved Minor Threat, we loved the Discord scene. I think our mentors were all working in a way that we could relate with. We learned a lot from those groups.”
Bassist Ben Shepherd, who would join Soundgarden as the 90s began, had memories of the club scene in the mid-to-late-80s that were shot through an altogether darker prism.
“There wasn’t any fuckin’ community,” he says. “That’s where Hater [the band he’d later form with Cameron] came in. We were a different side of the track to all of those fuckers. The real history is that the A&R guy showed up on the wrong fuckin’ night. Instead he ends up signing Mother Love Bone, because they were there on the wrong night. That changed Seattle history right there.”
In Rimini in the early summer of 1990, it was clear that things were changing. Soundgarden had finally signed to a major label, Mother Love Bone singer (and Cornell’s friend and roommate) Andrew Wood had died – the tragic event that would become the catalyst for the Temple Of The Dog project – and original bassist Hiro Yamamoto had been replaced briefly by the stone-faced Jason Everman.
Nirvana’s Bleach album was making all sorts of waves internationally, and had turned Kurt Cobain into something of an alternative pin-up, much to the band and Kim Thayil’s bemusement. “Do you think,” he said one evening as we were discussing Nirvana’s irresistible rise, “that some
“whoever came up with the grunge label did not understand what the music was about.” Ben Shepherd