Soundgarden: New Metal Crown

Introduction

PICTURE this: It’s a hot August evening. You’re one of thousands jammed into Memorial Stadium, at Seattle Center. The sun hasn’t gone down yet, but dusk is close, and the horizon’s beginning to darken to the east. You’re sweating, pressed in by the crowd. So far you’ve sat through You Am I, the Reverend Horton Heat, and Screaming Trees. They’ve all been good, but they’re not why you’re here. Now Artis the Spoonman is finishing his short set. You’re getting bored. Suddenly there’s the thud of a drum and for a moment all you can hear is cheering. Then the riff of Jesus Christ Pose kicks in and you’re on your feet, just like everybody else … .

Now a quieter scene: You take a stroll in Seattle’s Magnuson Park, wandering across the long slopes by the shore of Lake Washington, and eventually you come to a small bridge. You go across it, and find yourself on property owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It still seems like a part of the park—no fences, just grass and a series of strange, artistic structures. You keep on walking as the footpath—by now made up of triangular pavers—winds through what looks like a number of radio antennae. But when the wind blows, as it often does on this open space, they turn eerily and emit what sound like boat whistles. You decide to stay for a few minutes, and sit on one of the rather futuristic benches, looking at the view. The sounds change as the breeze rises and falls, from long, breathy sighs to moans and howls. It’s beautiful, spooky, even terrifying, often all three at the same time. You love it.

You’re actually in the middle of a piece of art. Douglas Hollis’ wind sculpture, A Sound Garden, which was dedicated in 1983. The antennae are aeolian pipes, guided by vanes, and played by the wind. They stand firm, facing into everything from gentle breeze to full gale, and make their music.

Soundgarden took their name from this, and in a way it’s quite perfect. For just like the sculpture they’ve stood up to all the weather flung at them, the twists and turns of the wind, and they’ve carried on making music.

From the very earliest days as a trio of Kim Thayil, Hiro Yamamoto, and Chris Cornell, who doubled on drums and vocals, to today’s incredibly successful quartet—still Thayil and Cornell, now the singer and frontman, with drummer Matt Cameron and bass player Ben Shepherd—Soundgarden have persisted in their vision, expanding and refining it, even when it seemed that not too many people might share it.

They’ve been around for ten years, longer than almost any other Seattle band, and in that time they’ve gone from nights of playing to ten or twenty people at the Ditto Tavern (and most of those were from other bands on the bill) to selling out two nights at New York State Armory, at 5,000 people a night. Or, back home in Seattle, packing Memorial Stadium to capacity with virtually 18,000 fans. And, to paraphrase the song, they’ve done it all their way. Every single step.

IN THE days before the spotlight fell on Seattle and its music scene, the Deep Six bands, as Soundgarden and their friends were known, sculpted their own strange ideal of rock. To them, isolated in the Northwest, a place all the major tours avoided like the plague, there was nothing strange about listening to, and being influenced by, groups as diverse as Kiss, Black Flag, and Bauhaus. There was no one to lay down the laws of cool. It was all music, they liked it, and that was what mattered. Besides, what they played was never meant to be for mass consumption anyway.

They dressed in what was practical and comfortable. Doc Martens, thrift-store flannel, and baseball caps. Only later, after the press had coined the term grunge and made it into a household word, did a million others around the globe follow suit.

And then, once the press was salivating over Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Mudhoney, and using every comparison and adjective to make Seattle the Second Coming of Liverpool, Soundgarden were out in the wilderness. They’d been tried and found wanting. Maybe they were from Seattle, but those records on Sub Pop were history now. What they played was, well … it was just too metal to be part of such a hip scene.

Never mind that they’d been the first of the Northwest bands to ink a deal with a major label (A&M). Never mind that they’d played exactly the same circuit as their hometown friends, honing their craft, building their audience. They had the big riffs, that Robert Plant kind of voice. It was metal, and that was that. Case closed.

Louder Than Love, their debut for A&M, held the promise of great things, and the label did what they could to promote it, hoping, no doubt, for a fast breakthrough. It sold respectably —that is, it was a disappointment since it didn’t rocket onto the charts the way everyone had anticipated. The name Soundgarden didn’t flame across the skies. But some people did discover them, and the band’s constant touring continued to bring new fans into the fold.

Meanwhile, Seattle was becoming the city where every aspiring musician in America wanted to live. If you walked down the street with a guitar, they said, you could have a recording deal before you’d gone five blocks. Pearl Jam, risen from the ashes of Mother Love Bone (and the corpse of Andrew Wood, the first of several drug-related deaths in Seattle music), had become huge on the release of their first album. Nirvana’s Nevermind had brought the concept of alternative music crashing quite suddenly into the mainstream. It was 1991, the year, according to Sonic Youth, that punk broke.

It would also prove to be the year that Soundgarden firmly established themselves, as Badmotorfinger went gold, made the Top Ten in the U.S. album charts, and garnered the band its second Grammy nomination with a sound that moved back toward their roots, the bizarre spot where metal and psychedelia meet. Six years of work, of all-too-frequent gigs, of time on the road, was finally beginning to pay off.

Suddenly it was okay to mention Soundgarden again. Not only were they now the metal band it was okay to like, they were the Future of Metal. The hip cachet that had accompanied the first Sub Pop releases had returned. The secret pleasures could be taken out of the closet and put back on the CD rack. They had power, intelligence, everything a fan could ideally want in a metal band, not to mention an alternative sensibility (which was, in fact, exactly the same as they’d been when they began).

During 1992 they played both ends of the market, first touring as the opening act for Guns N’ Roses, then as part of the bill for the Lollapalooza festival, where hipness met commerce and both came away richer. And the band enjoyed the last and biggest laugh—they performed the same songs at both shows. It was, in its own small way, quite groundbreaking. But then, that’s par for the course with this group. Often quite unconsciously, they’ve hammered together the strands of so many different elements—seventies metal, hard rock, punk, goth—into an alloy that’s stronger and harder than any of its constituents, and one which by its very nature stands a little bit beyond definition. Is it metal? Is it punk? By the end of the year both camps were trying to lay claim to the sound. But, finally, did it really matter what you called it? It was Soundgarden, playing their music. You either liked it or you hated it. You got it or you didn’t. There really wasn’t much middle ground.

Nineteen ninety-three saw the band spending a lot less time on the road than in previous years, and a lot more time in the studio, both writing and recording. The results saw the light of day in March 1994, and Superunknown, the new album, entered the Billboard charts at number one. Everyone knew it was going to be big, the payback for all the work, picking up on the momentum gained by the last one, but even so, it was, well, a bit of a surprise. Soundgarden had established a strong fan base, and A&M had orchestrated a large advertising campaign, but the fact was, they’d never been as accessible as many of their contemporaries. They’d never tried to be. It was, perhaps, the final sign that the musical climate in America had changed. In a short time Nirvana had shifted millions of units. Pearl Jam had become instant millionaires. Why not Soundgarden? After all, they’d earned it.

It certainly didn’t hurt the cause that Superunknown was the most commercial work they’d yet released. Somewhat unexpectedly, the record was filled with songs you could sing, that sounded just great on the car radio. Black Hole Sun held faint echoes of the Beatles at their psychedelic best. Fell on Black Days showed that even depression and fear could seethe and then explode, while My Wave plain hurtled out of the speakers.

Soundgarden at number one … To the people who’d seen them in 1985 at the Gorilla Gardens it seemed impossible, the warped product of some parallel universe. But there it was in black and white. And to prove it wasn’t some sort of fluke, the album spent most of the rest of the year in the Top 20.

A summer tour across America showed that success hadn’t gone to their heads. Culminating in a packed show in their hometown, Soundgarden proved they could still rock just as hard as they had in ’86. They’d just widened the parameters, that was all. Which, really, was what they’d been doing all along.

PERHAPS THE single most impressive thing about Soundgarden is the way they’ve stuck to their guns. In the course of their career they’ve had innumerable opportunities to change tack and broaden their appeal. When Louder Than Love came out, and suddenly they were a metal band, they could have played up to that, become another Metallica or even Mötley Crüe, and taken that shortcut to fame. But they didn’t.

And it’s even just faintly possible that Soundgarden are responsible for the rise of alternative music. Reportedly, Nirvana originally approached Sub Pop Records because Kurt Cobain loved Soundgarden’s two releases with the label. That led to the Love Buzz single, which led to Bleach (although it almost didn’t; frustrated by Sub Pop’s delay in putting out the album, the band talked to C/Z Records, another Seattle record label, about issuing it), and from there … well, never mind.

If you accept that, there are a lot of people (and a lot of bands) who owe Soundgarden a big debt of gratitude. Not that they’d want it. Just some respect.

But even that was difficult enough to come by for a long time. In Europe the metal press always treated them with deference, but in America they always tended to fall between the cracks. They were a metal band, the thinking went, and metal isn’t cool. Only in 1992 did things start to change, when Spin talked belatedly about The Year of Grunge and put Chris Cornell on the cover (even though Soundgarden had as much to do with grunge as they did with disco). And after they hit number one … well, imagine for yourself.

They’ve quite firmly remained a Seattle band. All the members still live there, albeit in far more comfortable circumstances than they enjoyed before. Kim Thayil’s beater Volkswagen bus has given way to a new four-wheel drive. The office of Susan Silver’s company, Silver Management, which also represents Alice in Chains and Hater (a side project for Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron), now has taken up an entire floor of a building—all carefully restored, exposed brick—and has a number of employees. You call the office, and while you wait on hold, you find yourself listening to a classical music station. Not metal. Not punk.

In a lot of ways things have changed. The band members are older, wiser, even a little richer. It’s harder to get through the boredom of a tour. But rub away at the surface, and they’re still the same musical idealists they were in 1984. Even when they’re off the road, they stay focused on their work. Back from Europe in the autumn of 1994, forced to cancel dates because of Chris’ throat problems, they immediately returned to the studio to begin writing for the next album, to record songs for a movie soundtrack, as well as a single to benefit the organization Home Alive. Music is what they do,it’s why they are.

And that’s the way it’s always been with them. In the early days all their free time was spent practicing, rehearsing, seeing what would work and what wouldn’t. For all the beers drunk, Soundgarden have always been utterly serious about their music. Quite obviously Lady Luck’s played her part in their success, but far more of it has been due to sheer bloody hard work.

Still, if you want to understand where Soundgarden stand today, how and why they got there, you have to go look back to the roots, to where it all started, in Seattle, and the way that scene was before the media trampled it into (and finally under) the ground. And then you have to go back even farther, to take a look at the history of metal, where the sound began, through the faint echo of power chords and fifteen-minute guitar solos.

1

Gentlemen, Start Your Amplifiers

THESE days it’s hard to believe there was a time when metal didn’t exist. A staple of the classic-rock stations, it seems like it’s been around forever. For anyone growing up and listening to FM radio in the seventies, it has been. It’s perhaps even harder to imagine that it evolved out of pop and blues; after all, from the Kinks’ You Really Got Me, (which is arguably the very first metal record, with its singular, pounding riff and manic guitar solo) to Ministry, Helmet, or Megadeth, might seem a remarkably long jump. But if you stop and think about it for a couple of minutes, you’ll realize that in the final analysis, it’s really not so far after all.

If there’s one person to blame, really, it’s Jimmy Page. Without him there’d have been no Led Zeppelin, and without the monster that was Zep we might never have had heavy music, the stuff that became heavy metal, then just metal, before it shattered like a mirror into a thousand shiny reflections of its origin. Or then again, maybe it was inevitable, simply fated to happen. But without Zep it would have certainly charted a completely different course and become … Well, we’ll never know now, will we?

Page was already one of London’s top session guitarists in the mid-sixties (it’s rumored that he was the one who played the solo on that Kinks song) when he was enticed into joining the Yardbirds, initially on bass, then playing joint lead guitar with Jeff Beck (who, in turn, had replaced Eric Clapton in the band; they were positively littered with guitar heroes). Because of Beck’s ongoing health problems the lineup only lasted a few months, until November 1966, but it was captured for eternity on celluloid in Michael Antonioni’s quintessential film of those Swinging Sixties, Blow Up.

After Beck left the fold, the Yardbirds soldiered on, gradually losing members, until Page—by now the only one left, and not even a founder—was more or less forced to change the name to the New Yardbirds, bringing in John Paul Jones, who, like himself, had been a fairly successful session musician and arranger, on bass and keyboards, then finding singer Robert Plant in a Birmingham group called Hobbstweedle. (He was recommended by another singer, Terry Reid, who was first offered the New Yardbirds gig but turned it down in favor of a solo career.) In turn Plant brought in drummer John Bonham from another Birmingham band. After fulfilling the New Yardbirds’ live commitments in Scandinavia, the name was changed to Led Zeppelin, appropriated from one of Keith Moon’s (The Who) pet comments, and the legend was ready to begin.

While people have made a strong case for Jeff Beck’s Truth (1968) as the first heavy album, or even Blue Cheer as the first heavy band (their only hit single, a blasting cover of Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues, in 1968, admittedly pointed the way), it was Led Zeppelin in 1969 that captured public attention, and record sales. Like Jeff Beck, Page’s grounding and his love was the blues, and he used it to strong effect on the record. But Zeppelin had far more going for them than just being a loud blues band. Blues was their point of departure for places music hadn’t been before, even in those swirling, druggy, psychedelic days. They took all the elements from the past, tipped them upside down, shook them around, and came out with something new, utilizing the studio as another instrument in a way no one had managed before, to bring a rare fullness and depth (a most important factor) to the sound.

Page and Plant were the undoubted focus of the band: Page as the new guitar hero, every bit as revered as Seattle native Jimi Hendrix (and, in his own way, equally as innovative and pioneering) ; and Plant, with his flowing, golden hair, bare chest, and piercing voice, a new type of idol, one who appealed to males just as much as females. By the time Led Zeppelin II arrived on the shelves a year later, they were already established as a major concert draw. The album (which topped the charts two months after its release) contained the first of what would become a whole series of Zeppelin classics, a song to which every young guitarist learned the riff (and then tried, usually in vain, to copy the solo)—Whole Lotta Love.

While Page and company might have been the first big name in heavy-metal music, they weren’t the only ones for too long. Hot on their heels came Black Sabbath (also boasting strong Birmingham roots), who managed to be even heavier and louder. With lyrics full of Satanic and black-magic imagery, and played at zombie-like speed, Black Sabbath, in 1970, was a revelation (or a revulsion, depending where you stood) to a generation. Critics hated it. Kids loved it. This music owed little to the blues rock tradition, seeming to come from another [under]world altogether. The music of their Ozzy period was tremendously influential in the genre, and their first four albums remain classics.

And then there was Deep Purple, who approached it from an altogether different angle. Starting out as a pop/progressive /pseudo-classical outfit, they had a pair of hits (with songs written by Joe South and Neil Diamond, no less) before releasing organist Jon Lord’s ridiculously pompous Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1970), which straggled in the footsteps of the Nice and all manner of other bands with hifalutin aspirations. It didn’t sell, so on their next album, Deep Purple in Rock, later that same year, they took another, more direct tack—louder and heavier, with the emphasis on Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar solos and Ian Gillan’s screaming. With new songs like Speed King and Child in Time, it all came together, and the band became a major force on the scene, at least for a while.

Across the Atlantic the amps were also getting cranked up to 10. Vanilla Fudge had scored a major hit with an extended, overwrought version of the Supremes’ You Keep Me Hangin’ On, and in fact had headlined over Led Zeppelin on the latter’s first American tour. However, following a decidedly half-baked second album—which included one twelve-minute opus purporting to contain the entire history of music!—they were off down the slippery slope to