How Soundgarden Named One of Their Most Important Albums

Soundgarden was always a difficult band to categorize.

Which in part is why the songs they created together still sound like nothing else. But the members of the Seattle band -- long before there was a "grunge" attached to their elevator description, were often amused by the things they heard offered up as descriptors.

"It's like, everyone says we sound like [Led] Zeppelin, or they say we sound like [Black] Sabbath. How did that happen? We thought we were just being trippy, you know? We listened to it, it's like, oh yeah, that's kind of cool," Kim Thayil said in a recent interview with the State of Love and Trust podcast. Journalists got in on the action, saying, "This is obviously Soundgarden's roots," something which came as a surprise to the Seattle-bred band, who'd categorized themselves as "acid punk" in the years before they (and many of their area peers) were tagged with the grunge moniker.

As we know now, whatever the labels might have been, a lot of things worked out. A large level of success at MTV and radio followed, of course, with peaks and valleys. They soared high, eventually broke up and pursued individual activities -- with vocalist Chris Cornell finding new areas of success. By the time they got back together and released 2012's King Animal, they were seemingly older and wiser. It happens.

But sadly, a good portion of the group's legacy has been frozen in amber since Cornell's unfortunate passing in 2017. The loss and passage of time would open an eventual lane for Thayil to consider his life before, during and after his time with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees.

A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond is the result and music fans won't be able to put this book down. It takes you deep into the depths of the group's story, with stories both humorous and emotionally hard. Thayil's take on all of it feels brutally honest, but respectfully written.

Conversation with the guitarist is similarly free-flowing and quickly reveals the music fan within Thayil that helped drive his contributions to Soundgarden's work. It's an important component, but just one layer of who he is. During our time, we looked to dig through those layers and learn even more.

You can hear our full interview on the latest episode of the UCR Podcast and read select edited excerpts from the chat below.

I have some pretty formative music memories thanks to Soundgarden. But it's clear from reading your book that you had your own version of that too. Still, I remember things like walking into the record store and having the record store clerk tell me that Soundgarden had a song called "Jerry Garcia's Finger." It seems like it was probably a lot of fun to be in a band that could really put things out that would light the fuse and the curiosity of music fans hearing your music, the way that, similarly, bands and artists had done with music for you.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think when I was anticipating a new release when I was a teenager, whether it was Kiss, Aerosmith or Cheap Trick, there's always that little gap in time when you when you know it's coming out because you read about it in Creem or or Circus or Rolling Stone or something. Or the clerk at your local record store tells you, 'Hey, next month, we're expecting a new Cheap Trick record."

Then you actually see the record and you just stare at that cover, and you look at the song titles. Then you imagine, you know, which ones are going to be the rockers. Well, this sounds like a fast song. This will be heavy. [But] you can't afford it yet, right? Because you're a kid -- at least that's how I was -- but you're stoked that you that you knew it was coming out. It's out, you've seen the cover, you know the titles.

And you sit there and try to imagine how the songs could sound. [You wonder] if there's an inner sleeve [or] if it's a gatefold. So the whole thing, the whole package, I think anticipation was, you know, a large part of the pleasure in looking forward to buying it and throwing it on your turntable. So, yeah, that was definitely a thing. And it's funny that you would mention song titles, because so often, one band member or another would suggest a different song title than what the writer had envisioned.

Listen to Kim Thayil on the 'UCR Podcast'

Chris's music was right there and he had these lyrics and he'd come out and say, "I want to call it this." It's like, "Huh!" You listen to the song, you listen to the lyrics. And I might suggest, you know, this might work if you call it that. It's kind of a little bit more impactful, a little bit more colorful, a little bit more streamlined and he would think about it.

In the early days, that would happen a lot more often than not. Ben [Shepherd] would do the same thing. You know, Ben gave the title for "Ty Cobb." And there's not really a reference to Ty Cobb in the lyrics, but I think thematically, "Hard headed / F--k you all." [Thayil chuckles] We thought perhaps it should be called "Hot Rod Death Toll!" You know, since that was one of the two choruses.

It was things like that. You know, should it be "Far Beyond the Wheel," or just "Beyond the Wheel?" It's called just "Beyond the Wheel." There's some mystery there, things like that. So that was often the case that someone would suggest that and it was up to the author, really, to agree or comply with the rest of the band's advocacy.

Listen to Montrose's 'Bad Motor Scooter'

As a Montrose fan, I was a little bit upset with myself that I didn't connect you guys taking the title of "Bad Motor Scooter" and matching it up with Badfinger's band name, to get the album title for Badmotorfinger. That's brilliant, man.
Two things about that: One, it was spontaneous. You know, while drinking and smoking cigarettes and playing around with the four-track and listening to the radio. But the second was the response. My buddy Reyzart [Reyza Sagheb], who did a lot of the graphic art for the Superunknown booklet, the fact that his initial response was just to start laughing -- like stomach holding laughing [was one thing]. [Album producer] Terry Date and Chris responded the same way a day or two later, when I was in the studio and I mentioned it to them, it just seemed initially like a great joke title, you know?

I said to Ben and [he just started] cracking up. [So it] seemed like a great joke title. But then when you sat there....I remember Chris sitting there in the control room next to Terry and like 15 or 20 minutes later, he's like, "You know, that's kind of cool!" He goes, "When you think about it, it's not just a joke, it's kind of cool." And then I'd think about it, I wrote it out as three words. I put it together as one word and thought, "You know, it looks cool, it sounds cool." We started discussing how it evoked a lot of things. It was witty and humorous, but it also evoked things like cars, automobiles, flipping people off, the whole thing. It was aggressive, but colorful and it was funny. So it did a lot of rock things. [Laughs]

How did it feel when you heard the sound of that record as a whole?
Oh, it was impactful. It jumped out of the speakers. You know, we're bringing home the daily cassettes from the studios and it was sounding good. But certainly when it was mixed and mastered, it just had a nice punch to it.

We'd come off of some disappointment. You know, we were really happy with how Screaming Life came out. But there was some disappointment with Ultramega OK and a little bit of disappointment with Louder Than Love. A little bit in the mixing and stuff. It was a little bit wetter than we might have imagined. But Badmotorfinger, yeah, it had a really solid drum impact and guitar colors, so we were happy about that.

Watch Soundgarden's 'Outshined' Video

Superunknown, too. I know everyone has had some grievances and complaints about working with Michael Beinhorn, but he made one of our coolest sounding records. It's certainly our most successful record. There's no question about that, that we liked how it sounded. It was performing it, which was very difficult and frustrating. It's one thing to have a sound that works in terms of the audio that you're listening to or the audio that's going on tape. -- or what the mics are picking up.

It's another thing to have that sound be conducive to playing your instrument. A lot of the sounds that Michael was dialing in just were not. He either wasn't understanding it, because he's a keyboardist....I know he had commented at times that he wanted the impact that he got from electronic music. And again, you're talking about compression, things hitting hard and banging. He did that, but as a keyboardist and someone thinking about electronic music, these are not in the set of things that rock guitarists might want to approach.

It doesn't facilitate what my fingers are doing on the neck or what they'd like to do on the neck. That was my particular grievance. Chris was less established of a guitarist, although he had a great sense of rhythm and a great right arm and elbow, from his years of being a drummer. He had a great sense of rhythm, certainly a better sense of rhythm than I would have. That right arm, man, the snare and the high hat. So he had an engineering sensibility and Michael certainly did. I think there was some interest in the sounds that could be made and go on tape.

For me, it's like, that sounds great, but it doesn't play well. The guitar is my voice and not just an instrument for recording or for writing. That's why there was some frustration there. But, my God, Superunknown is sonic and so is Badmotorfinger. I had to throw that in there, because what you're saying about Badmotorfinger, I totally agree with. But the impact sonically of the production of Superunknown was great as well.

For years, I'd say my favorite Soundgarden records were either Superunknown or Screaming Life. Sometime in the past decade, I was relistening to Badmotorfinger and that became my favorite one. Again, it's dynamic. We grow and reinvestigate and reappraise.

You write about this in your new book, but give us the latest update as far as where things are at with the final Soundgarden album that's been in the works?
[Thayil pauses] it's such an atypical process. That's one of the things that makes it a little bit more difficult, but a little bit more interesting. We knew that years ago back in 2017. We were trying to envision, how do we go about it? We had no question that it was doable. But it was just, what do we have to work with and how do we build the recording around what we have to work with?

Because that's the situation, unfortunately, that we were given. You don't have a record label budgeting a financial advance and a schedule with which you would make the record that would fit with their promotion and production and release schedule. There isn't any of that, so we're going to have to fund it differently and build it when we're available and when we have time.

In some ways, it's working sideways and in some ways it's working forward and in some ways, it's working backward. But it's really interesting and it's really fun. We'll get there.

Kim Thayil's memoir, A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond, is available now.