CHAPTER 8

SOUNDGARDEN

Attack of the Sasquatch Rock

The party line about the sound of grunge involves the bonding of punk and metal. On a macrolevel, this sort of dichotomy makes perfect sense, for most of the bands of the grunge era did indeed borrow the simplicity, attitude, and ragged first-take feel of punk and meld it with the muscle and noise of classic Sabbath metal. People point to the era’s biggest band, Nirvana, as the anecdotal example, and at first glance that distinction fits like a glove, as the best songs from Nevermind are essentially just really slow punk songs (which is a distinction that fits bands like Mudhoney to a T).

However, certain bands skipped the “punk” side of grunge entirely and went right to gigantic, sludge-heavy riffs that formed dirgey metal tunes. It was the sound of arena rock made ungodly ugly. Alice in Chains did it with a little less notoriety (their success didn’t come until they began to operate outside of their idiom; their most famous song is from an acoustic EP), but nobody did it better than the godfathers of a grunge subset known as “Sasquatch rock” (named for the legendary bigfoot that supposedly roamed the Pacific Northwest). If Sabbath was the heaviest of the heavy and Poison the glammiest of the glammy, then Soundgarden, those superheavy guys from Seattle, were the hairiest of the hairy. Their brand of arena-ready sludge rock was far more marketable than most of their contemporaries’, thanks to Soundgarden’s penchant for mammoth pop hooks and the wailing of Robert Plant–channeling front man Chris Cornell. They were even initially embraced by the same metal community that grunge destroyed. One of the first bands to establish themselves in the Seattle scene (two of their songs appeared on 1986’s Deep Six compilation), they were also one of the last bands to implode under the spotlight. Ironically, Soundgarden gave birth to “alternative rock,” a subgenre that eventually rejected them and sent them to an early grave in 1997 after a disastrous album and growing animosity between members. Soundgarden was a strange beast, but in the grunge era strange was the new mainstream and outcasts were the new cool kids, and for a handful of years in the early nineties Soundgarden was on top of the rock world and, despite selling platinum and attracting millions of fans, was still somewhat underappreciated and underrated.

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OF ALL the bands that gained notoriety in the grunge scene, Soundgarden’s rise to the top is the most traditionally archetypal. They are the only band to have formed in the pregrunge period, rise to stardom during the breakout heyday of the early nineties, and then manage to outlast just about anybody outside of Pearl Jam. During that time, Soundgarden did not particularly innovate or evolve a great deal, and since their points of reference were Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles, they always sounded like classic rock, even when they were new. There was nothing particularly fascinating about their approach, and their sound is not even very “indie” (especially considering the rock-star-god qualities of their front man), but Soundgarden became iconic in the grunge era anyway, and they did it very loudly.

The Soundgarden story actually began in 1981 in Illinois, where guitar player and beard aficionado Kim Thayil and bass player Hiro Yamamoto started playing music together in high school. The pair ended up at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washingon, about an hour’s drive southwest of Seattle, but quickly realized the city was where everything was happening (at least musically), so they moved there after a year, transferring to the University of Washington. Also along for the move was their friend Bruce Pavitt, who would later start up the fanzine Subterranean Pop and eventually cofound Sub Pop Records with Jonathan Poneman.

The members of Soundgarden first started crossing paths in bands in Seattle in the early 1980s. Yamamoto had joined a cover band called the Shemps that had put a “vocalist wanted” ad out in a local paper, and the guy the band eventually hired was a young drummer named Chris Cornell who wanted to try his hand at singing. The Shemps played mostly classic rock tunes (and by all accounts, they played the tunes relatively poorly). When Yamamoto eventually quit the band, bass-playing duties were taken up by his friend Kim Thayil. Cornell and Yamamoto stayed close, though—when the Shemps finally called it quits around 1984, the two moved in together.

Cornell and Yamamoto started jamming together and eventually brought along Thayil. In their earliest demos, Cornell channels Phil Collins by playing drums and singing at the same time. Eventually the band hired a drummer named Scott Sundquist to allow Cornell to concentrate solely on vocals. The three core members had all done time in classic rock–sounding outfits, but they were also into the noisy bands that were coming out of Seattle (they were fans of Skin Yard, a band that featured eventual Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron) and also dug the American Hardcore scene (they often expressed an affinity for Jello Biafra’s Dead Kennedys).

The band decided to call themselves Soundgarden after a gigantic pipe sculpture that served as an outdoor art installation in Seattle. When the wind kicked up, it blew air through the pipes and made an incredible low-ended moaning sound; in the sonic sense, there was no more appropriate band name than that, as the band was an art project that also made ungodly, overwhelming sounds when the timing was right.

They began to gig around town, playing shows with the Melvins, Skin Yard, and a number of other early grunge forefathers. They formally recorded their first original material in 1985 for the Deep Six compilation, but Sundquist quit shortly thereafter to spend more time with his family. Matt Cameron left Skin Yard to join Cornell, Thayil, and Yamamoto in Soundgarden. Such was the sorta utopia of the Seattle scene—bands shared and swapped members constantly, with little animosity between them. It really was as though each musician was simply a member of a commune and that it didn’t matter who they were playing with just as long as they were playing.

As the scene began to heat up in the wake of Deep Six, Soundgarden made history by becoming the first band to release an EP on the newly minted Sup Pop label, which was started by Thayil’s old friend Bruce Pavitt. Screaming Life was released in 1987, and it’s a remarkably accomplished piece of work. Produced by Jack Endino in only his second gig as a producer (he had previously turned the knobs for his own band Skin Yard on the Deep Six album), it’s a little more straightforward than their later work, but it still manages to pack a pretty impressive punch. “Hunted Down,” “Tears to Forget,” and “Hand of God” all sound big and tough, and though Cornell hadn’t quite found his wail yet (he sounds just slightly unsure of himself on Screaming Life), the mark of greatness was still apparent—in fact, the song “Nothing to Say” was once put on a local radio compilation titled Bands That Will Make Money.

The EP was well received, creating buzz not only for Soundgarden but also for Sub Pop. They released a second Sup Pop EP in 1988 called Fopp. In a sense, Fopp is something of a throwaway, as it contains only two original songs (fleshed out by a Green River cover and a dub version of the title track). But the strange funkiness of that dub tune revealed a side of Soundgarden that was simultaneously adventurous and somewhat goofy. It was an approach that defied conventions and created an atmosphere of unpredictability, which most of their mainstream contemporaries sorely lacked. Grunge bands did this remarkably well, but Soundgarden was probably the best at it. They were four hairy, strange-looking metal guys who played heavy riffs and sang about birth and death, but they also had a playful side. They weren’t funny, per se, but as with many of the bands that shared their vision (and their performance spaces), a sense of humor was important. From the outside, it tended to give the impression that the bands weren’t serious, which might have contributed to certain groups’ inability to be taken seriously, like Mudhoney.

The thing that people tend to remember about grunge, though, is its heavy-handed moroseness. Pearl Jam has always been perceived as being “important,” mostly because Eddie Vedder carried himself with such a profound sense of purpose. But Pearl Jam knew how to have fun, too, as evidenced by the white-boy funky Ten-era b-side, “Dirty Frank.” Soundgarden ran into the same problems: They got famous for songs such as “Jesus Christ Pose” and “Black Hole Sun,” but they also released a song called “Spoonman” as a single and recorded a track for their last album called “Ty Cobb,” whose chorus was not about baseball but instead was Cornell intoning “Fuck you all!” with a sly grin. So if there are all of these lighthearted indulgences on their résumé, why is Soundgarden remembered as the gloomiest of the gloomy?

Like most grunge bands, they were the victims of a perfect storm of assumptions. Though they toured the world, their music would always be defined by the city of Seattle, which from the outside is a pretty dreary place that has a very morose vibe. Sonically, they were also very dark, as even on the aforementioned “Spoonman” the guitars are distorted and sound sick in the “Touch Me I’m Sick” kind of way. But all sonics aside, Soundgarden and the rest of the grunge bands were seen as a reaction to the good-time hard rock of the 1980s. The perception about hair metal was that it was all about partying all the time, and for the most part that was true, even though bands like Twisted Sister and Judas Priest often ventured into darker territory. Since grunge was perceived as being the antidote to those kinds of rock poses, it clearly had to be the opposite of what that music represented. So even when grunge bands weren’t sounding dour or morose or mournful or depressed during a particular song, it was assumed that they were only making time until they went back to being down. The accepted perception about grunge is that it killed off glam metal; by that logic, it would have to operate under the opposite pretense. If eighties bands were about partying, then nineties bands simply must have been about being bummed out. This is oversimplifying logic, but it’s how scenes like this get reduced over time. In an age of information overload, things need to be consolidated and processed, so there’s no room for nuance. By that token, all grunge bands were depressing all the time. Soundgarden? The most morose metalheads on the planet.

Though they could never have known it would eventually hurt (or at least limit) the perception of the bands at the time, a lot of those concepts came from the fans. Grunge was supposed to be a reaction to eighties metal in the sense that it was supposed to be meaningful, or at least smarter than your average Warrant song. There has long been a perception in the United States that being depressed made you smart, or at least made you seem smart. The sources are varied, but Woody Allen has a lot to do with it. Allen is a guy who is tremendously funny and dynamic and intelligent in his movies, but the characters were often in therapy or suffering some sort of existential crisis. In Allen’s universe, being depressed meant that you thought more deeply about esoteric subjects like the expansion of the universe and this made you slightly more evolved than the person who didn’t consider those things. It’s a remarkably effective approach that a lot of young students take to heart. The best way to seem like a genius during your orientation week at college is to talk about your existential crisis.

Since the driving force behind grunge’s first wave of fans was college students or twenty-somethings who considered themselves more advanced but couldn’t get into Pavement, they naturally wanted their fandom to reflect better on them. Since people consider their favorite rock bands as an extension of their own personalities (much in the same way people attach themselves to sports teams), the fans wanted to be perceived as smart or deep or meaningful for liking these bands. Since they were essentially big, loud rock groups, creating the perception that all these bands were depressed was the shortest distance to becoming profound. The bands themselves certainly contributed to this perception (as the music does sound pretty down), but the fans perpetuated it for the sake of their own identification. When Soundgarden or Pearl Jam or anybody else tried to goof around, the first people to naysay were the people who loved the band the most, as their goofing reflected poorly on those same fans. It hurt the retroactive perception of a lot of those groups, because many of them are now defined as being only one thing, but it probably got a bunch of twenty-something Seattleites laid in the process. Rock fans are nothing if not shortsighted.

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BY 1988, Soundgarden had been receiving lots of attention from major labels, mostly based on the strength of the Screaming Life EP. Still, the band decided to put out their debut full-length on the independent SST Records. Ultramega OK, released in 1989, was really the first true “grunge” album to get noticed by the mainstream. Ultramega OK was even nominated for a Grammy (the first of the band’s three career nominations). Despite the fact that it really represents Soundgarden finding their sea legs as the band they would be known as, it is a very strange record for a full-length debut. The power is there, especially on “Flower” and “Beyond the Wheel,” both of which are highlighted by Thayil’s swampy riffing and Cameron’s Armageddon-is-coming drums.

However, Ultramega OK contains two covers, a beefed-up version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” and a cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Two Minutes of Silence,” which Soundgarden titled “One Minute of Silence” because they removed Yoko’s part. The subversive Soundgarden sense of humor was present on Ultramega OK as well, in the form of “665” and “667,” two tracks that reference the idea of metal bands being obsessed with the devil. The idea was that if 666 was the number of the beast, then the numbers on either side of it would have to be pretty powerful as well. The whole joke was tremendously high-concept, and the band even went as far as putting some backward messages on “665.” However, when the song’s messages are decoded, they aren’t about Satan. They’re about Santa.

Soundgarden’s full-length release on an indie did not stop the major labels from continuing to make them offers, especially after the very low-budget video for “Flower” got a few spins on MTV. Finally giving in, they signed with A&M Records in 1988, making them the first grunge band to get a major-label deal. While the majors had been interested in Seattle since the release of Deep Six, Soundgarden finally opened the floodgates for the feeding frenzy that would take place over the next several years. Soundgarden had been at it for years and was incredibly beloved in the Seattle community, so rather than cry, “Sellout,” the other bands simply nodded and smiled.

The band headed straight back into the studio to record their major-label debut. The resulting album, Louder than Love (originally titled Louder than Fuck, then Louder than Meat), solidified the band as a driving force with a clearly defined sound. Because it was a major-label release, it also had major-label money behind it, so it was the best-sounding Soundgarden album yet, and the complicated nuances of Thayil’s riffs and solos were finally highlighted properly. Though he often shunned the spotlight and subsequently was denied the credit he deserved, Thayil might have been the best guitarist (or most accomplished musician, period) of the grunge era. Look no further than the complicated time signature in “Get on the Snake” or the absolutely face-melting solo on “Gun” for proof. In a time period when chaos reigned supreme, Thayil added some style and grace to the proceedings.

Louder than Love is an excellent hard-rock record that contains some of the sharpest tunes in the entire Soundgarden catalog, especially the singles “Hands All Over” and “Loud Love.” The album also contains another signature Soundgarden goof piece, this time in the form of “Big Dumb Sex,” which was a painfully straightforward parody of all those eighties tits-and-ass songs (sample lyric: “I’m gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you.”), but played so straight that it’s almost hard to tell if it’s a joke or not. However, the lyric sheet is so over-the-top that it’s almost impossible to process it as anything but a gag (as opposed to a similar song like Stone Temple Pilots’ “Sex Type Thing,” which surfed the line between parody and reality a little too closely).

Shortly after the album’s release and just before Soundgarden was about to embark on their first-ever big-time national tour, Hiro Yamamoto decided to leave the band to go back to school. Left hanging with a tour to get to, the band auditioned several bass players to replace Yamamoto. The band liked Ben Shepherd, who had played in a number of punk bands and was friends with drummer Matt Cameron. But Shepherd didn’t know the songs well enough and wouldn’t be able to learn them in time for the tour, so Soundgarden ended up hiring Jason Everman, whose most recent gig was as the second guitarist in Nirvana, but he was dismissed after the tour for Bleach. Everman’s run in Soundgarden was extremely strange: Though he didn’t play on Louder than Love, he is in most of the promotional photos from that era and appears in the videos from that record. The only thing he ever recorded with the band was a cover of “Come Together” (also featuring Jack Endino on backing vocals; it marked the last time Endino would produce Soundgarden) that appeared as the b-side to the “Hands All Over” single. Everman was fired after the national tour for Louder than Love. It’s clear that the guy was a total disaster, as he always managed to be unceremoniously canned from seminal acts (he later dropped music altogether and joined the army; it’s assumed he’s had better luck there).

Despite Everman, the tour for Louder than Love was a big success and Louder than Love managed to crack the Billboard charts. When Soundgarden returned home to Seattle, they hired Shepherd to come play bass and work on their next album for A&M, which would be titled Badmotorfinger and be released in 1991.

Before the release of that album, however, the band was sidetracked by the overdose death of Mother Love Bone front man Andrew Wood. Wood was a good friend to both Cornell and Thayil and had even been Cornell’s roommate at one time. The news of Wood’s death hit the Seattle community hard, and hit Soundgarden especially hard. They had lost their founding bass player and had now lost a dear friend and musical ally. In response, Cornell rounded up his friend Stone Gossard, also of Mother Love Bone and soon of Pearl Jam, and collaborated on a handful of songs that were recorded with Pearl Jammers Jeff Ament, Mike McCready, and Eddie Vedder, along with Cameron and Thayil from Soundgarden. The group called itself Temple of the Dog, and the resulting self-titled album became the first album of a grunge supergroup, even though neither band had gotten much exposure as of yet. But when A&M formally released it in 1991, it became a hit and ended up spawning the radio and MTV hit “Hunger Strike.” In fact, “Hunger Strike” ended up being the first time mainstream audiences really got to see and hear Chris Cornell and his epic set of pipes.

In retrospect, 1991 might have been the biggest year in music history. While it saw the breakout of grunge in Nirvana and Pearl Jam, it also featured the return (and subsequent collapse) of Guns N’ Roses and saw the breakouts of Garth Brooks and Amy Grant and the death of Freddie Mercury. For Soundgarden, it meant the release of their best album yet. Though it was overshadowed a bit by the breakout successes of fellow Seattleites Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Badmotorfinger still scored several radio hits in “Rusty Cage,” “Outshined,” and “Jesus Christ Pose.” It got built up over time, but it eventually ended in the Billboard Top 50 by 1992, right around the time Nirvana and Pearl Jam were both peaking. Though Soundgarden had both of those bands beaten in terms of longevity and depth of catalog, they were still not considered to be “elite” yet (that wouldn’t come until the release of their next album). It seemed for a while that while Soundgarden was building a fan base and getting more and more success, the overwhelming wave of pro-Seattle sentiment didn’t appear to be rubbing off on them. Considering they had been slowly building themselves up since 1984, it’s likely that they would have had the same level of success in ’91 as they would have if Nirvana never appeared. The sudden Seattle blowup should have made them kings, but for a brief moment it looked like they were going to be relegated to bridesmaid status.

Nobody could ever accuse Soundgarden of being lazy or complacent, as their touring schedule for Badmotorfinger was long and grueling. The band spent almost a year straight on the road, opening dozens of shows for Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row in late ’91 and early ’92 before spending the summer of 1992 on the main stage of the second annual Lollapalooza tour (along with Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Ministry; there were also a few sets by Temple of the Dog, marking some of the few times those collaborators played live). Soundgarden’s sweat and toil paid off, though, as playing for so many different types of rock fans and staying on the road made Badmotorfinger into a platinum album. MTV was also sitting up and taking notice, spinning the videos for “Jesus Christ Pose” and “Outshined” during the summer of 1992.

The standout detail about Badmotorfinger is that it really represents the pinnacle of Chris Cornell as a singer and a front man. The album fully celebrates and exploits his otherworldly wail, but it also highlights the soulful croon that he had developed and that the band would later ride to pop crossover status. Songs such as “Outshined” were given a new dimension that balanced out the brutal, jagged noise of the song with Cornell’s rich vocal stylings. In fact, the definitive Chris Cornell vocal track might be on “Birth Ritual,” the song the band provided for the sound track to Cameron Crowe’s Singles, a movie in which the band also appeared. “Birth Ritual” is everything that’s great about Soundgarden: the tough riffs, the heavy rhythm section, and Cornell’s rock-god vocals that equally call to mind the seering tenor of Robert Plant and the booming baritone of Jim Morrison. It’s a dichotomy that is unfortunately not always associated with Soundgarden. Of all the grunge bands, they are remembered perhaps as the most monochromatic. Though they released a number of singles that showed a great deal of variation, they are recalled as the big, dark metal band of the grunge era.

It’s easy to make that mistake, though, as Soundgarden’s next album, which catapulted them to pop stardom, was also their darkest. Sounding more like Black Sabbath than Sabbath themselves, Superunknown was Soundgarden’s finest hour and also its biggest hit. Released in 1994, Superunknown went straight to the top of the Billboard charts and went platinum five times over. Its singles included the freewheeling, wacky “Spoonman,” the pitch-black ballad “Fell on Black Days,” and the anthemic “The Day I Tried to Live.” But the one song that defined Superunknown and subsequently will represent Soundgarden until the end of time is a hot slab of Beatleish psychedelic metal called “Black Hole Sun.”

“Black Hole Sun,” which would win a Grammy for “Best Hard Rock Performance,” was a massive watershed moment for grunge, sadly occurring at the end of its reign of supremacy in the post-Cobain era. The song was a massive molten slab of melodic rock, a midperiod Zeppelin riff wrapped in a wave of druggy psychedelia. The lyrics seem to be about Armageddon (or some sort of cataclysmic event that seems pretty biblical), and the words match up perfectly with the music underneath, as the tension and discomfort in the verses give way to the bombast and destruction in the chorus. Curiously, “Black Hole Sun” is one of the few Soundgarden songs that follow the traditional quiet verse/loud chorus dynamic that grunge made famous—the band always seemed to go from being loud to being extremely loud.

A big part of the success of “Black Hole Sun” (and of Superunknown in general) was due to the video, which was in the most popular clip on MTV in the summer of 1994 and later won an MTV Video Music Award for “Best Hard Rock Video.” In a series of Lynchian images, a cavalcade of demented-looking people with hideous smiles make their way around a highly stylized neighborhood as the sky turns black and the gates of hell threaten to open. There is a woman cutting up a still-flopping fish in a kitchen, a group of religious types encouraging people to repent, and, in the most surreal twist, a little girl who turns a plastic doll on a spit over a grill and later lets melted ice cream drip from her mouth in a tremendously disturbing image at the song’s climax. It’s a video that remains both cool-looking and affecting and still shows up on MTV “Best Of” countdowns.

In fact, “Black Hole Sun” was just one of the many excellent videos produced by grunge bands during the early nineties. From 1991 to 1995, music videos were at their peak of artistic prowess, and grunge bands led the way. The videos produced in that era were done by the first wave of directors who would later cross over into feature films. Guys such as David Fincher, Mark Romanek, and Anton Corbijn really came into their own during the grunge era, crafting interesting, compelling videos that featured images that sometimes lasted much longer than the bands associated with them.

The quality of the videos came from several different driving forces, the first of which was money. People often forget that the art of music videos was still relatively nascent in the early nineties, as MTV had not even celebrated its ten-year anniversary by the time the decade started. But in that time MTV had proven that they had the ability to break bands (and in the time before the Internet they were just about the only entity that could make or break a record). The early nineties also saw the beginnings of MTV branching out into other nonmusic forms of programming (most notably The Real World, which debuted in the summer of 1992), so for a video to get airtime it had to grab the attention of the viewer (and the MTV programmers) that much quicker. So by the early nineties, labels were willing to throw a lot more money at the production of a video in hopes of getting it on MTV, breaking new bands and sustaining older ones. More money meant more options, which allowed directors to dream bigger and make their clips feature-length-quality narratives. In many cases, music videos had finally evolved into high-quality short films.

But it wasn’t just the directors and big checks from labels that made grunge-era videos great—the bands also had a lot to do with it. A lot of bands from the alternative era came from artier backgrounds and had a strong visual sense (Kurt Cobain, for example, fancied himself a painter). They wanted the visual representations of their songs to be as strong and striking as the songs themselves, so they drove an aesthetic that encouraged everybody to think more outside the box.

Videos also became artier based on necessity. Since a lot of bands shunned the spotlight, videos had to come up with alternatives to simply showing the band playing the song, which led to a greater sense of narrative in videos and more of a focus on striking visuals. Though they are present in the clips, nobody really recalls the images of the bands in the videos for “Black Hole Sun” or “Heart-Shaped Box” or “Jeremy.” Those videos all seem to be drawing focus away from the band so that the focus can be on the song and the story in the clip.

For a while, it seemed as though the music video existed as more than just an instrument of hype for a band or a record—it was an art form unto itself. Like everything else in the grunge era, it didn’t last long, as the rise of bling-heavy hip-hop and sugary pop in the latter half of the decade returned videos to their hype-machine quality. But also like everything else in the grunge era, it was amazing while it lasted.

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“BLACK HOLE SUN” and Superunknown were the climax of Soundgarden’s career; unfortunately, things tumbled in the years after. They released their final studio album, Down on the Upside, in 1996. Though it received a great deal of critical acclaim and earned Soundgarden a lot of respect for trying new sounds and experimenting with things outside their idiom, it was a commercial disappointment, and its creation led to tensions within the band about a new direction. They once again set out on a grueling touring schedule, playing a number of European festivals and making another run on the Lollapalooza tour. But the tensions bubbled over at the final show of the tour in 1997. Frustrated with a reported equipment failure, Ben Shepherd stormed off the stage and left Chris Cornell to perform the encore by himself. Two months later, Soundgarden announced their breakup, keeping up with the grunge tradition of passive endings. They were the last of the Deep Six bands to fall, and they made a hell of a run of it.

Matt Cameron ended up joining Pearl Jam on drums, and Kim Thayil and Ben Shepherd both have appeared in various projects. Cornell released an acoustic-tinged solo album in 1999 that sounded like an unplugged Led Zeppelin album. He later shocked the universe by joining up with three of the four members of Rage Against the Machine to create Audioslave, a postmodern aggro-rock band with the funky guts of Rage Against the Machine and the epic vocals of Cornell.

There was little about Soundgarden that wasn’t archetypal. Their sound adhered closely to the prototypical sound of grunge that took a handful of metal riffs, messed them up, and added a little punk attitude (though Soundgarden was, as stated earlier, easily the least punk of any of the grunge bands, no matter how many Dead Kennedys shows they attended). Their rise to fame was a slow burn, and they broke out about the same time as the rest of the Seattle hit makers (though their truly big success came a bit later). Even their breakup was grunge-by-numbers: Although there was news of tension within the band, they essentially just shrugged and went their separate ways. They were really the workingman’s band—they did a lot of things really well but probably never anything spectacularly but also never really bottomed out. They never had drug problems or courted a great deal of controversy. They never had spectacular personalities. They simply lived the grunge ideal: They showed up, they rocked, they thanked their fans, and they went home. Soundgarden dared to live the dream, and because of that they were the most grunge of anybody—sonically, socially, and philosophically. They’ll be remembered as a big, hairy, loud metal band, but they were actually the grungiest of the grunge.