Soundgarden’s last studio album, Down on the Upside, came out 15 years ago today. In honor of that anniversary, here’s a short excerpt from my book in which poster artist/video director Frank Kozik talks about the little-seen clip he shot for the album’s first single, “Pretty Noose”:



Soundgarden, they were super-nice guys. I did a music video for them, for “Pretty Noose,” which was from their last album. You could tell that those guys were getting really burned out by the mechanism at that point. They definitely didn’t want to do the dog and pony show one more time for this fucking video.



So I was like, “Okay, if you were not a rock star and it was a Saturday afternoon, what would you be doing?” And the big guy with the beard was like, “I’d be shooting pool,” so he was shooting pool. And the other guy was like, “I’d be riding my motorcycle,” so he’d be riding a motorcycle.



I asked [Chris] Cornell, “What would you be doing?” and he was like, “I’d be sitting here getting shitfaced.”



The way it worked with the video was this weird dude, who was the label/MTV guy, came in and was like the producer or something. The guy was a retard. He was asking Cornell, “Can you take your shirt off?” Cornell was like, “I don’t want to be the pretty guy with the shirt off. I want to be the asshole.” He just really wanted to go have a cheeseburger and not take his shirt off.



So the compromise was, okay, he’ll take his shirt off, but only in the context that he’s just brutally raped and murdered his girlfriend in the video. It got filmed, and then they cut that part. They refused to show the video in the U.S., except when MTV had the show where they’d air the weird videos once a month or whatever.