Chris Cornell, singer for Soundgarden (Original artwork by Bud Curtis, used with permission)

Soundgarden was the first band I almost bought an album before I had ever even heard their music.

When I was a 7th grader in Olympia, Washington — late 1990 or early 1991 — I was at a Camelot music store looking at the $10 CD bin. In one hand I was holding Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, in the other I was holding Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love. At the time, I was unfamiliar with the music of either artist. All I knew about Bob Dylan was that he was a legendary rock n’ roll icon with decades of albums to become familiar with. All I knew about Soundgarden was that they were from Seattle. I ended up choosing Dylan over Soundgarden, thus losing my ability to claim I was into the band before they broke into the mainstream in a big way less than twelve months later.

Like few other bands in the 1990s, Soungarden’s dark lyrics and melancholic music offered a connection to socially isolated and depressed 90s kids. As such, last week’s news of the untimely death of front man Chris Cornell resulted in a gut-punch feeling while also flooded with decades-old memories. Struggling with my feelings regarding Cornell’s death, I decided to sit down and listen to the four albums that represented Soundgarden’s peak — Louder Than Love, Badmotorfinger, Superunknown, and Down On The Upside — and celebrate Cornell’s life through his music.

Despite being a Soundgrden fan for over a quarter-century, I had never before st down and listened to their albums from Louder Than Love straight through to Down on the Upside. It’s amazing how these albums — released just two to three years apart — represent almost quantum-level changes and improvements from one to the next.

For its reputation as a “classic” album —for pretty much being the first album released on a major label by a band of the 1980s Seattle scene — Louder Than Love is pretty much a straight-forward rock record typical for its time, driven by guitar riffs and Cornell’s incredible voice. However, contemporary reviews were critical of Cornell’s lyrics. And besides some obvious exceptions — “Gun”, “Hands All Over”, “Ugly Truth” — there were also some pretty dumb lyrics. A song about having sex with a friend’s mom? “Big Dumb Sex” was a joke that nobody got — Guns & Roses even covered it a few years later! Regardless of the lyrics, the guitar riffs were majestic, with Kim Thayil’s musical wizardry providing a counterweight to Cornell’s banshee-like wailing. Louder Than Love failed to have a charting single — it was impossible for Soundgarden to have the breakthrough everyone in Seattle expected if they weren’t getting any radio play. Which is why it was Sub Pop label-mate Nirvana instead of Soundgarden who enjoyed initial major-label success and paved the way for other bands to follow.

But from the first opening notes on Badmotorfinger you can instantly tell this was a record from a band that wasn’t fucking around any more. I don’t think any band from that scene/time had as ferociously intense half an album as the first side of Badmotorfinger. If you listen to the throwaway “Big Dumb Sex” and “Full On” reprise to the classic opening riff of “Rusty Cage” everything is going, well, to 11: Kim’s riffs, Cornell’s lyrics, the complicated time signatures that were drummer Matt Cameron’s guidance of the band — he was the one responsible for determining the time signature for each song.

Badmotorfinger was a statement that Soundgarden was going to rule the rock music world. I can’t help bud wonder what history would’ve been if their release history had been slightly early, if Louder Than Love had been released in 1988 and was the album Soundgarden toured in support of that received major label notice resulting in Badmotorfinger’s release in 1989. Would the world have been ready for this album at the time? Would “Rusty Cage” and “Outshined” received radio play, or would they have been ignored as Louder Than Love’s singles were? 1989 was time of Warrant, Skid Row, Don Henley, Fine Young Cannibals, and Tom Petty dominating both radio and the charts. Given the time, it perhaps makes sense that Louder Than Love wasn’t the breakthrough album everyone though it would’ve been, but I’d like to think Badmotorfinger would’ve transcended that time & era and grabbed the Headbanger’s Ball crowd by the balls and resulted in earlier mainstream success for Soundgarden. Who knows? *shrug*

And then Superunknown… what I find interesting about this album — which may have been a reason why it sold millions of copies — is the deviation that Soundgren’s music takes at this stage. Less reliant on riff-driven songs as their previous albums, Superunkown leaps around from styles to time changes to different turnings and use of instruments than previous albums. Cornell’s lyrics took a huge leap on Badmotorfinger— in no way could anyone call the lyrics on that album “dumb”, and no reviews at that time did — but Superunkown truly sounds like a band that has fully matured. Although the record perhaps doesn’t match the ferocity & intensity of the first side of Badmotorfinger, I’m going to have to share perhaps an unpopular opinion that I found the second side of kind of Badmotorfinger, well, boring (besides “Mind Riot” and “Drawing Flies” which are two of my personal Soundgarden faves.) I could not say that about Superunkown— the entire album grabs you from the opening of “Let Me Drown” — which is almost a full scale barrage that’s a worthy carry over from Badmotorfinger— to the now unsettling “Like Suicide,” a song Cornell wrote about a crow flying into his window, on each repeat listen of Superunkown I found myself excited about each upcoming track.

In fact, the songs I like perhaps least on this album are the two biggest singles “Spoonman” and “Black Hole Sun” (which reviews at the time called the album’s weakest song, and is now what Soundgarden is perhaps most known for.) Superunknown also provides, to me, the ultimate Soundgarden song in “The Day I Tried To Live” which combines Thayill’s mesmerizing guitar riff, complicated song structure, unsettling lyrics, and Cornell’s menacing voice resulting in an overall moody and chilling song which spoke the most to my moody teenage self like none of their other songs.

I find Down On the Upside to be a pretty interesting album, but as a follow-up it clearly failed to register with a wider audience, unable to sell the kajillion copies as Superunkown. Perhaps the reason is because Soundgarden once again deviated from their previous record. Yes, the opening track “Pretty Noose” promised more of the same with a wailing guitar intro, abrupt changes, Cornell’s lyrics matched with impassioned wailing, but this song was almost atypical for the rest of the album. Down On the Upside’s tracklist offers more of a melodic output than Soundgarden had previously provided and less reliance on riff-driven rawk as on previous albums, which was a result of Cornell’s influence — who once listened to nothing but a stack of Beatles records he discovered at a neighbors house for two straight years as a kid — opposed to Thayil, who wanted to continue the riff-driven music that Soundgarden had established as their “sound.” Sadly, this rift about the direction the band should go in resulted in the band’s break-up, which — in hindsight — is so tragic, as Cornell and Thayil expertly complimented each other as partners, playing music for well over a decade by 1997. Cornell did have solo releases and his output with Audioslave while Thayil kind of gigged around until Soundgarden’s reformation, and this unnecessary and pointless rift robbed us of at least a decade’s worth of Soundgarden output.

Regardless, back to Down On the Upside, the album’s other single “Burden In My Hand” had huge success and is a fucking great single, hinting at would Soundgarden could’ve offered. For the first time, Cornell provided an actual narrative with his lyrics — bringing his love out into the desert where he proceeds to commit murder — instead of relying on vagaries or invocations to conjure mood or feeling. Singer/songwriters as storytellers is a pretty common conceit throughout the history of rock music — except for the Seattle scene, with perhaps Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam being the lone exception. “Burden in My Hand” is Soundgarden’s take on this format, and sadly it was their last big single. My personal favorite on the album is “Boot Camp,” the album’s final track which works just as well as both a free-form poem and as a song, offering three minutes of aural perfection while being wildly different from every other track on not only Down On the Upside but all other previous albums. “Boot Camp” is also a fitting coda for their pre-breakup output, and a song that has been repeatedly stuck in my head since the news of Cornell’s death.

That’s my take on listening to those albums back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I know they had earlier releases which have nuggets of greatness (“Nothing to Say”, “Swallow My Pride”, “Hand of God” and, for all its ridiculousness — which is kind of why I like it —their cover of the Ohio Players’ “Fopp”) and recent material, those are the albums that represent Soundgarden’s peak and I never really sat down and listened to them in such a manner, noticing the band’s progression from album to album. What also blows me away is the release schedule. Louder than Love late 1989, pretty much 1990. Badmotorfinger late ‘91 — when nearly all Seattle bands released albums — with radio play throughout ‘92. Superunknown spring of ‘94. Down On the Upside spring of ‘96. When you throw in the Temple of the Dog album — which is basically a Soundgarden album with an expanded roster of guest musicians — recorded in 1990 and released a year after Louder Than Love, there was a new record released every two years for most of a decade, comprising some of the best music that some of us had ever heard in our life at that time.

The sheer output of Cornell and Thayil — plus the ultimate Soundgarden line-up with Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron — for that decade blows me away. It must’ve been exhausting, and looking back at Cornell’s lyrics there is no doubt he was struggling with his demons, demons that were widely shared throughout the Seattle scene at that time. I am so glad that we hadn’t lost Cornell earlier, but it will be a long while before I’m over his passing.

RIP Chris Cornell