The following is a true story.
It’s the summer of 1990, and this writer finds himself on a date with a beautiful girl from Ireland’s County Kildare. Both parties are working in Douglas, Isle of Man for the holiday season, and conveniently staying in the same hotel, and as the evening has been rather agreeable, a night-closing drink in the room I’ve been sharing with my best mate is offered, then accepted.
As we sit at a Catholic nun-approved distance from one another on the edge of my bed, conversation eventually turns to music, namely the music that has been blasting at obnoxious volume all summer from this very room.
“Do you guys only listen to heavy metal?” Debbie enquires.
“Not entirely,” comes the reply, a little too smugly. “Faith No More and Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden aren’t heavy metal bands, you see. Now, to you, they might sound like heavy metal bands, but what they’re doing is different, it’s smarter, and darker, and more subversive than heavy metal.”
To prove this undeniable argument, I press ‘Play’ on our tape deck, which currently contains a cassette of Soundgarden’s second album Louder Than Love. With unfortunate timing, the cassette is cued up on a track on side two called Big Dumb Sex.
“I know what to do,” wails vocalist Chris Cornell. “I’m gonna fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you, fuck you.”
Two mildly mortified Irish teenagers sit in awkward silence as the song draws waaaaaaaay too slowly to its conclusion.
“I’ll see you tomorrow Paul. Goodnight.”
Soundgarden always did confuse people.
Formed in 1984 with the express aim of being “Black Sabbath without the parts that suck”, the group had a polarising effect on the Seattle rock community, who couldn’t quite decide whether their dirgey Sabbath/Stooges/Zeppelin inspired-sound was intended as a lusty celebration of classic rock or a straight-faced piss-take. Naturally, Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil never apologised and never explained.
When the group quit America’s most respected punk rock label SST to become the first band from their peer group to sign to a major label (A&M), suspicions of their motivations and intentions only intensified. And that’s before anyone had heard their new music.
Given the context in which it was made, and the career moves which subsequently followed – most notably the quartet’s decision to tour with Guns N’ Roses in 1991 – it has become fashionable to claim that Louder Than Love was Soundgarden’s attempt to edge closer to the rock mainstream. This is revisionist nonsense. A full two years before what was later dubbed ‘The Year That Punk Broke’, the mainstream was Pump, Dr. Feelgood, Skid Row and Sonic Temple, and though a new ‘alternative’ sensibility – spearheaded by NIN, FNM, Dinosaur Jr., Jane’s Addiction and Sonic Youth – was gaining traction, Louder Than Love was a particularly obtuse and awkward release, even by the standards of the latter group.
Bassist Hiro Yamamoto’s agonisingly uncomfortable I Awake (opening line: “Woke up depressed, I left for work, you have a good day, it’s not your fault”) is possibly the album’s most off-kilter composition, but there are unconventional, unorthodox ideas at play throughout. For proof, listen to Kim Thayil’s one-note drone guitar which runs for a full two minutes through opener Ugly Truth, the lurching time signatures and tempo changes destabilising Gun – written about Cornell’s occasional desire “to grab some rich broker and rip his head off” – through to the creepy spoken word drawl running beneath Cornell’s melody lines on Big Dumb Sex.
“That song is a parody of the sexual innuendos of disco records,” Cornell told Melody Maker in 1989. “Instead of beating about the bush, I decided to be bold, to actually come out and say, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna fuck’. I guess it was good to get it out of my system so that I’ll never write something like that again.”
Louder Than Love marks the point at which Cornell began to assume the dominant role in the band. Where the songwriting credits on 1988’s Ultramega OK were evenly split between the singer, Thayil and Yamamoto, Cornell’s contributions are given increased weighting on the band’s second album (a situation which hastened Yamamoto’s departure from the group) and it’s these tracks – Ugly Truth, Loud Love and Uncovered, in particular – which shine brightest from the sludge.
With the later addition of bassist Ben Shepherd and with drummer Matt Cameron’s blossoming as a songwriter of note, Soundgarden’s group dynamic would shift again on 1991’s Badmotorfinger, but here Cornell emerged as the band’s focal point at precisely the point where MTV’s 120 Minutes had identified a new breed of charismatic figureheads – Mike Patton, Trent Reznor and Perry Farrell among them – on the fringes of the mainstream.
Upon its release, on September 5, 1989, Louder Than Love didn’t set the world on fire, peaking at number 108 on the Billboard 200. But its impact went beyond mere chart stats, for it pushed Soundgarden to the forefront of a new musical vanguard whose influence would be keenly felt in the decade that followed. On a personal level, for this writer it became one of the key bridging points between metal and alt. rock, opening my eyes, ears and mind to a whole new universe of music that would genuinely change my life.
The Seattle quartet would gain greater poise and power, but Louder Than Love marks the point at which Chris Cornell’s group transitioned from ungainly local heroes to self-aware architects of their own future.