Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil Sounds Off

If you browse YouTube for interview footage from Soundgarden’s heyday in the 1990s, it doesn’t take long to discern how uncomfortable the band looked answering questions back then. A 1991 clip, for example, shows the era-defining Seattle icons practically squirming in their seats as they’re questioned in the Chaplin screening room of what was then A&M Studios in Hollywood. Right off the bat, lead guitarist Kim Thayil comes across as particularly aloof and dismissive. The mood eventually lightens, but the band’s responses remain guarded. 

Thayil and company maintained more or less the same disposition with the press throughout Soundgarden’s career climb en route to becoming one of the pre-eminent Seattle acts and avatars of the grunge/alternative era. Even when they tried to be approachable, Thayil, frontman/guitarist Chris Cornell, bassist Ben Shepherd, and drummer Matt Cameron strained to reveal much, if anything, about their inner workings. Like their peers in groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Soundgarden outwardly chafed under the glare of fame. 

When they abruptly announced their disbanding in April of 1997, Soundgarden did so via what must surely rank as one of the most bare-bones band-breakup statements ever issued. “After 12 years,” the statement reads, “the members of Soundgarden have amicably and mutually decided to disband to pursue other interests.” Thirteen years later, with their legacy still intact—and even, perhaps, bolstered by the lingering mystery around their demise—a reunited Soundgarden had clearly warmed to the interview process. 

They may have been more gregarious toward interviewers, but Soundgarden post-2010 were still as tight-lipped about the circumstances that had driven them apart. In the intervening decades, precious few concrete details have surfaced—not only about the breakup itself, but about the relationships at the heart of the band’s remarkable story. Asked, for instance, about the split in 2014, the band responded with an apparent willingness to discuss it but talked their way around offering any actual insights. 

Likewise, after Cornell took his life following a Soundgarden concert in 2017, his surviving bandmates and peers refused to broach the subject in a retrospective round of interviews for the 20th-anniversary edition of director Doug Pray’s 1996 grunge documentary Hype! Needless to say, the time was ripe for someone to set the record straight. Now, with Thayil’s memoir A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond, we finally get an insider’s view into a highly insular organization that imploded under mysterious circumstances not once but twice. 

In a brisk, economical narration, Thayil (pronounced THIGH-yill) recounts his upbringing in the racially integrated, mixed-income Chicago suburb of Park Forest. The first-generation child of immigrant parents who placed a premium on education, Thayil grew into a highly cerebral philosophy major with an appetite for the writings of Spinoza, Descartes, and Kafka. As the book illustrates, however, his childhood obsessions hewed towards all-American staples like baseball, comic books, and the music of KISS. 

Along with co-author Adam Tepedelen (a longtime Decibel contributor who also helped pen the autobiographies of Mudhoney’s Steve Turner and Exodus’s Gary Holt), Thayil sustains a perfect pitch of mounting suspense for almost the entire length of the book. Through his telling, each chapter in his life builds with increasing momentum toward the next: his adolescent struggles, his relocation to the Pacific Northwest with eventual Soundgarden co-founder/bassist Hiro Yamamoto, and the ensuing events that sealed his place as one of the paragons of what came to be known as grunge. 

While it would be inaccurate to describe A Screaming Life as a tell-all, it is many orders of magnitude more revealing than anything Thayil or other members of Soundgarden have previously disclosed on the record. Still, Thayil maintains a certain measure of discretion. On the other hand, he doesn’t flinch from expressing his discomfort at various points with the band, its professional support structure, success, alternative culture, and even his own family. In this regard, Soundgarden fans who’ve sat with questions for decades should consider A Screaming Life a must-read.  

Interestingly, Thayil barely touches on the aspects of his own playing that made him such a compelling innovator on his instrument. Instead, he focuses on the band, which becomes just as much the subject of the “life” in the book’s title as his own. Of course, Soundgarden were emblematic of their time and place. In several crucial respects, however, they were, as Thayil describes them, an “anomaly”. They wore the obvious influences of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles on their sleeves, for example, but post-punk pioneers like Bauhaus, Killing Joke, and Hüsker Dü equally influenced them. 

Several Seattle acts similarly straddled punk, post-punk, metal, hard rock, classic rock, and alternative, but none rivaled Soundgarden’s penchant for exotic tunings, off-kilter time signatures, mystifying atmospheres, and overall strangeness. Kim Thayil brings a fittingly unique voice to the telling of their tale. 

He spoke to PopMatters over the course of two hour-long sessions on consecutive nights shortly after the book’s release. What follows is an edited composite of those two exchanges. In spots, Thayil’s responses have been slightly retouched, rearranged, and/or combined for the sake of continuity, readability, and flow. 

By your account, when Hiro Yamamoto first started jamming with Chris Cornell in the attic of the apartment they shared, you were not his first choice as a guitarist.

[Laughs.] Yeah, that’s right. 

You really didn’t want to do it. You kept trying to avoid it until Hiro finally wore you down. It’s interesting that he didn’t reach out to you first, since you’d moved out to Seattle together. Presumably, he would’ve been familiar with your musical tastes. 

He knew I was really busy. I’d just started a relationship; I was going to college at the University of Washington; I worked full-time on weekends and nights; and I was occasionally DJing at the University of Washington’s radio station, KCMU. I had a really full schedule, and Hiro was aware that I was working and going to school. That was probably one of the things that played into his thinking. 

You were enrolled at the University of Washington, but A Screaming Life conveys that you still didn’t have a clear sense of your life direction at that point. 

Like many students in that situation, it takes a while to decide what you’re going to major in. When you choose a major, you’re at a liberal arts college and not a vocational school. So the objective isn’t always career-oriented. Some people may approach it that way, but it’s not unusual to be at a liberal arts college without a clear career trajectory. 

So what would you have done with your life if you hadn’t given in to Hiro’s badgering? 

It’s hard to tell. I was in my last semester, so I would’ve gotten my bachelor’s degree. I suppose the decision to make next would’ve been, “Do I want to go to graduate school? Or do I want to get a resumé together and start marketing a philosophy degree?”—which I didn’t have any particular interest in. I wasn’t vocationally motivated. [Laughs.] Unless you’re in Europe, where there’s scholastic and vocational tracking, you never know which skills will develop. 

That’s part of the reason people attend college: to explore various subjects, learn more about themselves and their interests, and develop those interests alongside skills. So I just don’t know. I mean, I might’ve gone to graduate school, but I don’t know because I was young. People that age often don’t know, except for those who are very focused on things like medical school and degrees in engineering or business. My dad was an engineer and a business major. 

You write in your biography that your dad was nudging you to get a “real job” even well into Soundgarden’s career. 

I’m not clear that my parents ever accepted music as a career choice. I’m not even sure I saw it as a career choice myself. I’m not sure Chris or Hiro saw it that way either. It was an occupation. It’s what we did with our time. We weren’t fast-tracked with management or record-company interest as, perhaps, a more career-oriented talent might’ve been. It was an amateur path—meaning: we did it for the love of playing music. 

Your dad advised you to be an engineer.

Or go to law school. He didn’t like me majoring in philosophy. He wouldn’t have encouraged me to get a Master’s in philosophy since there are no jobs in that! [Laughs.] But those decisions weren’t his to make.

I understand that there are traditional Asian or immigrant families where the parents might have more influence or say over the direction of their kids’ academic and professional pursuits, especially if they claim that they’re [makes scare quotes gesture] “investing in it” by paying for their education or whatever. That wasn’t the case here. 

In general, my parents advocated on behalf of academia: reading and learning about whatever you can. That love of learning and curiosity was instilled in me primarily by my mom, an English major, but also by my father. The whole professional focus came later, as a young adult. That wasn’t part of my rearing as a kid.

When I was a young adult, then all of a sudden it changed. That didn’t come from my mom; it came from my dad. I think my dad probably thought, “This is what a dad does”. I think he felt it was his responsibility to get me to start earning money. That was really important to my dad, but it wasn’t to me. 

At a certain point, though, your parents’ attitude changes. You write that they would contact you often to request autographed merch for relatives. 

They might’ve felt that their social station had risen as a result of their relationship with me. But what I ended up saying to my folks, primarily my dad [laughs], was, “Do not act as my agent.” I had to remind them that I’m not a store or a distributor. 

You didn’t have the stuff at home anyway.

Exactly. And I’m not directly selling it. My dad had an MBA. He understood how these things work, but he still put pressure on me to provide these things. I had to explain that we have a contract with a merchandising company that manufactures and distributes these things. Like, “I myself would have to purchase these things and send them to you”. So I had to be like, “Just can’t do it, Dad”.

It made things a little bit difficult. From what I understand, Indian parents aren’t too bad at guilting their kids if they need to [laughs]. But I was resistant, because I had enough pressure as it was—not just from the work, but also from gaining fame and recognizability. 

My parents’ interest in my music coincided with Soundgarden’s success. If their interest had been there at the beginning, that would’ve been a different story, but it grew as our public profile grew. So my parents were almost like moles [laughs]. You can limit access to the outside world, but it’s more difficult to do that if it’s your parents.

I love my parents, but in a way, they were kind of taking advantage. They weren’t aware of the outside pressures. Then again, the pressure didn’t just come from them; it also came from other friends and the general public. So, as you’re trying to negotiate developing relationships with colleagues, strangers, and professional associates, you have this added burden of redefining your relationship with your parents.  

I saw Soundgarden four times in the 1990s. If you look at old concert footage, you can see a demonstrable change: up until 1992, the band appears to be collectively driven by this sense of striving forward. Yet when you start touring behind Superunknown in 1994, you all look really dispirited onstage. That’s just my impression, but it does align with what you describe in the book. 

By that time, there were a number of relationships that had ended or been damaged. There were also friends we’d lost in unexpected ways. All those things made the general celebratory nature of Seattle’s initial rise less festive—much less. It gave it a very real and darker sheen—more of a matte finish, less glossy [laughs]. We were learning quite a bit, either about how friends and colleagues were failing to negotiate the twists and turns or the struggles they were encountering. 

A Screaming Life sheds light on what was going on during the period from 1995 up until Soundgarden’s breakup in 1997. Down on the Upside is the only album in the band’s discography where the context changed overnight. Retrospective reviews tend to frame that album as a musical epitaph, as if you can hear an era coming to an end in the music. But that’s not how the album came across when it was first released. 

Right. I think what’s happening there is that people are getting the causality reversed. They’re going back and inferring connections that weren’t actually connected. 

They’re reading into the music in hindsight. 

Exactly. And that’s just sloppy. Like, “Here’s what we know happened: the band came apart; therefore, you can hear it”. No, you can’t! The band wasn’t falling apart there. I was dissatisfied with my role in recording some of that material, but it wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t liked it. If I didn’t like a song, I would’ve said “I don’t want to do that,” and it wouldn’t have been on the record. I like the songs—and by “like”, I mean: “I want to play that”. 

There was no problem with the material. The problem was the change in the nature of the way the members were writing and creating with each other—it wasn’t really happening. The collaborative spirit was diminished. There was a focus on individual authorship and creation. Individual authorship and creation require less communication and sharing in a collaborative sense. Well, that’s discouraging, coming from the kind of band we’d always been. 

We weren’t really behaving like a band; we were behaving like a warehouse for solo records. That’s what ended up happening. The reason why The White Album worked for The Beatles is that they very consciously and publicly announced that they weren’t going to tour anymore. They dedicated themselves to working with George Martin and becoming a studio band. With us, there was some interest in taking the same kinds of risks as The White Album or a Sgt. Peppers. I think the band thought, “Well, we can do that.” And we probably could—I was like, “Sure, but we’re still a touring band”. 

There were things people in the band wanted without perhaps fully fleshing out how we were going to achieve those things within the framework of either a collective process or a live show. Since we’re a guitar band—and I’m the main guitarist—then a lot of that fell on my shoulders. It’s like “Geez, I could play like the guitarist in Soundgarden would play, or you could have me accommodate all these individual visions”. 

Your issue, as you reveal in the book, was that your bandmates were trying to shoehorn your guitar style into the visions they had for their respective songs. 

At times, three different individuals wanted me to play guitar that sounded like how they’d played guitar on their demo, which is a ridiculous thing to ask—and, I would say, disrespectful to the recognition of the successful collaborative collective we had been for over a decade. It wouldn’t fly if I were to tell Matt, “Hey, lay off the ride cymbal” [laughs]. Or “Chris, can you go up an octave in this section?” 

\I can’t fault Matt or anyone else for the pressure I was also getting from two other people. I don’t think any of them were aware that the others were making similar requests. I’m the only one who was aware of it, and the producer was as well. It could have been addressed by either the producer or me. I didn’t address it, other than to get pissed off and say, “I’m going to bring in my guitar, and I’m going to dial in a sound that I think fits this song.” 

It was frustrating, but I loved all the songs. Everyone did. It’s a great album with great songs and great performances. I wasn’t happy, but it didn’t stop me from playing the best guitar that I could on songs that I loved. There were certainly pressures in making that record. I was certainly dissatisfied in the studio, but that’s not to say the other guys were. It was after that that other frictions developed. I’ve seen so many reviews that say, “It’s the sound of a band coming apart.” No, it’s not. 

At the time, it felt like the opposite. During the promotional campaign leading up to its 1996 release, I got the impression that the album was being presented as a band flexing its creative muscles. Like: “If we want to make our generation’s answer to Physical Graffiti and have all this stylistic variation on one album, we’ll do that because that’s how capable of a musical unit we are”. 

I see what you’re saying. The eclecticism was definitely a reflection of the band expanding. For example, I loved the song “Applebite”. I wanted to write lyrics for that song and was in the process of doing so. One of the things that was frustrating was that I communicated that to our producer, Adam Kasper, and to Matt as well. I’d written lyrics for Matt’s song “Room A Thousand Years Wide” [off 1991’s Badmotorfinger] and thought I could do it again. Everyone was like, “Yeah, right on!” But later in the week, or the following week, I came in and Chris had tracked vocals. 

I was like, “What’s going on here? I already told you, the producer, and I told Matt. So why was that not communicated to other band members?” Still, it was a song I loved. I loved it so much I wanted to write lyrics for it. It was very different from other things we were doing. It turned out very trippy. There’s a Pink Floyd quality to it. That’s what I was hearing, and that’s what Chris ended up giving to it. We were certainly drawing from other aspects of our writing. There’s also a lot of Telecaster on that album. I’ve hardly played Telecaster on anything else. Most of my Telecaster parts are very specific to that album. 

There are many delicate tones throughout that album. And to play devil’s advocate: could it actually have been a vote of confidence from your bandmates that they thought you could stretch your playing and achieve what they were asking of you? 

Yeah, probably. But other things were happening there as well. For example, Chris might track a brighter, more delicate sound for something like “Burden In My Hand”, and he might track his part first. But then I’d come in, and it’d be like, “Okay, where’s the room for what I’d do here? If I use my usual guitar sound, it’s not going to quite fit with what’s there.” For that song, I think Chris played dobro [a 1929 National Duolian resonator guitar, to be precise—Ed.]. His part has a very particular metallic acoustic quality. If the dobro had been tracked later, that would’ve been different. But, because it came first—

Then it anchored you to that same tonality. 

Yes, exactly. But that’s something I was aware of from playing guitar in multiple bands, including my years in Soundgarden. Chris didn’t play as much on the first three records [1987’s Screaming Life, 1988’s Ultramega OK, and 1989’s Louder Than Love—Thayil always cites Screaming Life as the band’s “first album”; although Screaming Life was released as an EP, the band recorded a full-length’s worth of material and intended to release it as a full-length]. He gradually started playing more and more as he got better. 

So the reasons behind my reservations might just not have been on his radar. That changed years later. After he was in Audioslave, he called and apologized. He said, “I see now that Tom [Morello]’s got his own sound and style. There’s a particular way he likes his guitar to feel, and I realized that we were pushing you to try and do these different things for different songs on that last album”. He’d learned something about guitarists that he maybe hadn’t understood before. It was really sweet. 

That’s one of the things I really loved about Chris: he was an accountable person. There are so many people out there who fail to be accountable for their actions and behaviors. Chris was not that way. If Chris realized that, “Oh, I fucked up, and I was wrong”, he’d address it. I would try to do that too. Generally, all of us in the band tried to do that. You learn, grow, and realize that relationships are dynamic. You gain perspective. That was one of the band’s strengths: that nobody was that autocratic or inflexible [laughs]. 

You say in the book that you would each tell another band member, “You’re being a dick”, if you thought it was necessary. 

To be clear: the point of my saying that is not to call anyone a dick in print, but for the reader to understand that we held each other accountable. 

You also describe Chris as very empathetic and astute at reading people. You say that he had a keen sense of when it was prudent to hold back and give someone space, rather than confront them. 

Yeah. Chris was kind of the anti-bully. All the qualities you associate with being a bully, he was the opposite. He could be assertive, aggressive, and strong-willed, but he didn’t like being hurt, and he didn’t like hurting people. If he felt that he had done that, he would be the first to point it out. Ben, Matt, and I would do that as well—maybe not as quickly. Sometimes you’d have to wait for the steam to come off of me, and then I’d say, “I was a dick; I think I might’ve hurt that person’s feelings”. 

According to your description, when the band reunited to make King Animal, it was with the same sense of creative freedom as Upside, but this time, everyone was respectful of your needs. 

Well, not just of me, but of each other. Everyone was different. We were all older and more mature, but Matt and Chris had become parents. There’s a whole set of lessons to be learned from nurturing a young being and encouraging them through their growth. You develop patience as you impart your wisdom or share with this other developing being. I feel like they brought that sense of patience they’d both learned to the table with the band. It was something I could learn from them.

I didn’t have kids, but I’ve had a number of pets that were very dependent on me. Some have gone through medical issues; some have had behavioral quirks that I needed to accommodate and be loving and supportive about. You don’t want to hurt or scare dependents—whether children or animals. You then become more sensitive to friends and family members. 

Did you ever consider having children yourself? 

Oh, all the time. It just doesn’t always happen.

It’s funny, these are conversations you have with friends, family, partners, and bandmates over the years. I’ve known everyone for so long, since we were so young. There were definitely parts of our lives where some of my bandmates never wanted to be parents. Like, [feigns adamant tone:] “Why would you want to bring someone into this terrible world to have to endure all the things I endured? Why would you force that upon a young kid in a world that’s getting worse?” I would think, “Well, I want to be a dad.” But situations—your profession, where you’re at in your relationship and in your life—make it difficult. 

In your 40s and 50s, you might start to deal with sick or aging pets, parents, or relatives. Both my parents passed away three years ago. My partner’s father went through a lot of medical and aging issues that required a lot of support. Things like that drain your emotional resources. Then you couple that with a career. The majority of my friends didn’t become parents. Some of them wanted to. A few adopted.

Chris and Matt both grew and learned from becoming parents. I could see it—in their patience and compassion for situations and relationships. It was quite wonderful. The band became beneficiaries of that maturity and insight.