Talking to Kim Thayil is like flipping through an encyclopedia of heavy rock, only the entries come with punchlines, tangents, and the occasional reminder that he once wrote for Encarta. Yes, that Encarta. But first things first: Soundgarden.
Thayil laughs at the idea of anniversaries, especially the “30th anniversary” of Screaming Life/Fopp. “Screaming Life was released in ’87,” he says. “Fopp was ’88. So technically it’s 33 years for one and 32 for the other. But when they put the CD together in 1990, suddenly it’s an ‘album.’ For us, Screaming Life was already an album. Six songs, produced by Jack Endino, our debut on Sub Pop—that’s an album. Fopp was an EP, built around a cover. But the label compiles them and, boom, it’s a record.”
Even back then, Soundgarden knew they didn’t sound like anyone else. “We were quirky post-punk, then we started adding psychedelic elements, and we played them heavier,” Thayil says. “It was like Black Flag meets Black Sabbath by way of Bauhaus. We weren’t trying to be different, but people would point it out. To us it was natural. We grew up on Sabbath and Zeppelin, then the Sex Pistols and Ramones. That’s the soup.”
The soup produced songs like “Little Joe,” a wiry, vaguely Eastern curio Thayil remembers arranging before he even picked up a guitar. “I described it to Chris and Hiro—this wiry riff, then space for the bass to define itself. Chris was our drummer at the time, but he was involved in arrangements. I picked up the guitar and illustrated what I meant. That’s how we wrote. Sometimes we’d only figure out later that a song was in 5/4 because someone tried to count it out at a gig.”
Time signatures became part of the Soundgarden myth. “We were already doing that before Matt Cameron,” Thayil says, “but we wanted him because he could play the weird stuff and write songs. We wanted everyone to be a songwriter. That way, the albums would be stronger. With Matt, we could go back to the fives and sevens, and he’d just nail it.”
In 1990, Soundgarden dropped “Room A Thousand Years Wide” backed with “HIV Baby,” a single that perfectly summed up the band’s democratic chaos. “That was my idea,” Thayil grins. “Matt wrote the music for ‘Room,’ I wrote the lyrics. On the flip, Chris wrote the lyrics for Ben’s music. Except, actually, I wrote some of those riffs on ‘HIV Baby.’ But I thought it’d be cool if one side said ‘Thayil/Cameron’ and the other said ‘Cornell/Shepherd.’ Just to show that everyone was contributing.”
For all the heaviness, Soundgarden never hid their Beatles obsession. “The first album I ever got was Hey Jude,” Thayil says. “By fifth grade I had Sgt. Pepper’s and Revolver. I’d sit in my room with a black light bulb from Sears, listening to The Beatles. That was huge for me. Chris probably held onto them longer, as someone writing vocal lines, but it was there for all of us. Then punk hit and I moved on to guitars and weird noises. But yeah, the Beatles were foundational.”
Soundgarden’s discography is littered with oddities: foreign-market EPs, label-generated samplers, a 1995 CD-ROM called Alive in the Superunknown. “That wasn’t us,” Thayil insists. “That was the label experimenting with new technology. You’d get a menu, some crude animation, maybe a ridiculous video game. MTV even aired one of the animations on Headbanger’s Ball. It was all part of the ‘CD-ROM era.’ I even recorded guitar noises for Encarta—Microsoft’s encyclopedia. You’d click and hear a sound. That’s my legacy too.”
Then there’s No WTO Combo, the one-off 1999 protest band with Chris Cornell, Jello Biafra, Krist Novoselic, and others. “Jello called Chris about playing a show during the WTO protests in Seattle,” Thayil says. “Chris called me. We shared political sentiments, so we did it. There might have been talk of more shows, but it was a crazy time. Civil unrest, tear gas. That was it—one show, one record. Now it’s out of print.”
Which leads to the inevitable question: why hasn’t Kim Thayil ever made a solo album? He laughs, then sighs. “Probably a lot of reasons. When Soundgarden broke up in ’97, I was fed up with accountants and lawyers and managers. Songwriting had turned into meetings. I just wanted to play recreationally. Also, everything I’d do would sound like Soundgarden—because I wrote most of the riffs. Without the greatest singer in the world and the greatest drummer in the world, it would just be a B-grade Soundgarden. Who needs that?”
Labels didn’t help. “A&M got bought, everyone we knew was fired, the label disappeared into Universal. Our manager took time off to be a mother. Suddenly there’s no band, no label, no management. I didn’t want to dig up lawyers and chase it. I just took a 12-pack to my friends’ house and played guitar.”
Now, though, he’s not ruling it out. “After Soundgarden ended this time, I told myself, not this time. I’m not going into semi-retirement again. I’ve been more willing to deal with the business side. There’ve been offers, projects, collaborations. I even had a tour lined up with Dave Alvin before the pandemic shut it down. So yeah, maybe.”
Until then, there’s always the catalog. Thayil still considers Screaming Life their debut, still remembers the arguments about how many songs they could squeeze onto an EP, still marvels at the sheer weirdness of Little Joe. “We knew we sounded different,” he says. “We didn’t know what it meant. It was just natural. We were listening to Black Flag, Sabbath, Bauhaus, Kiss, The Beatles, The Melvins. Stir it all together and that’s Soundgarden.”
And that’s enough.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
And related, here's a compilation of Kyle Meredith's interviews with Chris Cornell:
