Jeffgarden.com

Cracked.com Author: Gladstone
Original Publish Date: 01.05.2012

Excerpt:

#3. Soundgarden

I’m a huge Soundgarden fan. I love Chris Cornell and the boys so much they’ve basically ruined loud music for me; it just seems pointless to listen to any other band. But it wasn’t always that way. My first exposure to them was the mention of their name: Soundgarden. Mmmm. Sounded ethereal and prog rocky, appealing instantly to my lame suburban sensibilities. I was eager to check them out. What I got was this:

At that point, I relegated them to the dumbass, punk rock junk pile as mindless cretins. That was my mistake. First off, I had no idea that song was called “Big Dumb Sex” and was mocking the “hey let’s fuck” sensibility of some dance music. More importantly, the best was yet to come.

The 180 Moment: Temple of the Dog

In 1991, I first heard “Hunger Strike” fromTemple of the Dog — a tribute album to the late Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone. The one-off project featured Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron with Stone Gossard, Mike McCready and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam. The song, quite literally, stopped me in my tracks and made me change direction until I found where the music was coming from. (Spoiler alert: God. It was coming from God.)

The album redefined how I thought about songwriting and rock vocals. Soundgarden’sBadmotorfinger, featuring “Outshined” and “Rusty Cage,” was already out at the time, but I had ignored it, writing it off as more “Big Dumb Sex” noise. But Cornell’s songwriting and vocals on the more mellow and soulfulTemple couldn’t be denied. I played the CD over and over. (Oh — for our younger readers — CDs are things I listened to as a boy after failing repeatedly to find chicks willing to have sex with me.)

After hearing Temple, I went back toBadmotorfinger and realized all that same songwriter craft was still underneath the more aggressive arrangements. I’d sold Soundgarden short. Thankfully, I did my 180 before Superunknown came out so I was in full blown fan mode when the greatest album of the ’90s arrived.*

*To Radiohead fans: maybe OK Computer is better. To Faith No More fans: maybe Angel Dust is better. To Nirvana fans: You’re adorable!