#335 - Soundgarden - Superunknown (1994)
MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:
SOUNDGARDEN BIO
Soundgarden was initially formed in 1984 with a lineup of Chris Cornell on drums and vocals, Hiro Yamamoto on bass, and today's guest on guitar. A drummer named Scott Sundquist was brought in to handle drums so Cornell could focus on singing, but he left the band shortly after, and was replaced by Matt Cameron. Their debut album Ultramega OK was released in 1988, and their 2nd album "Louder Than Love" was released almost a year later. Right before touring, Yamamoto left the band, was briefly replaced by Jason Everman on bass guitar for the tour, and was then replaced by Ben Shepherd in 1991, forming the line-up we all associate with Soundgarden. They began work on album #3, Badmotorfinger (one of the top 100 selling albums of 1992), which pushed them in to mainstream attention. With the burgeoning grunge scene taking shape, Soundgarden got right back to work after touring for Badmotorfinger and begun work on their next album.
After Superunknown, the band released their 5th album "Down On The Upside", but broke up shortly after the subsequent tour ended. After an almost 15 year break, the band got back together and released their final studio album "King Animal" in 2012. Work on another album had begun, but never was completed due to the tragic death of Cornell in 2017.
VH1 Ranked Soundgarden #14 in their 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.
BACKGROUND – SUPERUNKNOWN
This is the 4th studio album from Soundgarden, released March 8th, 1994 (less than a month before Kurt Cobain's death). This is the first album with Michael Beinhorn as producer, and second album with Ben Shepherd on bass, joining the existing lineup of Chris Cornell, Matt Cameron on drums, and today's guest on guitar. The album's recording sessions took place from July 1993 to September 1993 in Seattle. Resident engineer Adam Kasper, who went on to produce Soundgarden's following albums, assisted Beinhorn on the recording process. They took the approach of recording one song at a time. The drum and bass parts were recorded first for each song, and then Cornell and Thayil would lay down their parts over top. Even though the band spent as much time writing and arranging as it had on previous albums, it spent a lot more time working on recording the songs The reason for the lengthy album, according to Cornell was that "we didn't really want to argue over what should be cut"
It was an immediate hit, debuting at #1 on the Billboard 200 and sold over 300,000 copies in it's first week. It was the 13th best selling album of the year. It also topped the charts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It received a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album in 1995*, and eventually went 5 times platinum, selling over 9 million copies worldwide.
The Rolling Stone's Voodoo Lounge won the 1995 Best Album Grammy, also beating out Pearl Jam's Vs, R.E.M's Monster, and Neil Young & Crazy Horse's Sleeps With Angels
This ranked 9th on RS's 50 Greatest Grunge Albums (1 - Nirvana's Nevermind, 2 - Soundgarden's Badmotofinger, 3-Pearl Jam's Ten, 4 - Hole's Live Through This, 5 - Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff, 6 - Alice in Chain's Dirt, 7 - Temple of the Dog Self Titled, 8 - Nirvana's In Utero, 10 - Pearl Jam's Vs)
“It was the pinnacle of our career, but we had difficult things going on,” Kim Thayil told K! in 2012. “[The death of] Kurt was heavy and upsetting for us. Some of us had relationships falter, and we lost some other friends, too. We were dealing with personal loss while trying to grasp at professional success. I don’t know if we ever fully appreciated it.”
Cornell once said about the album “There’s an eeriness in there, a kind of unresolvable sadness or indescribable longing that I’ve never really tried to isolate and define and fully understand,” he said. “But it’s always there. It’s like a haunted thing.”