Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Happy Birthday, Neil Diamond!

Sometime in the spring of 1990, I came home to the house I shared with two of my band mates to find a USPS package delivery notice waiting for me in our mailbox. I probably groaned audibly, because I knew that retrieving the package would mean getting up earlier than usual the next day, because our local post office was about a mile north of our pad, and the record store I worked at was several miles to the south.

The next morning, after dragging myself off my futon and trudging over to the p.o., I grabbed a southbound #36 to work. After finding a seat, I took a closer look at the package, which was actually a flat envelope about the size of a magazine, and had my Uncle John's return address on it. John is an immensely talented artist, so I though maybe he'd sent me one of his works for my walls. I gingerly opened the envelope to take a peek at what was inside, and my mind was promptly blown by the autographed sheet music that you see above. Apparently, John's son (my cousin) and Neil Diamond's son went to the same school in L.A.; knowing that my band Lava Sutra were all big Neil fans, and that we had been covering "Shilo" as part of our live sets — and actually recorded it as a "hidden track" for our demo cassette — John purchased the sheet music and took it with him to a school event, just in case Neil would be there. When he ran into Neil that night, he showed him the sheet music; "I remember that song," Neil laughed, before very graciously signing it for me. It's one of the greatest gifts I've ever received, and has hung prominently in every house and apartment I've lived in since.

I've never had the opportunity to meet or interview Neil Diamond, which is a shame; the music world is filled with douchebags of all stripes, but I've never heard anything bad about Neil from anyone who's ever crossed paths with him. He's always come across like a true gentleman — maybe one with a slightly heightened sense of self-importance, or a goofy sense of humor that doesn't always translate well, but a gentleman nonetheless. Which is why, my fandom aside, it made me really sad to hear that he's retiring from the road after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In light of that news, I wrote a few things about his history as a performer for the Forward, which you can read here.

And in honor of Neil's 77th birthday today, I went back and dug up a few other things I've written about him over the years. In 2015, after witnessing the greatest Neil Diamond concert I've ever seen (and sadly, will ever see), I wrote this piece for the Forward; and a year earlier, I reviewed his most recent studio album — the unexpectedly excellent Melody Road — for the same outlet. And though it's no longer available on Rolling Stone's site, I made a list of ten great Neil Diamond tracks for them back in 2005, which has since been re-posted here.

Obviously, Neil's music means a lot to me, so it's been gratifying to be able to express that in these pieces. It's also been encouraging to see how younger generations of listeners have come around to him in the past 25 years. When I first saw him in concert, at the Rosemont Horizon in 1992, my friends and I (then in our mid/late 20s) were the youngest people in the place; but when my wife and I went to see him at the Greek Theatre in 2015, probably half the crowd was younger than me by a decade or two. Over the course of fifty years, Neil Diamond went from being a Solitary Man to a legendary one; and if he got cheated out of a victory lap by this disease, hopefully he can at least take comfort in reflecting on a half-century of celebratory performances, and knowing that so many of his heartfelt songs have stood the test of time.

So Happy Birthday, Neil. Long may you rock, in whatever manner you choose to do so from here on out. You got to me, and then some.

 

The Dope's That There's Still Hope

Though I do have some nice memories from it, 2017 was an undeniable shit-show for me in all manner of ways (and quite possibly for you, too). But rather than crawling under my desk and assuming a fetal position, I am fully resolved to make this coming year a better one on every level — and the fact that my first gig of the year involved writing something on Bruce Springsteen's first album bodes pretty well for that, I'd like to think.

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was released 45 years ago today, and I've counted it among my five favorite Springsteen albums since the days when there were ONLY five Springsteen albums. It's fair to say that it's his loosest and looniest record, as well as (for better or worse) his most verbose, and spinning it again (and again) while doing research for this Rolling Stone piece was kind of like having an evening out with an old friend who I'd lost touch with for awhile — lotsa laughs, lotsa good memories, lotsa stories that don't always get finished. True, "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" is a song I never need to hear more than once a decade (and "The Angel" isn't a whole lot better, though I love the melody on the bridge), but the rest of the record still totally delivers the scraggily poetic goods for me.

Anyway, a very Happy New Year to whomever's reading this, and may your 2018 be filled with love, joy, good health and great music.

 

Midnight Magic

 

Christmas came early for me in December 1979 — about a week early, in fact.

This pre-Christmas Christmas was necessitated by the fact that my mom, sister and I were preparing to move to Chicago from Los Angeles, where we'd spent the past year living with two of my aunts, my uncle and my two young cousins in their airy Spanish Revival duplex on Sixth Street. Our plan went like this: My mom was flying to Chicago to meet Froggy, her fiancee, while my sister and I would fly to New York City to spend Christmas (and a few days before and after) with my dad and stepmother, and then we'd meet up in Chicago in time to start the new year (and new decade) in our new home. So on December 19th, our final evening in Los Angeles, my sister, mom and I exchanged presents with the rest of our L.A. family.

Among the more memorable gifts I received that night were a Strat-O-Matic College Football set, a copy of The People's Almanac #2, and a copy of the Commodores' Midnight Magic LP. In retrospect, it seems kind of strange that the one record I got that Christmas was far mellower than the music I'd gotten deeply into that fall through local FM radio station KMET, as well as via various friends — new wave-ish things like Cheap Trick, Blondie, the Knack, the Cars, the Records and Bram Tchaikovsky, and older hard rock stuff like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Foghat and Jethro Tull. But I'd been a fan of the Commodores since the summer of '77, when "Easy" oozed like cosmic honey out of every radio in earshot, and they were one of those bands that my mom and I both shared an affection for (even if she'd aptly described them as "corny" on more than one occasion).

And frankly, I wasn't the kind of kid who got off on pissing off my mom with my record collection; I happily absorbed the harder stuff on my own time, but also really enjoyed the times when my mom and I would listen to music together, finding common ground in the melodies that transported us. So when writing out my Christmas list that year, I thought Midnight Magic would be a better bet to ask for than, say, Get The Knack, because I knew with the latter that it'd only be a matter of time before my mom's ears picked up the line "When she's sitting on your face" from "Good Girls Don't," and an awkward conversation would inevitably ensue...

Since we were due to leave the next day, my sister and I immediately packed up all our new presents — except for the Strat-O-Matic game, which I insisted on taking with me to NYC — in a suitcase for my mom to take with her to Chicago. I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to listen to my new album for another ten days or so, but then again it gave me something to look forward to, a new thrill to savor once the excitement of spending our first Christmas in Manhattan was over.

I finally got a chance to pierce the album's shrink wrap on our first night in Chicago, while we got comfortable at Froggy's one-bedroom apartment on the 67th floor of the John Hancock Building. From his living room window, Froggy pointed out a black, glass-and-steel rectangle below — the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed apartment building on Lake Shore Drive where we'd all be moving in a matter of days. For now, though, we'd ride out the remaining days of '79 in his comfy bachelor pad in the sky, which came complete with a wooden-based BSR turntable that I popped Midnight Magic onto at my earliest opportunity.

Up til this point, I had only heard "Sail On" and "Still," the album's two hit ballads; the country-tinged verses of the former seemed a little odd to me, but I loved how the song built to a mighty chorus crescendo. "Still," on the other hand, I didn't dig at all — in retrospect, the sappy ballad was a dry run for Lionel Richie's solo career, but at the time it just seemed both convoluted and dull. Nevertheless, I was a loyal fan, and remained hopeful that Midnight Magic would contain a funky track or two along the lines of "Brickhouse," or even "Too Hot Ta Trot". In that respect, I would be sorely disappointed; once I finally spun the record, it became apparent that there was nothing on it that could touch the funkiest highlights of the Commodores' back catalog. However, the upbeat cuts like "Getting It," "Sexy Lady" and the title track were a different (and appealing) animal altogether — they were clean, smooth and sophisticated in a way that somehow seemed to perfectly befit our new surroundings.

But the track that I really connected with was "Wonderland," which opened Side 2. A lush, slow-grooving seduction ballad, the song found Lionel promising to sweep a girl off to the land of love with a ride down "Paradise Drive," if she'd just take his hand. While "Wonderland" was entirely too "adult" for me to relate to on a literal level, I was completely enraptured by the luxuriously silky sound of the track, and completely caught up in its evocative promises. "Hello, honey, this is your lucky day," Lionel sang, and yeah, this was my (and our) lucky day — after a year of scraping by in Los Angeles with so little money that I'd felt guilty about asking my mom to take me shopping for new clothes, she was about to marry a guy who lived in a skyscraper, and who was about to move us all into a sleek apartment building with an actual door man. The building was even located on Lake Shore Drive — not Paradise Drive, perhaps, but damn close enough...

I played the album again that unseasonably New Year's Eve, shortly before we boarded a CTA bus to take us up to Rogers Park, where we quietly rung in the new decade by watching a late screening of Going In Style — a bittersweet heist comedy starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg — at the 400 Theater. On the way home, as our bus cruised southwards along Lake Shore Drive, I looked out at the lights of Lincoln Park, which seemed to bob and beckon in the distance like fairy lights, and heard "Wonderland" playing in my head. I knew next to nothing about my new home at this point, but I couldn't wait to learn everything — couldn't wait to become a part of this historic and enchanting metropolis where I'd been lucky enough to land. I was so pumped, I wasn't even stressed about having to enroll in a new school the following week, which would be my fourth school in less than two years.

Sadly, life never flows as quite smoothly as a late-70s Commodores track. In time, Froggy would turn out to have deep-seated anger issues that primarily manifested at me; living in a Mies Van Der Rohe building would prove a cold (often literally) and depressing experience; and my desire to fit in with the rock-loving, WLUP-listening kids at my new school would eventually cause me to renounce my love for all things Commodores. But for a couple of weeks at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, Midnight Magic represented all of my hopes and dreams I had for the new year, the new decade, and my new life. As I sit here in Chicago on a bitingly cold New Year's Day, I listen to "Wonderland" and can still feel the same heady sense of excitement, promise and wonder — that same Midnight Magic — that I did thirty-eight years ago. And I find myself wondering where the hell all the time went.

 

 

Hef A Good Time, All The Time

There's so much to be said in the wake of Hugh Hefner's passing, both about Hef himself and the cultural impact (positive and otherwise) of his most famous magazine. But I'm not going to get into any of that here...

No, I think the best way to observe Hef's death is to watch (or at least acknowledge the existence of) this sublimely ridiculous network TV special from the Thanksgiving Weekend of 1979. I myself have no memory of its broadcast, though it certainly would have been right in my 13 year-old wheelhouse at the time. And good lord, look at that cast: Richard Dawson! The Village People! Chuck Mangione! Wayland Flowers and Madame!

And then, of course, there's added "bonuses" like Dawson's recurring bit with ill-fated Playmate Dorothy Stratten, and celebrity walk-ons like James Caan, Marjoe Gortner, Jim Brown, Ruth Buzzi, Robert Culp and Patty Hearst. Honestly, the only way they could have made this more quintessentially "1979" was to have Dave "The Cobra" Parker and the rest of the "We Are Family" Pirates snorting coke in the Playboy Mansion Grotto...

Speaking of "We Are Family," this TV special serves as not only a fascinating (as well as titillating and occasionally nauseating) time capsule from the, er, tail end of the 1970s — the commercials alone are worth the price of admission — but it also serves as something of a riposte to those pro- and anti-disco factions who would claim that July 1979's Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park was what "killed" disco music and culture.

Four months after that legendary/infamous event, disco was clearly still considered commercially potent enough for ABC to broadcast a roller disco special with the Village People as guest stars; at the same time, if this bloated, vapid and coked-up mess accurately reflects where disco culture was at (or at least how mainstream America was perceiving it) by late '79, it clearly would have croaked soon enough on its own, without any help from antagonistic (and opportunistic) rock DJs like Steve Dahl. I loved disco now, as I loved it then — but pop culture trends go in waves, and disco's wave had already crested by the time Disco Demolition kicked it in the skin-tight satin pants.

In any case, you can watch the whole mind-boggling thing here at the amazing Archive.Org site, or dig it in more bite-sized chunks via the following YouTube clips:

Rest in peace, Hef. No one can say you didn't enjoy your time on Earth.

 

 

If Your Hart Is A Flame Burning Brightly

I remember talking to a friend about Hüsker Dü's New Day Rising, shortly after that album came out. "I hear Hüsker Dü are doing POP SONGS now," he laughed, dismissively.

Well, yeah. New Day Rising was the album where Grant Hart's pop sensibilities really stepped up to the mic; not coincidentally, that's also the album where Hüsker Dü went from being a band I genuinely respected to a band I truly loved. New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig (which followed it just eight months later) were my 80s Rubber Soul and Revolver — two perfect records that seemed joined at the hip sonically and artistically, even though the growth of the guys who were making them was happening almost too fast to be fully captured by recording technology. I can't even calculate how much time I spent in the fall of 1985 playing both albums back-to-back in my college dorm room, either playing guitar along with them or just laying back and absorbing their brilliance.

Flip Your Wig's "Flexible Flyer" was one of those rare songs — like the Music Machine's "Talk Talk" or the Flamin' Groovies' "Shake Some Action" — where the first time I heard it, it truly felt like it was written FOR me, a massive missive sent directly from the same lonely spot in the cosmos that I hailed from. The music was anthemic, the lyrics were positive and philosophical, and Grant Hart sang them like he was Paul Stanley's stoned-out younger brother. It still stirs my soul today as much as it did in the fall of '85.

"If your heart is a flame burning brightly
You'll have light and you'll never be cold
And soon you will know that you just grow
You're not growing old"

 
Rest in Funky Peace, Grant Hart.

And You Could Have a Change of Heart (Walter Becker, RIP)

Swimming lessons at the "Y" were the worst.

For reasons I can no longer recall — but which probably had at least something to do with my stubborn resistance to taking any sort of extra-curricular instruction in anything that I wasn't already deeply interested in — I got a late start on learning how to swim. My dad didn't sign my sister and I up for after-school swimming lessons at the Ann Arbor YM/YWCA until I was already ten years old, which meant starting at the "Tadpole" level along with kids who were four or five years younger than me.

It was incredibly humiliating. One time after class, while passing the main staircase at the "Y," I was spotted by a group of girls that I knew from my fifth grade class at Burns Park. "Hey, Dan," one of them called out from the upper landing. "What class are you taking?" Faced with the choice of admitting the awful truth, telling an easily debunked lie (my hair was obviously still wet, for one thing), or simply running wordlessly out of the building, I instinctively chose the third option.

I took my final "Y" swimming class in May 1978, just a week or two after I turned twelve. We had to pass a series of individual tests in order to graduate from the "Minnow" level — an achievement which meant that I could officially handle myself reasonably well in the deep end of any pool, if not exactly on the open ocean — so I had plenty of time to happily drift and daydream while the seven- and eight-year-olds in the class took turns demonstrating that they could tread water and float on their backs. As I glided slowly through the heavily chlorinated water, knowing I would never have to dive into that dreaded "Y" pool again, I repeated a mantra in my head in celebration: "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide/Call me Deacon Blues." 

It seemed like I'd seen the Aja album, with its arresting cover image of a shadowy geisha, in the living room of every one of my dad's friends that spring. But it took me a while to connect it with the lush and languid "Deacon Blues," a song so far removed from what I thought of at the time as pop music that it didn't really register the first twenty or thirty times I'd heard it on the radio. Finally, my friend Abbot — during one of our many CKLW-soundtracked Nerf basketball shoot-arounds — called my attention to it. "You should like this song," he said. "They mention the Crimson Tide."

I zeroed in on the chorus, and realized he was right. I had no idea what the song was about — it seemed both forbiddingly adult and almost surrealistically nonsensical — but I loved the Crimson Tide reference. My grandfather had spent most of the 1970s in Tuscaloosa as the dean of the University of Alabama's School of Social Work, and in that time (and over the course of many summer and Christmas visits) I'd developed a fondness for Bama football that nearly rivaled my love for the U of M's Wolverines. Grandpa Fred even lived two or three doors down from Bear Bryant, Alabama's legendary coach, who we used to run into during evening walks around the neighborhood. I had no idea why Steely Dan (whoever he/it was) would name-check the Crimson Tide, but Abbot's assessment was correct — the mere fact that they did so was enough to make me like the song, and then the music slowly sucked me in from there.

Steely Dan's music was smooth, sumptuous, and seemed aimed at a much older demographic than the one I belonged to at the time. And yet, as the spring of 1978 blurred into the summer and I found myself really caring about popular music for the first time, their omnipresence on the AM dial became increasingly apparent to me. "Peg," "Josie" and "FM (No Static At All)" were all sizeable hits that year, but it also wasn't uncommon for a radio station to whip out "Do It Again" or "Reelin' in the Years," breakthrough hits for the band from '72 and '73, and songs that I now belatedly remembered as seemingly being on the car radio whenever we'd go for an ice cream run to the Washtenaw Dairy. But for some reason, I'd never heard their biggest hit, 1974's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," until one afternoon in July '78. My sister and I were out in Los Angeles, visiting my mom, and at that moment we were edging our way down Laurel Canyon in a VW Bug belonging to John, my mom's boyfriend. "Oh man, is that Steely Dan?" John cried, cranking the volume as the song's opening vamp came rolling through his dashboard speakers.

Indeed it was, and I was completely entranced — not just by the song's hypnotic groove, but by its words. Once again, the lyrics seemed to be way more "adult" than anything I was used to hearing, and they seemed to start somewhere in the middle of the story. "We heard you're leaving/That's okay." Who's leaving? And why? "We could stay inside and play games/I don't know." Like what, Yahtzee? I didn't know, either. But the lines "You tell yourself you're not my kind/But you don't even know your mind" resonated with me, even if only from the standpoint of having "liked" a girl or two in my sixth grade class who hadn't "liked" me back for reasons that they couldn't or wouldn't fully articulate. "And you could have a change of heart," Donald Fagen offered, hopefully. Oh yeah, I could definitely relate.

As much as I immediately loved the song — and at least kind of dug their other hits — it wasn't like I instantly declared myself a Steely Dan fan at that moment. The first time I ever heard Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" or ELO's "Sweet Talkin' Woman," I felt compelled to run out and buy those records as soon as I had enough money in my piggy bank. But Steely Dan's music seemed mysterious and oddly unapproachable; as with the ocean, these were waters I instinctively felt leery about swimming in. Plus, by this time I'd seen photos in the newspaper of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and they both looked like some of the creepier inhabitants of the communal Santa Monica Victorian where my mom had lived for a few years in the mid-70s.

Between my insatiable hunger to learn and absorb as much as I could about music — an obsession that really kicked into high gear in the summer of '78, and hasn't really slowed since then — and my mile-wide cynical streak, I also quickly became suspicious about the stealthy ubiquitousness of Steely Dan's music. John, my mom's BF, was a big fan of jazz and blues (he'd previously done time as Taj Mahal's tour manager) so it made perfect sense that he would be attracted to Steely Dan's jazz-influenced sound. But I started to notice that, for many of the adults I interacted with at the time, the Aja LP served as a sort of totem of sophistication, something you had to have sitting out in your fern-shrouded, shag-carpeted living room if you wanted to be taken seriously as a person of taste circa 1978. And then there was stuff like Donny Osmond singing "Peg" during the 1979 Miss Universe pageant TV broadcast (yes, me and a couple of bored friends watched it on one hot summer night in Ann Arbor), which made the song seem like nothing more than mainstream pap.

Maybe this music was "adult," but was it adult in the soulless, acquisitive, middle-class American way that I'd already come to distrust? Hell, Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers had sung harmonies on the original recording of "Peg," and for someone whose tastes were rapidly veering towards hard rock, new wave and even punk, the Doobies were the epitome of lame. By the time Gaucho hit the charts in late 1980, I was off "The Dan" completely, writing the music off as pretentious, self-congratulatory corporate product, the sort of thing that primarily existed as background music for record industry glad-handers like Paul Simon's smarmy Annie Hall character to consume "the Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian" to. Wasn't punk supposed to eradicate this kind of shit?

It would take me until the mid-90s to realize how utterly, comically wrong I had been about Steely Dan. I think my "change of heart" was due in part to relocating from Chicago to Los Angeles — whereupon I began to understand how many of their songs were about (or at least inspired by) being uptight, snarky East Coast (and at least half-Jewish) intellectuals adrift amid the decadence of 70s L.A., and how the experience both appalled and appealed to them. I also learned to appreciate how their sleek, hook-filled, impeccably-arranged music served as a Trojan horse for their twisted, sarcastic and decidedly transgressive lyrical worldview. And despite what I'd once perceived as an almost infuriating emotional remoteness in their work, I actually found myself taking refuge and comfort in  "Any Major Dude" and (especially) "Any World That I'm Welcome To" during some very dark moments in my life.

There was also the belated realization — driven by articles like Alex Wilkinson's amazing Rolling Stone profile from 2000 — that Becker and Fagen were an incredibly unique, fascinating and (dryly) hilarious creative duo. The "Classic Album" documentary on the making of Aja went a long way towards fostering my appreciation of their work, as well; the meticulousness of their vision is both awe-inspiring and kind of comical, and the way they chuckled over their tormenting of Michael McDonald during the recording of "Peg" (starting at 6:20 in the clip below) just endeared them to me more.

Love 'em or hate 'em — and I have certainly done both in my time — there was no pop duo like Becker and Fagen. And now Becker's gone, which is of course very sad, though in retrospect it's kind of amazing that he actually lived this long (his Gaucho-era heroin habit nearly got the best of him), and that the formerly road-averse pair was able to make a spectacular comeback as a touring act during the last two decades.

Walter Becker leaves behind an incredible body of work, one which I (and so many others) continue to successfully plumb for new joys, and one whose uncompromising singularity of vision would be remarkable in any age. As they say in baseball, Becker took his hacks and didn't get cheated; and as any major (league) dude will tell you, you can't really ask for much more than that. Rest in funky peace, Walter.

 

Real Cool Time

Finally got a chance to watch Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch's Stooges documentary, this weekend. I genuinely learned some things (like how Iggy's wanton shirtlessness was inspired by Yul Brynner and other silver screen pharaohs of the 1950s), was annoyed by the repetition of certain footage and the omission or soft-pedaling of some favorite Stooges lore (the band's bloody '73 demise is only briefly mentioned, for example), but overall found the film incredibly entertaining, and it's totally sent me down a(nother) 60s/70s Michigan music rabbit hole.

Sure, there's plenty of things for diehard Stooges fans like myself to carp about, but I'm happy that the film officially exists and is commercially available, so that newcomers can enjoy it and learn about one of the mightiest, most influential bands to ever stalk a stage — as opposed to the MC5's True Testimonial doc, which was much better than this one but will never officially see the light of day thanks to an unfortunate tangle of legal wranglings.

My favorite thing from Gimme Danger, though? This photo of über-guitarist Ron Asheton hanging out at Ann Arbor's Nickels Arcade, which I'd never seen before. My family and I lived in Ann Arbor from mid-1967 to the end of 1978 (just a few blocks away from the MC5's Hill Street enclave, in fact), and during that period we must have walked through Nickels Arcade at least a thousand times, probably more. I often got my hair cut at the barber shop there, and my sister used to buy miniature glass animals from a little shop at the west end of the arcade, just to the left of where Ron is standing here.

It was a magical, otherworldly place for us, with its Beaux-Arts terra-cotta details and vaulted glass skylight that ran the entire length of the gallery. And learning that one of my all-time favorite guitarists hung out there as well, probably killing time while waiting for Iggy to get off work at the nearby Discount Records (where I would eventually buy my first 45s), makes it even more magical for me now.

This Indescribable Chaotic Element: A (Mostly) Unpublished Interview With Chris Cornell

On an appropriately rainy September morning back in 2012, I sat down to breakfast with Chris Cornell at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

We were there to talk about King Animal — the first new Soundgarden album in 15 years — for a cover story that I was writing for Revolver magazine. I'd written about Soundgarden and other Cornell-related projects many times over the previous two decades, but this was the first time I'd ever interviewed him (in person or otherwise), and I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I'd chatted several times in the past with Kim Thayil, and always found the Soundgarden guitarist to be gregarious and hysterically funny; but there always seemed to be a sense of "otherness" emanating from Cornell, both onstage and in interviews, which made me wonder what (if anything) was really going on behind his striking visage...

I should probably get this out of the way right here: While I'd followed Soundgarden's career since the release of their Screaming Life EP in 1987, and I saw them live nearly a dozen times between 1989 and their 1997 breakup, I was never a huge Soundgarden fan. I respected what they did, admired their individual and collective talents, related (of course) to their 70s rock influences — yet their music never really resonated with me the way that, say, the music of their Pacific Northwest compatriots Screaming Trees and Mudhoney did. Even today, if you were to ask me what my favorite Soundgarden LP is, I honestly couldn't tell you. They're all impressive — and impressively consistent — in their own way, but I can't say I'm ever "in the mood" for some Soundgarden. Such are the vagaries of musical tastebuds...

That said, I was still incredibly saddened by his unnecessarily premature passing, and my heart hurts not just for his family and all the people out there who knew and loved him, but for all my friends (and I have many) who were legitimately huge fans of his music — Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave, and/or his solo work. And it's for that latter group that I'm re-posting this full transcript of our interview, most of which (for reasons of space) didn't make it into my Revolver piece. During our conversation, I felt like I really got a glimpse of the kid inside the man, the diehard music fan inside the rock god, the humor and intelligence churning away behind the quiet reserve that was (probably) equal parts natural shyness and necessary self-protection. I genuinely enjoyed our conversation that morning; and if you were a Chris Cornell fan, I believe you'll probably dig reading this. Rest in Peace, Chris.

*****

Chris Cornell: Hey, before we start — have you heard the whole record?

Me: Oh yeah; I've had a stream of the whole thing for about a week now.

Okay, good. It’s kind of typical for a Soundgarden record — if you hear any of the songs taken out of context, it’s fine, but you don’t get the whole picture.

There's been a lot of expectant buzz about the album on the internet. Do you ever go on Soundgarden chat boards or anything like that, and read what your fans are saying?

I’ve never done that, ever. Things get to me — like, I might hear about something that a fan has said — but most of the time I’m ignorant of it, and kind of want to be. I don’t see it being helpful. And personally, I’ve never been the person that would go online and comment on a message board or posted video, or anything like that. I don’t want to judge people that do it; if that’s something you’re into, I get it. But it seems to me that those venues are mostly for people kind of picking things apart. It’s more about people interacting with each other than the art that someone else is doing. It might be people who are passionate about being fans, but what they’re doing is participating and communicating with each other in some way; it’s a social thing. And that has nothing to do with — and it should have nothing to do with — Soundgarden writing and recording. [Laughs] So I ignore it. Even if someone sends a message, saying, “People are very upset about X,” I immediately try to dismiss it, and hope that I’m not so stupid that I would do something that would upset fans… But you know, fifty percent of my career is doing things that upset a certain group of fans. [Laughs] So I don’t want to neglect that side, either — I’m working on the next thing that’s gonna really piss people off!

The album has a very dramatic flow to it. How involved were you in the sequencing of the album?

This was the first Soundgarden record, because it’s been 15 years, that I could just put the final mixes — or whatever was closest to the final mixes — in an iTunes playlist and just move them around. I probably spent the most time sequencing it that I have on any record. There were some songs, and this is always the problem with Soundgarden, where if you take them out of context and play them side-by-side, it sounds like we’re insane people for trying to put them on the same record. But once you sequence it correctly, it all makes sense. We have a lot of different influences, and we’re pretty liberal about collecting them and putting them all together in one song. And also, all four of us are coming from different angles on each song, because we all hear it our own way, and we all relate to it — cognitively, at any rate — based on what we imagine the influences are. We might do a song, for example, that Ben brings in, and I hear a completely different influence than him or Matt might hear in the same song. So it becomes kind of a collective thing. It takes a little bit of finesse to sequence from beginning to end and have it make sense.

Give me an example of two songs on the album that seem weird together when you remove them from the running order...

Well, on this album, one of the last songs we finished was “Blood On the Valley Floor”. Everybody was super happy with it, but that really pushed the needle a little bit towards super slow, aggressive, riff-oriented Soundgarden. And then there’s the song “Halfway There,” which is almost Beatle-y. And how do those two songs live on the same album without us sounding like insane people? [Laughs] To get all of that through is a little bit of a challenge. But what you get out of it at the other end, I think, is an authentic album experience, [something] I was raised with, and people don’t necessarily, at least in large numbers, give a shit about anymore. But hopefully this album will help.

Was the "authentic album experience" a big part of how you absorbed music as a kid?

Yeah. I did a lot of listening to music alone — that’s sort of how I became a musician, just based on years and years of being a super-geeky music fan. I didn’t really think of being in a band or making records or writing songs until I was probably 17, 18… it didn’t start at 10. I wrote songs and stuff, but I didn’t think that was what I was going to do until I was in my late teens. Listening to an album was definitely like a really important escapist thing that I completely dove into. And that was my only perspective ever while we were making albums, is that it would be that...

Once Soundgarden became a live touring band, then sometimes I would steer into the notion of a live experience when I was writing a song: “What are we missing that we don’t deliver live? Let’s write that!” But the priority was always that it would be an album experience, and that you’d draw your listener into a world that they can only go into through you, and then get lost in that without any missteps by us that would shock the listener out of that and back to reality — like that clunky acting scene in a movie where you’re really into it, and then you see behind the curtain and realize you're in a theater seat with a bunch of people next to you.

It’s a great headphones record, as well. It's very immersive — it sucks you in and never lets you come up for air.

That’s the goal, I think. We don’t go after that from song one; it’s something that kind of naturally happens, but which we also sort of manipulate as we’re reaching the end, when we’re sequencing, mixing and mastering. The artwork also is important, [even though] probably only a fraction of people even look at it any more. To me, that was another triumph for this album — seeing the cover art and the back cover with the song titles on it, seeing the album title work together with the songs, and the whole thing becoming what I would imagine a Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd album was to me, at least as a kid. I used to buy records at this head shop that was near my house. They would always burn incense in there, so all my albums smelled like that incense, so that was part of the whole trip, too! [Laughs]

Where did the title King Animal come from?

That came from Kim. I was assuming that it came from just sitting with the album art; this is the first time that I can remember where the album art was done before the album was done or before a title came, so the title itself wasn’t really influencing the visual. So Matt and Kim and Ben were all kind of throwing ideas around for titles; I was badgering Kim to come up with something brilliant, like he’s done before. He’s the one who blurted out “Badmotorfinger!” and “Ultramega OK!” — just stream of consciousness. A couple of the ideas we were thinking about didn’t really fit with the artwork, and I think Kim just dreamed that up viewing Josh Graham’s artwork, thinking of how it fit in with the artwork and the song titles and the big picture. And it really drew it all together.

It's like King of the Jungle returning to reinforce its dominance. Is that how you see Soundgarden right now?

Yeah, it’s confident, not passive. And it does that one magical thing which Badmotorfinger and Superunknown and Louder Than Love did, which is, it’s a memorable and strong title to a body of work that you can’t really title with a description. We’ve never been able to do that; that’s why our titles have always been somewhat ambiguous. We can’t really lay out a title that describes the music within in one line, or the band itself in one line, like AC/DC did over and over with High Voltage, Powerage, and on and on.

Louder Than Love always struck me as doing exactly that, though.

It might be closer. Screaming Life was, also… though it was also more brief.

As I understand it, you guys reunited, initially at least, more out of a curatorial impulse than a creative one.

Yeah. It had taken a little time. A couple years after we disbanded, it became sort of clear that our musical legacy had moved into this sort of classic rock embodiment, which was great — that was another triumph to me, like, Okay, our music is going to go on. It’s not dated, it wasn’t "of the moment," it wasn’t listened to because it was part of a genre, it wasn’t because of geography anymore. It was based on the songs. But then, as time went on, it also slowly but surely became clear to all of us that new generations of fans are being born and growing up — and as I did, they’re going to gravitate towards essentially what’s in front of their face. Some of the records that changed my life, I picked up literally by accident; someone left it at my house, or I liked the cover, that sort of thing.

Like what, for example?

Well, like the first Bauhaus record I bought was a live record [Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape]. Peter Murphy’s hiding his face behind a cymbal — which is removed from the drum kit, which I liked — and he’s singing. Something about that just spoke to me, like, “I don’t know what this is, but this has to be great.” I took it home and listened to it once, and I didn’t really like it, and it sat in my record collection. And then I was going through my albums and saw it again, and I was like, “This has to be good — I must have been in a shitty mood when I listened to it.” I put it back on, and they became one of my favorite bands, and I started having friends who were Bauhaus fans; I suddenly had goth friends, and stuff.

So basically, you wanted Soundgarden's music to be discoverable for kids who would have been born to late to know about the band during its actual existence.

Yeah, it became sort of obvious that we need to do that, because no one else was doing it. Management wasn’t doing it. The label, which has a huge part of our history in their catalog, was doing nothing. We didn’t have a fan club anymore, we didn’t have a website; we had nothing. So that’s what started it. And we were super proud of every part of it; there’s no ‘dark period’ where we were bummed out about what happened. The last creative experience we had, Down on the Upside, was a great one, so we didn’t really have to get over that hump of, “Making those last three records was so awful, I don’t know if I can do it again.” [Laughs] We didn’t have that.

At what point did you decide that making new music was going to be part of the plan?

I don’t know. We were sitting in a room together, all four of us for probably the first time in 14 years, and the first five minutes were a little awkward. I guess it’s just human nature. Everyone’s a little guarded and a little cautious, and everybody looks a little different. But after five minutes, we’re remembering when the roadie was lighting his farts, and when someone was in a blackout and swinging from a chandelier, or whatever — just all the funny stories. And that went on for like an hour and a half. And to me, once that was going on, it felt like… you just become a band. That’s all you know how to be together, anyway, because that’s all you ever were. Everyone that’s in the band now, I was friends with before we were a band. But probably some of our most intense life experiences, individually, happened when all four of us were there. So that immediately is resurrected, it just is. So I felt from that moment, whatever it is that everybody wants to do, it has to be unanimous — we would never individually participate in something that was “Soundgarden” if it wasn’t us four.

How soon did you go from that meeting to actually making music together?

It took a little time. We immediately had things to do — putting together the Telephantasm compilation, discovering that we had live recordings we didn’t know about and putting that together, getting the website going, getting the fan club going again, and then rehearsing to play a show. In that first year, we had so many show offers that we turned down, it was kind of ridiculous. It was like, all over the world, all at the same time, insane money — and we all immediately and unanimously said “no” to that. And to me, that seemed to be when suddenly everyone felt comfortable moving forward. Because I think that what caused us to split apart, rather than just take a hiatus, was just that Soundgarden had become a business; and that business had somehow, in a sense, started to be able to dictate to us what, where and how we were going to do things, whether we were into it or comfortable with it or not. I think once we all realized that’s going to happen now — we’d just turned down a year of touring, so obviously nobody’s into it for that reason, nobody’s into it because they need a check, nobody’s into it because it’s a "smart business decision" — I think that just made everybody comfortable. And the actual creative process was natural; everybody had ideas right away. The only obstacle was getting all four of us in a room together.

Synching up the schedules?

Yeah. But I actually liked how that rolled out, in a lot of ways. Because I think there are a few moments, as in the making of any record, where you sort of lose perspective — and I’ll get that perspective back six months after that record comes out. [Laughs] That didn’t happen on King Animal, because we had that little extra time to gain perspective. The downside to that can be, and it can happen to anybody, that if you sit with songs, mixes, arrangements for too long, you can completely fall into a downward spiral and overthink everything; it’s not fresh and exciting anymore, and you forgot what you liked about the song. I was worried about that a few times, just thinking ahead like, “Well, what if this happens?” But it didn’t happen.

Billy Corgan dissed you guys recently, saying that your reunion was clearly all about the money — but from what you're telling me, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

No. And even if it were, wouldn’t that be the pot calling the kettle black? Last time I saw him, he was starting a new Smashing Pumpkins record with one other founding member, that was it. I would even sort of defend a band that did get back together to support their legacy and tour and make money. If you actually are fortunate enough to have created a legacy, what then? [Laughs] What is the appropriate thing to do? What is the honorable thing to do? Set it aside? It’s yours — you can do anything you want with it, and that’s your business. I think that the only dishonorable way to handle it is one that will hurt the individual. Selling off your rights to administer it, for example — that would be doing a bad thing to your legacy for the money. And people have done that; their songs end up in commercials. Sly Stone lives in a van; he sold his publishing for 50 grand. That’s really sad.

Sonically and musically, you guys clearly haven’t lost sight of what made Soundgarden Soundgarden. Or maybe that’s just what happens when the four of you guys get together in the studio?

Well, there’s growth; I hear it in a lot of things, and I also saw it in a lot of ways, where it felt to me like everybody had an easier time getting what they wanted in the studio. Any sort of obstacles that we used to have, all of that showed up in the same way. There’s definitely that sort of alchemy and chemistry where when the four of us play together; no matter what it is, it sounds like Soundgarden. So that was there. But part of it too is this unmanageable, chaotic thing that I’d forgotten about...

I used to think about it a lot, because we would have these shows — even on our last tour of Australia [before the band broke up], we were having some of the best shows of our career, and some of the worst! And I was trying to figure out why, and it kind of came down to this indescribable chaotic element that’s there, and if there’s too much of it, it’s a disaster, and if there’s none of it, it’s a disaster. There has to be a certain amount of it, but it doesn’t seem to be controllable, which is scary. So what do you do? Do you just go out there and hope that that element is there in an adequate amount to make it great? [Laughs] That came right back, and I had not heard that since we split up, and I’d never had that experience with any other people.

That's pretty amazing.

It really was. And then the other thing that was there, and what was evident immediately when we started writing together again, was that we still had vision in the same amount that we always did. Soundgarden always had vision; I guess you’d call it a “collective vision,” because everyone individually had their own vision of what Soundgarden meant, to them and to our fans. We’ve always had that, through thick and thin, because there were periods where people were quite critical of us — critics, the indie scene. The indie scene was always critical of me, from the very beginning, because it was back when the word "alternative" was based on its actual definition, and the biggest selling commercial music of the time was hard rock. I think it appeared to a lot of people that I could have existed in that world, so why am I bothering the post-punk indie people with my presence, if I can actually sing and come up with melodies? It was like, "Go be in a big, famous arena rock band!" [Laughs] So we had all of those [people criticizing us]… and throughout that, we all stuck to the vision, and I suppose that’s sometimes what gets lost in the perpetuation of a band over a long period of time. Do you remember when Chrome just kinda became Damon Edge?

You mean, after he split with Helios Creed and then started making his own records as Chrome?

Yeah. It was still cool, but it was not Chrome — the vision was gone, and it had become something else. And I think that that can happen. But we haven’t lost it, even a little bit. Everyone’s head is still in the game the same way. Whatever problems we had before, personally, with just functioning as human beings, we probably all still have. Just maybe over the course of a few years, we’ve come to understand how to deal with those things a little better, but they’re all still there. Nobody showed up with a Deepak Chopra book in their backpack, you know? [Laughs] Nobody has completely transformed into another human being. And I’m thankful for that, in a weird way.

Are songs ever rejected for not sounding Soundgarden-y enough?

I think that shows up every once in awhile, but almost never has that kept it from being a song that gets recorded — and if it gets recorded and mixed, it usually ends up being on the record. I think no matter what it is, even if it’s a demo where you hear it and think, “That’s not Soundgarden-y enough,” it becomes Soundgarden once everyone plays on it, pretty much every time. I think “Black Hole Sun” was a big outside moment — everyone liked the song, but none of us, including me, were sure that that should be on a Soundgarden album. And then we just recorded it, and it seemed to fit really well within the context of the rest of the album. But none of us ever thought it would be a single; that didn’t make any sense. I’ve always felt that I never really cared what the singles are; whatever it is, it’s fine with me. If it’s on the album, I like it! [Laughs]

There's always been a weirder aspect to Soundgarden’s music — whether it was your prog-rock time signatures or your psychedelic moments — though it's something you haven't always gotten credit for. And that comes through on the new album, as well.

Yeah, it definitely does. I felt like there was an early period, too — and we were loved and hated for it in the indie world — which was bringing in elements of 70s rock. The punk-rock Bible group hadn’t really accepted that notion yet. [Laughs] It was like, “No, wait a minute, you can’t do that!” I remember Soundgarden playing an early gig in Vancouver, and Mike Bordin of Faith No More was there; he was a big early supporter. And I remember an ashtray, a big chunky glass ashtray, whizzing right past my temple. The audience was all completely back against the wall and seated. They just hated us. At that moment, I felt like, “Oh... we know something that they don’t!” It was that confidence that came from getting that reaction, which we got a few more times. And every time we got that reaction, I felt like, “We’re doing something that they don’t know what to do with.” It’s not that it’s bad, because that’s not how people react to bad — it’s something else. You’re talking to your buddy if it’s a bad band playing; you’re ordering another drink and ignoring it. You’re not standing there looking at it, trying to figure out if you should kill them or like them.

But even once people accepted you for being heavy, it was almost like they chose to ignore your more proggy or psychedelic aspects.

I think we’ve always been a little too diverse to figure out easily. And that can be a problem, possibly now more than ever, because people digest things very quickly and then are distracted by the next thing. I think it’s helped our longevity, and I think it will help our longevity after we drop dead; but I also think it was a minus when it came to popularity in the big picture, and selling a lot of records, and existing in the major label world that way. We still have the elements of indie post-punk that was kind of anchoring us, and keeping us from being an easily understandable and accessible commercial rock band. Which we never were. We had our moments, but we were also very difficult, if not impossible, to mimic with any success. [Laughs] I’ve had people send me songs [of other bands] for years, saying, “These guys are totally copping your band, bro!” I’ll hear a couple lines in the song where there will be an element of something that I do, but that’s it. Or it’ll be a big riff and a guy with a huge range, but it sounds like a heavy metal singer. I always felt like we did too many things to have a soundalike band exist, and that’s probably another indication of why we haven’t sold 40 million records, either. People have to be able to understand it easily for you to have that kind of success.

I’ve always summed all that up as good for us. Like, how lucky are we that we can sort of maintain that? Some of the weirdness and versatility, which is super exciting when it’s your band and that’s what you get to do. And yet, to still have enough success that we can continue to make records as long as we want, and we can all have careers separately, and we can all go out on the street or go to a hockey game and not get harassed. And that’s pretty awesome! I think it’s good for us to sort of pause occasionally and realize how lucky we are to have that balance that we created. Even though it seemed like it took us a long time to gain an audience, there was never a moment where it was like, EVERYTHING CHANGED OVERNIGHT, like every single “Behind the Music”. All those Behind the Musics, they're all pretty close to the same story: “Yeah, we met in high school or the first year of college, we started a band, somebody’s friend was an agent who brought in a manager, we made a record, it sold 60 million records in a week, and then we had trouble making the second record because everyone was super-high and we hated each other.” [Laughs] That wasn’t us; we didn’t have that. We chugged away and chugged away and chugged away, and we kind of still do.

Okay, I have to admit this: I remember seeing you guys with Mudhoney and Bullet Lavolta at Cabaret Metro in Chicago in the fall of 1989. The other bands pulled up in vans, and I remember my friends and I were totally ragging on the fact that you guys had a tour bus — like, "Oooh, look at the big rock stars!" Of course, we had no concept at the time of how utterly unglamorous life in a tour bus actually is; plus, in retrospect, that was probably a pretty old and crappy one, right?

[Laughs] Oh yeah, and we rode those dirty old buses all around the world for a long time. At the same time, we weren’t thinking about it, because we were living our life. I think the biggest mistake a band can make, or anybody that’s an artist I suppose, is to ever imagine a finish line. Like, “Once we sell this amount of records, we’ll be cool.” You’ve always gotta be sort of dissatisfied, no matter what it is, otherwise you’re not gonna keep moving on. I can’t remember which of the many Bob Dylan documentaries this came from, but there’s that quote from him about how an artist should never find themselves, they always should be looking, and then they’ll be all right. I’ve always felt that about us, that we’ve never made a defining record.

Really? I know a lot of people who would beg to differ on that.

I think Badmotorfinger in a sense is kind of defining, in that we sort of figured out on that album how to max out what we thought we had been about for the last few years. But then we kind of immediately and easily reinvented that on Superunknown. There was never a moment where we felt like, “This is who we are, and we’ve just done the best version of this that we can do. Now what?” Because it’s always evolving. And I don’t know where that comes from. It could be because you’ve got four members involved in earnest in writing songs, so you have these four different impressions of what Soundgarden should sound like. So it’s always moving. But I feel like we’re still searching...

The last song I finished writing lyrics and singing to [for this album] was “Blood on the Valley Floor." It was funny, because it was the last one, and I felt that that one was, somehow, a triumph — and without ever discussing it or worrying about it, it was like we’d sort of solved a puzzle that had been around for years. We made this slow and heavy song sound only like us, and nobody else. And maybe we’ve done that before, but in my mind I felt like we were always reaching for some version of that sound, and we’d always somehow missed it — whether it was the arrangement, or the way that I sang it, or it was too long, or I tried to put some other element in it that didn’t fit. That’s like a moment I think of defining one of the million ideas that Soundgarden represents to me, like, “Oh, I’ve reached out and actually achieved that, and I don’t have to think about anymore.” Now we’ve got all these other issues, where I’m still dissatisfied with this aspect or that aspect. And then somebody will bring in a song that has nothing to do with any of these ideas, and then suddenly you have this new parameter in considering what the band means. Now it’s a new band! Whoa!

 

 

Let There Be Rock (Records)

In honor of Record Store Day, I salute the memory of the late, lamented Rolling Stones Records (later known as Rock Records) on Washington Blvd. in downtown Chicago, a store where I spent more time (and, adjusted for inflation, money) from 1982-86 than I have at any record store before or since.

During my last two years of high school, I would catch the bus down to the Loop nearly every Friday afternoon, and return clutching albums that would change my life — London Calling, Setting Sons, Underwater Moonlight, Squeezing Out Sparks, Moondance, King of the Delta Blues Singers, Kick Out The Jams, Parallel Lines, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society and the British pressing of Revolver were just a few of the crucial additions to my vinyl library that I remember bringing home in a bag with a Rolling Stones lightning bolt on it. During my year off between high school and college, I worked right around the corner, which meant I was able to spend virtually every lunch hour digging through their bins, in search of records I'd only read about in back-issues of CREEM and Trouser Press. Their three-dollar cut-out bin basically made me who I am today.

Rolling Stones used to sell bootlegs, too, and though they were generally out of my price range, I did buy a few Springsteen and Who boots there. I also vividly remember the day that the Feds busted them for it; I didn't know what was happening at the time, other than that I and all the other customers who were there during that lunch hour were instructed to leave immediately, while some very official-looking guy bolted the door behind us. The store was open for business again the following day, but all of the illicit records were gone, never to return.

Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, they changed their name to Rock Records, though they kept their old logo, color scheme and Guy Peelaert-style window decorations. The store got a whole lot less interesting once the Compact Disc took over, but I would occasionally return for old times' sake, and maybe score a cool import CD or two. The last time I set foot in there was probably sometime in the mid/late 90s, while visiting family and friends in Chicago. Judging by its Yelp listing (from which I lifted these store photos), the place finally closed its doors for good in 2009 — this time it wasn't the Feds that shut it down, but the changes in the music industry and the challenges of running a nuts-and-bolts retail establishment in this age of online shopping.

As much of a vinyl lover as I am, I've never actually visited a record shop on Record Store Day, both because I hate the crowds and because I hate the way that major labels continue to jam up most of the country's remaining vinyl pressing plants in order to get their largely inessential RSD product on the shelves, a situation which causes massive delays for a lot of independent labels and artists who are trying to get their own vinyl product out there. That said, I have to admit that RSD has also been responsible for some of my favorite vinyl releases of the past five years, including Rhino's 2014 reissue of the Everly Brothers' phenomenal Roots LP, and Munster's 2016 reissue of the Mike Stuart Span's impossibly awesome 1968 single, "Children of Tomorrow". And if it helps keep record stores in business, and my friends and acquaintances who work at them put food on the table (as well as vinyl on the turntable), then so be it; just as long as we all continue to support our local record shops on the other days out of the year, right?

Anyway — here's to ya, old friend.

 

 

The Pissenger

My friend John to me, during an all-school assembly at Ann Arbor's Burns Park Elementary in 1977:

"Wouldn't it be great if Iggy Pop showed up right now, and started pissing all over the place?" 

Happy Birthday, Ig. Long may your legacy continue to fascinate and inspire the youth of America.