The band Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain both called the best of grunge
When Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl skyrocketed to fame with Nirvana, they were never in it for the competition.
The world may have magically ordained Seattle as the next hub of interesting music, but it wasn’t like Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone were trying to outdo each other on the circuit when they started playing their first gigs. It was all in the interest of having fun, but the members of Nirvana knew when they were dealing with friends and when they had superstars in their backyard.
But even if Cobain wanted to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, he hardly ever showed it. He may have regretted getting glossed over for his songwriting compared to Eddie Vedder half the time, but it’s not like his lyric sheets were the most straightforward, either. He wanted to make music that sounded good with lyrics being an afterthought, but there is some power in writing words that are abstract.
A lot of the imagery on an album like In Utero is a lot more graphic than anyone would have thought would be on a mainstream rock record, but that was all about what Cobain was listening to. He idolised John Lennon for writing dense lyrics in his tunes, but if bands like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin didn’t have the kind of lyrical depth he was looking for, Soundgarden fit the bill a lot better when they first came out.
Despite sounding like an underground version of Zeppelin to most people’s ears, Chris Cornell was more into progressive music than most people would have realised. It doesn’t seem like tunes like ‘Black Hole Sun’ and ‘Spoonman’ are meant to be the hardest things in the world, but try playing them right, and you’ll figure out how many strange licks they throw in or the random time signatures that they seem to use on every other track.
They may have come in way before ‘grunge’ was a buzzword, but even when the Seattle scene blew up, Cobain felt that Soundgarden was one of the few bands that he could tolerate, saying, “Usually when there’s a large city, there’s a lot of bands. I don’t know why they’re all good. Tad, Mudhoney and Soundgarden are the only bands that I personally have liked. The rest of them I don’t really care for.”
If Cobain was interested in the eccentric side of Soundgarden, Grohl was more into the brute force they put behind their songs. He was a diehard Zeppelin fan long before joining Nirvana, and apart from Cornell’s Robert Plant-esque voice, hearing a song like ‘Black Hole Sun’ towards the end of Nirvana’s tenure is what made him realise that this was one of the greatest bands of all time.
Nirvana had already conquered the world, and Pearl Jam had been blowing up around the same time, but once it was Soundgarden’s turn to take over, Grohl felt that they had crossed a threshold, saying, “They were playing interesting rock music. It only made sense that they would be the first to write a song like ‘Black Hole Sun’. Forget about being a hit song; but to be the band to write that song. Nobody else could do that. It raised the bar for everyone. It was way beyond anything anybody had done within our scene. Nobody had a voice like Chris. Nobody played drums like Matt [Cameron].”
And even though Nirvana looms a lot larger in history thanks to Cobain’s legacy on Nevermind, Superunknown and Badmotorfinger are still worthy of being placed next to those classics purely on the basis of the ingenuity behind everything. Foo Fighters may be one of the bands from that time keeping the spirit of alternative music alive, but there’s always going to be certain tropes that people are going to be stealing from Soundgarden without even knowing it.
