Why Soundgarden quit after Chris Cornell’s favourite album: “I don’t want more of that”
Everyone in the music business has needed to deal with some sort of drama, and inevitably, there will be times when clashes with fellow artists end up with a few bruised egos. While many of the biggest bands of all time broke up acrimoniously, Soundgarden’s split was different. By the time they released Down on the Upside, Chris Cornell felt they had accomplished all they could together.
Because when you look at their career trajectory, the Seattle legends were never looking to be the biggest band in the world. If they were trying to become one of the most celebrated acts to come out of the Seattle scene, they were already going about it in a kooky manner, especially with the release of their debut Ultramega OK, which boasted such surefire hits like a cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s experimental piece, ‘One Minute of Silence’.
That was never going to fly on the charts in a pre-Nirvana world, but that didn’t seem to matter. Every project was a new opportunity for the band, and if it only appealed to certain people, then so what? They did take chances when they wanted to, though, including working with future renowned metal producer Terry Date on the album Louder Than Love.
Even when the grunge scene started slowly taking over the world, Soundgarden was still a bit of an outlier. They had been in the trenches from the very beginning, and yet their big breakthrough came after the death of Kurt Cobain, which arguably marks the end of the genre’s relevance in the mainstream.
Though Down on the Upside felt like the sad comedown of grunge half the time, Cornell felt comfortable calling it a day after that record, telling Spin, “My favourite Soundgarden record is the last one. We weren’t a band who ended up strangling each other or fighting with lawyers. We had critical success, we had commercial success, we made records I think are timeless, and we were together for a long time. I’m not so greedy that I want more of that.”
While the record wasn’t designed to be a final hurrah by any stretch, it does contain some of the more adventurous songs that they would ever write. A tune like ‘Blow Up the Outside World’ does sound a lot more arena rock than the rest of their catalogue, but can you really call a record ‘mainstream’ with ‘Burden in My Hand’ as the lead single, complete with a strange open tuning and a twisting time signature?
Compared to the metallic side of their sound from earlier, this is what grunge would have sounded like if it had listened to a lot of prog, and considering it marked a massive spike in their career, it served as a decent note to pack things in on. Even though the group did have an unceremonious final show which included bassist Ben Shepherd launching his bass into the air, it’s not like they were hating each other’s guts when they walked off that stage.
They just needed to do other things, and considering where Cornell went with Audioslave, he seemed more than comfortable fitting into different artistic boxes. If anything, Soundgarden’s career trajectory feels closer to a band like Led Zeppelin than anything else. The records were all classics, it was always a touch experimental, and it never stopped being interesting for a second.
