Kim Thayil on Soundgarden's grunge legacy, losing Cornell and Cobain

Kim Thayil has spent more than four decades in Seattle, a city famous for its coffee obsession, but he didn't drink a cup until lockdown. Tea was his drink—his parents are Indian, and that small detail captures something essential about him: he's always been the one standing slightly apart, watching the scene from the margins rather than fully inside it.

When Thayil and bassist Hiro Yamamoto formed Soundgarden in 1984, they were something the Seattle punk scene had rarely seen before. Two-thirds of the band was Asian. Both men had grown up in Park Forest, a Chicago suburb, as children of immigrants, and that outsider status never quite left them. "We grew up as immigrants and outsiders," Thayil says in his new memoir, A Screaming Life. "I was raised on American culture: the Monkees and the Brady Bunch and Superman comics. But there was this distance—I wasn't necessarily a member of this club." That distance, paradoxically, gave them freedom. Thayil could explore heavy music without the weight of genre convention, without needing to prove himself to gatekeepers he'd never wanted to join.

The hair metal that dominated the 1980s felt to him like a cartoon—all spandex and hairspray and machismo, a look that had no place for a skinny, long-haired brown guy. Soundgarden took the power of heavy rock and stripped away the sexism and misogyny that came with it. Their song "Big Dumb Sex" was a satire, a deliberate rejection of the genre's retrograde values. But audiences didn't always catch the irony. People heard aggressive music and a shirtless singer and assumed they were just another bunch of jerks. "We all had long-term relationships; we had regard for our sisters, our mothers," Thayil says. "We didn't identify with that culture, physically, intellectually or emotionally."

Chris Cornell arrived as the band's drummer, but his voice changed everything. Thayil initially thought Cornell was merely competent, a workmanlike singer in a covers band. He wanted someone with an immediately identifiable sound—an Ian Curtis, a Tom Waits. But Cornell's range was unearthly. He could hit notes Thayil didn't know existed, could hold them for impossible lengths. Swimming had built his diaphragm; it had also built those abs that made him look like a rock god. But temperamentally, Cornell was no David Lee Roth. He was an introvert who'd rather watch a movie in a dark room than work a party. He'd show up, tolerate the attention, then withdraw. With drummer Matt Cameron added to the lineup, Soundgarden was complete.

Thayil introduced two old friends—Bruce Pavitt, who ran the fanzine Subterranean Pop, and Jonathan Poneman, a colleague from the college radio station—and convinced them to work together. That partnership launched Sub Pop, Seattle's most important record label, with Soundgarden's 1987 single "Hunted Down" as a founding statement. The Seattle scene that emerged was tight-knit, united by Black Sabbath and punk, by coffee and a disdain for rock cliché. When Soundgarden covered Sabbath's "Into the Void," they replaced the original's campy apocalyptic vision with a speech by Chief Sealth, the 19th-century Suquamish and Duwamish leader who gave Seattle its name. Native culture mattered to them. The environment mattered to them.

For years, the music industry ignored Seattle. Then, in autumn 1991, Nirvana's Nevermind and Pearl Jam's Ten became multiplatinum phenomena overnight, and suddenly grunge was everywhere. Soundgarden's third album, Badmotorfinger, arrived that October—heavy music of uncommon grace and spirituality. It went double platinum, but the mainstream acceptance their peers enjoyed seemed out of reach. They needed a crossover song. When "Black Hole Sun" arrived, radiant and Beatles-esque, Thayil hesitated. Was it pandering? Did it even sound like Soundgarden? Cornell sensed the resistance. "He said, 'Once you and Ben and Matt get to it, it's gonna sound like us. Go nuts: make it crazy and psychedelic.'" The song won them their first Grammy. Their 1994 masterpiece Superunknown sold over 7 million copies worldwide.

But just as they were breaking through, the vibe turned dark. In April 1994, Kurt Cobain killed himself. Thayil learned the news during a European gig; the band held each other in the dressing room afterward, sobbing. "This was not supposed to be happening," he says. They'd believed the Seattle scene had rejected the self-destructive mythology of Hendrix and Joplin and Morrison. They drank beer, smoked weed, occasionally tried psychedelics, but pills and needles were forbidden. "We thought, 'We're not idiots like that, we're not part of that ironic narrative of celebrity.' We thought we were immune to this." He sighs. "But still, we were going off the cliff."

Disillusioned and worn down by touring, Soundgarden split in 1996. Cornell pursued a solo career and formed Audioslave with three-quarters of Rage Against the Machine. Thayil heard rumors that Cornell was struggling with substance use. "It was a shock," he remembers. "Given what had happened with Kurt … I couldn't believe it." He wanted to reach out, but Cornell no longer lived in Seattle. By the time the band reformed in 2010, Cornell's substance use was behind him. They cut a sixth album, King Animal, and "had definitely refound our groove," Thayil writes. Unbeknownst to his bandmates, Cornell was still fighting depression. After a show at Detroit's Fox Theatre in May 2017, he took his life in his hotel room.

The loss still devastates Thayil. "I could never have anticipated the vacuum, the absence, and how profound it is," he says. "The loss is not just in missing the companionship, the creative partnership, and everything I learned from him. I also miss that sense of duty, as a big brother, to protect him. I still feel that sense of 'What could I have done?'" He's had to recognize his own mortality, his vulnerability, his impotence. "You can't save everything you love. Perhaps you can't even save yourself." Thayil now possesses nine unfinished Soundgarden tracks that Cornell had completed vocals on before his death. The band is still working on them, though without a record label to finance the project, progress is slow. But Thayil says he's up to the job. "I always take responsibility for the things I love," he says. "And I can't imagine ever not loving Soundgarden."