Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil recently sat down for an interview on the “Turned Out A Punk” podcast to discuss his upcoming memoir, “A Screaming Life: Into The Superunknown With Soundgarden And Beyond“. During the conversation, he reflected on the band’s early days signing with a major label, their connection to underground heavy music, and how executives initially tried to mold them into a mainstream pop-metal act.
When asked if the band was frustrated about being grouped into the metal category alongside acts like Metallica during the late 1980s, Thayil clarified that Soundgarden actually had a deep respect for the thrash and doom metal underground. The problem wasn’t the genre itself, but the label’s corporate approach to it.
“Well, we liked Metallica, but that was different. The thrash scene kind of had — they crossed over with the punk scene very, very much so, and it was independent, and it wasn’t as radio friendly or MTV oriented or pop oriented. We were already into Metal Church, and I was acquainted with Trouble and Exodus, so we had those records. As a atter of fact, it was Mark Arm, Mark from Mudhoney — back then it was pre-Green River, or around the time Green River and Soundgarden started — it was Mark who turned me on to… He brought [Metallica‘s debut album] Kill ‘Em All and [Exodus‘ debut album] Bonded By Blood over, and he’s turning me on to this. I remember him saying, ‘Listen how fast that is. That guitarist, he’s only, like, 17.’ [He was talking about] Kirk Hammett. And I remember it was Mark who — I don’t know how his collection got so big, ’cause he wasn’t DJing, but he turned me on to the Trouble albums and everything. So that aspect of metal was perfectly fine. On one hand you got this band that’s definitely on the metal scene like Trouble, then you got this band coming out of the punk rock indie scene like Saint Vitus. And they’re both kind of doom oriented. And there’s that element in what we’re doing. There’s definitely some stoner rock doom stuff that we impacted with that scene. We did a lot of different kinds of stuff,” he explained (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
The real friction happened behind the scenes at A&M Records. Thayil noted that major label representatives didn’t understand the independent scene Soundgarden came from and wanted to push them toward the highly lucrative, image-driven MTV pop-metal format.
“I think the problem was the major label maybe orienting things toward MTV. The people who work in major labels, they wanna get a little gold star on their lapel or their door, like, ‘Hey, we helped break this band or make this…’ They didn’t quite understand that we weren’t of that scene and we’re this separate thing. And really it was Nirvana‘s success that got that s**t off of our back. Thank you, Nirvana. And Nirvana wasn’t being promoted, ’cause everyone wanted to see what Soundgarden did,” he said.
Thayil revealed that he actually tried to convince A&M to sign Nirvana early on, but the label executives turned the idea down to avoid internal competition.
He continued: “I tried to talk our A&R guys at A&M into signing Nirvana. It’s, like, ‘Oh, we got this band. They’re like our little brothers. They’re coming up. They’re amazing. The singer’s great. Their songs are cool.’ They’re, like, ‘Well, why do we wanna sign them when we already got you? We don’t want two bands who are similar. And we wanna see what you guys do first before we…’ I thought, ‘Huh.’ But they were very frank about that. It’s, like, ‘Well, we don’t wanna sign Nirvana‘ because we might compete with each other. We’re kind of from the same scene…”
He went on to detail how the industry was hyper-focused on the glam metal formula, to the point where they likely considered replacing members of Soundgarden to fit the mold, hoping to capitalize on frontman Chris Cornell‘s marketability.
“And they don’t know what kind of success we may or may not have. But they knew what worked, and what worked was the stuff that was just the hugest thing in the world, and it was MTV and it was radio and it was that pop metal that, it had generally the glam look, so that was a way to sell it and package it, but the music was pretty much kind of pop with Van Halen guitar solos and fuzzy guitars. But if you take off the fuzzy guitars and the proficient tapping, you end up with basically pop songs, only pop songs about — I don’t know — cars and strippers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — I’m sure there’s cool stuff about cars and strippers — but the human experience does have a little bit more variety and depth to it. So that’s the thing that bothered us, was people’s inability and lack of insight or courage in taking risks in developing us as we were with an audience we’d already built through a number of tours in Europe and the U.S. on these indie labels. Why would you wanna steer us in the other direction? Oh, because it’s lucrative and it’s successful. And we did have — Chris [Cornell] is very good-looking, statuesque, and he could easily be marketed that way. ‘If he’d only do the spandex and heels and maybe put some blonde streaks in his hair and use some hairspray.’ But it wasn’t gonna happen. That wasn’t what Chris was about, and it wasn’t what the band was about. I think there probably was an interest in maybe doing that to help sell Soundgarden and break it. I do not doubt that there are probably some talks in the back rooms about, like, ‘If we could just get another bass player and guitarist that was more willing to play that, then we could package this and this could be huge.’ But fortunately, that didn’t happen. We had a manager who championed us, and each of us were championing each other,” he added.
Thayil pointed out that while major labels were busy chasing pop-metal trends, they were losing massive market share to independent labels that were fostering the real groundswell in rap, punk, and thrash.
“But that was it. They wanted to market us alongside a band like Metallica… By the way, before Metallica got huge, you had success from Faith No More, and then the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers started having success. Beastie Boys‘ Licensed To Ill was double platinum really quickly. So the labels were kind of looking around trying to figure out where to put their feet, and there may have been money in that pop metal thing, but there was other stuff happening. You had independent hip-hop labels that had platinum records, and you had some independent metal records, labels that were selling bands like Metallica and Megadeth. And you had SST, which with the success of Hüsker Dü and Minuteman and a lot of their bands, SST became a really powerful and wealthy label themselves. And this is all money that’s not going into the major label coffers. And I think they were aware of that. They ignored rap and punk and thrash for a long enough time that a good percentage of that record industry entertainment dollar was not going their way,” he concluded.
Thayil‘s book, “A Screaming Life: Into The Superunknown With Soundgarden And Beyond“, is scheduled for release on June 9, 2026, through the HarperCollins imprint William Morrow.
Last week, in an exclusive preview published by Rolling Stone, Thayil detailed the immediate aftermath of the show and his feelings regarding the late vocalist’s state of mind during that fateful tour.
“It was just before midnight when I, post-show, went upstairs to the green room to meet some of our guests — two Orioles players and members of Dennis Coffey’s band. I’d mentioned to Chris earlier that they were coming, hoping he might want to say hello, but he had already left the venue. Matt, Ben, and I stuck around, had some beers, and hung out. The night felt off, though. There was something different about it. Maybe I was still adjusting to Jerome [tour manager] being gone from the tour, or maybe it was the strange vibe Chris had been giving off.”
Despite sensing an underlying tension, Thayil noted that the band’s interpersonal dynamics had shifted over the years, leaving him unaware of the full extent of Chris Cornell‘s personal struggles and internal battles.
“I’d known Chris long enough to sense when something was amiss. It wasn’t just that he was tired—there was something deeper, though he didn’t feel comfortable opening up to me. We weren’t hanging out much during this tour. After sound check, we’d briefly talk about the set, songs we were writing, or ideas we were jamming on. But Chris traveled separately and lived on the East Coast, so we didn’t have much chance to connect outside the band. We’d been apart for years, between 1997 and 2009, and during that time, he’d remarried and moved away from Seattle. So I wasn’t fully in touch with what was going on in his personal life, his sobriety, or how he felt about his career.”
Drawing comparisons to his own past experiences with family members expressing suicidal ideation, Thayil emphasized that the singer never exhibited those specific warning signs to him. The sheer unpredictability of the tragedy made it profoundly difficult to process, especially considering the timing of the event decades into their career.
“Chris never made these kinds of statements to me. I never feared that Chris would harm himself in the way that my mom made me fear as a youth. He was the opposite of my mom. He wasn’t making these proclamations. He never did. Chris’s death and the manner in which he died were so unexpected. It seemed to me at the time to be so out of character in 2017. If Chris had done something like that when the band were younger in the late eighties or maybe even the mid-nineties, on the heels of the deaths of Andy Wood, Kurt Cobain, and Chris’s good friend Jeff Buckley, it might have made more sense. Decades later, at his age, and being a father, it seemed unfathomable. Not in 2017. Maybe in 1997.”
Reflecting on the heavy lyrical themes that defined Soundgarden‘s catalog, the guitarist admitted the pain of feeling like he missed crucial psychological indicators hidden within the music itself.
“I didn’t see it coming. The thing that hurts me the most is to be a close friend and colleague and not to have read things that perhaps, in retrospect, I should have read. That’s hurtful. I feel like I let Chris down by not seeing the look in his eyes, or not hearing a tone in his voice — not being able to read it. But it’s hard to read things like that, because you don’t get a lot of chances at it. You can only look in retrospect and go, Ah, here’s an indicator. There was nothing that was on my radar that I could read at that time. And then I looked at the paper trail and it was like f**k, the paper trail goes back to the beginning. His lyrics are just riddled with these kinds of introspective insights. Most of Soundgarden’s work sort of describes something less than sunshiney. That’s what I mean by ‘paper trail.’ This didn’t come out of the blue. I mean, I had conversations with Chris over the years about everything from love, or what is friendship, or death or suicide or the creative process. We were close enough in the early years that we talked about all these things. But talking about these topics wouldn’t necessarily raise alarms or concern. These were just conversations. We were a dark band, and Chris wrote dark lyrics that befit the music. If people think there was something overtly indicative in his words, then they have a crystal ball that I didn’t have.”
Currently, the surviving members of Soundgarden are working on a final album featuring previously unreleased vocal tracks recorded by Chris Cornell before his tragic death in 2017. Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron, and bassist Ben Shepherd have teamed up with producer Terry Date, who previously engineered the band’s classic records Louder Than Love (1989) and Badmotorfinger (1991).
In November 2025, Soundgarden was officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Performer category. The induction honored Thayil, Cameron, Cornell, Shepherd, and original bassist Hiro Yamamoto. During the ceremony, the surviving members performed a special set featuring guest vocals from Taylor Momsen and Brandi Carlile, along with appearances by Mike McCready of Pearl Jam and Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains.
