Soundgarden Vs. History, by Paul Shirley

There are plenty of angles I could take in a discussion of Lollapalooza 2010.

I could write about the bands I discovered:  The Soft Pack, which played rock ‘n roll that John Fogerty would be proud of; Semi-Precious Weapons, whose lead singer gay-shocked his way into my heart; Band of Heathens, which oozed cards, heartbreak, and whiskey.

I could write about bands I already knew, but was thrilled to see live:  The Drive-By Truckers, who almost convinced me to move to Alabama and become an alcoholic; Cut/Copy, whose members almost convinced me that I need to dance every day; Cypress Hill, which almost convinced me that it was 1992.

I could write about the weather (hot), the person-per square foot ratio (high), the port-a-potties (plentiful), the food (oddly enough, delicious), or the friends I got to see again (Canadians).

But for me, this year’s edition of Lollapalooza was about Soundgarden.

I’d like to write that I’ve wanted to watch Soundgarden from the moment their breakthrough album, Superunknown, arrived in the mail along with nine other not-as-edgy CDs from Columbia House.

But writing that I’ve wanted to see Soundgarden since 1994 wouldn’t really be true.  I’d never even been to a concert when Superunknown arrived in the mail.  I bought it mostly because I hoped my friends would think I was cool because it was cool.

Suspicions of a possible cool bump were confirmed several weeks later when I spent a Friday night at Jason Rogers’ house with three friends.  Never mind that “cool” was a very relative term; our night would be spent staying up late, drinking two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew, and playing Doom on Jason’s HP 486.

Despite my awareness that I was not cool, and despite the accompanying realization that if I wasn’t cool, my friends probably weren’t either, it felt good to hear, a week before the Night Of The Virgins, “Make sure you bring that Soundgarden CD!  I don’t have it yet.”

In preparation, I familiarized myself with the album.  After all, I couldn’t just show up and not know that “Superunknown” was also the name of track five.  I set about trying to understand the dark and dirgy music that dominates Superunknown’s 74 minutes.   To this day, I think “My Wave” is my favorite Soundgarden song because it was the first song I could remember “discovering” on an album I owned.

The video game party came and went.  And, afterward, even though I’d liked what I’d heard in my cursory aural examination, Superunknown went onto the shelf, where it waited for me to shrug off the chains of U2 and Duran Duran.

Before I could return to my musical Velveteen Rabbit, Soundgarden broke up.

In college, I came back to Chris Cornell and his band of not-so-merry musicmakers.   At first, I listened to Superunknown to remind me of more innocent days.  But soon, I was listening to the album once a month.  Every time I did, I found something new and exciting.  It was perfect for when I needed something dark, and it was perfect for when I needed something ligh…okay, it was mostly perfect for when I needed something dark.  I needed dark a lot in those days.

Soundgarden stayed broken up and, even as I learned to appreciate the rest of their catalog, I assumed I’d never get to see them live.

My excitement was Sen-Dog high, then, when – because of a connection I’d made months before – I escorted my girlfriend into Chicago’s Vic Theater on the night before Lollapalooza 2010 to watch Soundgarden play a special pre-festival showcase for a crowd of only 1500.

The band took the stage with a grim, businesslike air, to applause that wasn’t as wild as I thought it would be.  I chalked the reserved reaction to the audience’s makeup – mostly industry types – and hoped it wasn’t because everyone knew something I didn’t.

Someone once wrote – or said, I can’t remember – that Chris Cornell was the least-talented member of Soundgarden.  I’d always scoffed at the quote; I couldn’t imagine how anyone could think that a man with a voice like his could be the least talented in any group of four people.

When Soundgarden’s show started, something hopeful drained from my torso to my shoes.  That someone had been right.  The audience had been right.  Cornell was ruining the show.  His apathy was evident in his body language; he didn’t care about the songs he was playing any more than I do about soybean futures.  He looked like he would rather have been breaking rocks in a 30’s prison.

And then there was his outfit.  His skater pants and long hair made him look less like Chris Cornell, returned to save rock ‘n roll, and more like Chris Cornell, returned to dress up like Chris Cornell.

His voice wasn’t bad, or shot, or disappointing.  It still warranted its place alongside “blistering,” “powerful,” and “epic” in Google searches spent trying to find the best way to describe it.

The problem was that he didn’t know how to use it.  When the song needed restraint, he wailed.  When it needed power, he backed off.  For the first half of the show, Soundgarden looked a lot like the Toronto Raptors, circa 2003.  One guy was making all the wrong moves, and no one else was quite sure why.

Eventually, thank (Jesus) Christ (Pose), Cornell settled down and I was able to put to bed fears that I was going to have to tell my host that I hadn’t enjoyed myself.  By the encore, which featured the darkest, bleakest Soundgarden song there is – “4^th of July” – I had decided that the band had, for the most part, salvaged the show.  Matt Cameron’s drumming was as breathtaking as the Paris skyline that Ellen Page bends to her will in Inception, and Kim Thayil’s way with the guitar was so casual and sure that I thought for a second he was working with a backing track.  (He wasn’t.)

When we left, I told the friend who’d gotten us in what I thought: that Chris Cornell had come close to wrecking the set, but that the talent of his bandmates had saved the night.

After three days of heat and blisters and 16-ounce Budweisers, and given plenty of time to analyze what I saw, my off-the-cuff analysis still rings true.  Soundgarden isn’t great because of Chris Cornell; Soundgarden is great in spite of Chris Cornell, which is a bizarre thing to write about a band with a singer with a voice like his.  His attitude toward the crowd and toward his bandmates didn’t help my impression of him, but it did help explain why Soundgarden didn’t stick together, and why they probably won’t survive a lengthy reunion tour.  As far as I could tell – and I was paying pretty close attention – the members of Soundgarden don’t like Chris Cornell any more than Morris Peterson liked Vince Carter back in 2003.  It isn’t much fun to play with a guy who doesn’t like you.

I’m glad I got to see Soundgarden up close.  If nothing else, doing so saved me from having to brave the masses on Sunday night, when Soundgarden played their “real” Lollapalooza show in front of 50,000 people.  Instead, I walked to the opposite end of Grant Park to watch (and enjoy) Arcade Fire with my Canadian friends.

More important, seeing Soundgarden reminded me that it’s easy to twist the past – to revise our own histories. It’s fun to remember the good parts of our lives and then, to forget the bad parts.  It’s fun for me to think my high school days were exciting, carefree, and pleasant, and that I was happy playing Doom until 3 AM on a Friday night.

But in truth, my high school days were miserable, unsettling, and terrifying.

I wanted Soundgarden to be good for the same reason that I try to romanticize that dorky Friday night from high school.  The truth is: that night only seems great in retrospect.  At the time, the fact that I was spending a Friday night playing video games was depressing.  I was likely mad as hell that I hadn’t had the nerve to ask Kyla Krull to a movie.  Only now do I look back fondly at such innocence.

Soundgarden is a good band that made one great album, couldn’t handle the stresses of life on the road or the stresses of Chris Cornell, and broke up because of it.  They probably won’t come back and save rock ‘n roll, because they probably aren’t capable of doing that.

But hope springs eternal, as they say.  There will be more bands to engender my excitement – to make me feel cool again.  And while I recognize that I may make mistakes when it comes to overrating the bands of my past, I hope I’ll never lose the ability to remain optimistic about the bands of my future.

So long live The Soft Pack.  And Band Of Heathens.  And Warpaint.  And Semi-Precious Weapons.  Better yet, long live my impressions of those bands.  Because, by 2020, I’ll be telling people how they missed the show of the decade because they didn’t see one of them play at 12:30 on Saturday afternoon on the Budweiser Stage at Lollapalooza 2010.

In some ways, I won’t be wrong.

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