(Credits: Press)
Sun 26 April 2026 20:00, UK
Chris Cornell wasn’t in the business to put together the same underground rock tunes for the rest of his life.
Even though Soundgarden were the last band to become famous out of the Big 4 of grunge, they were already being heralded as one of the greatest bands to come from the Northwest, especially with a voice that sounded like the second coming of Robert Plant whenever they played. But Cornell learned the hard way that if you want to reach people, you are going to have to go through a fair share of speedbumps along the way.
But when you look at the very beginning of Soundgarden, it was a mystery what they even were trying to do half the time. They liked the idea of making music that was heavier than what came out of Los Angeles, but the lion’s share of their songs didn’t seem commercial in the slightest at the beginning. No one was going to go for a single that had multiple time signature changes and had strange open tunings, but Cornell wasn’t about to compromise his sound, either.
The Seattle mainstays wanted to give the audience something they hadn’t heard before, but Ultramega OK is only a small facet of what they could do whenever they performed. Cornell’s voice is still there and sounding more feral than anything else, but even by the standards of grunge-rock production, this was a bit too rough around the edges for the frontman to come back to all that often.
The songs are definitely there, but even though ‘Beyond the Wheel’ could have been a long lost Black Sabbath song based on how it sounds, the whole album feels more like a demo recording than anything else. Cornell was still a fantastic vocalist, but he felt that the producer royally screwed them over when he heard the finished product and heard everything sounding like it was underwater.
The reverb on the record wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but compared to what they would be working on, Cornell felt that producer Drew Canulette wrecked the record before it even hit shelves, saying, “Production-wise, it didn’t really sound like us. We figured, ‘Okay, [Drew] was involved in making this live Black Flag record, so he can’t be a complete idiot about recording.’ But in my opinion he was a complete idiot about recording. We had done demos for Ultramega in Seattle with Jack Endino that sounded much better. And that’s the only time where I was really devastated by the fact that we kind of missed it.”
And, really, if you want that old-school Seattle sound, Endino is really the king of that genre. Endino knew the perfect way of getting songs to sound dirty and mean without being too harsh, but even if Ultramega OK was way too sloppy in Cornell’s mind, it did at least give them respect from people that thought that his Zeppelinesque voice was too mainstream for the rest of the Seattle scene.
If anything, the fact that the record sounded too sloppy may have forced them to go in the opposite direction a little too much. Louder Than Love sounds great with Terry Date behind the board, but compared to what the rest of Seattle was doing, making an album that sounded overtly metal wasn’t going to do them any favours with their hometown crowd that spit in the face of every hair band down South.
It’s hard to think of a debut that gets nominated for a Grammy as being a massive failure, but it was more about what it represented to Soundgarden. They were capable of doing so much better right out of the gate, and if they wanted the career that they eventually got, they were going to have to grow up a lot more once they walked into the studio a second time.
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