New oral history of Soundgarden’s Superunknown

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Somewhere between a man beating himself bloody with spoons and a producer ripping a door off its hinges, Soundgarden made the record they’d been waiting nine years to unleash. Already beloved in the Seattle rock scene, and reaping the benefits of their town’s early ’90s grunge celebrity alongside their friends Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the band’s previous album, 1991’s Badmotorfinger, had gone platinum and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance. They’d helped spur Sub Pop records on to greatness, hit the road with Guns N’ Roses, and commanded the mainstage of Lollapalooza.

But the band that so identified with muscular, pistoning hard-rock believed they were also capable of a deeper pop melodicism, of more nuanced anthems. By the summer of 1993, frontman and guitarist Chris Cornell, a longtime Beatles and Pink Floyd devotee, and bassist Ben Shepherd, a blithely experimental hand with tunings and dynamics, had begun crafting songs that would defy headbangers’ expectations. They recruited the producer Michael Beinhorn — who’d helmed releases by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Soul Asylum — to help realize their ambitions.

The six months of recording, engineering and mixing that went into Superunknown did not progress as in-step with that idealism. The band clashed constantly with Beinhorn — whose methodical repetition was at odds with their down-and-dirty recording habits — and all began to doubt the results. But their vindication would come, unsubtly, in the radio ubiquity of «Black Hole Sun,» two Grammy wins, and the enduring career the band had cemented for themselves as a result of the album’s success. Furthermore, the record handily dispelled any notion of Soundgarden being reductive metalheads: From the roiling surf-pop guitars of «My Wave,» to Cornell’s menacing, discomfiting vocal operatics on «Mailman,» to the tetchy, bluesy crawl of «Limo Wreck,» and the Gonzo nonchalance and psychedelic-pop agility of «Black Hole Sun,» Superunknown thrived in its eccentric outer limits.

Here, 20 years after the album’s release, is the story behind its creation from the people who were there, plus a Bill Nye the Science Guy cameo, because Seattle was pretty weird back then.

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