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Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 19th, 2017, 8:50 am
by The Swollen Goiter of God
One of my top five Soundgarden songs is "Pretty Noose." It's from Down on the Upside, their followup to Superunknown. It's kind of devastating to listen to now.



I spent most of the summer of '96 listening to Down on the Upside. I was away from home doing two different college prep programs through two different universities for most of that summer. (University of Alabama and Auburn University, for the curious. Both on faceless, alumni-sponsored fellowships. Because I was young and handsome and looked to be a promising enough scholar, on paper, for people to want to throw money at me. Boy, did I show those assholes.) I had a lot of alone time and spent the majority of it cycling through the fifteen or so CDs I owned.

I think Soundgarden performed on Saturday Night Live that summer, and I'm pretty sure Jim Carrey was the host. My dorm had a TV in the commons. I was pretty excited to see Soundgarden, but my TV-hogging male program colleagues were reluctant to be torn away from their Donkey Kong Country 2 game. I was able to get the females in the program excited enough about Jim Carrey hosting to convince them to convince the the TV-hogging males to let everybody watch Saturday Night Live. Imagine my frustration when the musical guest was introduced and the females told the males they could switch the input and play Donkey Kong Country 2 through the song.

It took some fancy footwork to convince the females that the males would get caught up in the game and that they'd potentially miss some Carrey. Everybody came away from the experience thinking I had a real hard on for Jim Carrey, but so be it.

I broke my toe that night, but that's a different story.

Also, I think it may have been a rerun. I'm pretty sure I missed the episode on its initial broadcast and was afraid I'd never get another chance to see it if I didn't see it then. You know, because the Internet was barely a thing at that time. For me, anyway.

* * *

The first line from "Blow Up the Outside World," also from Down on the Upside, is similarly devastating in retrospect:


Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 19th, 2017, 1:42 pm
by Dalty
Suicide? Awful, awful.

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 23rd, 2017, 7:33 am
by Dalty
Roger Moore died.

This one hit me right in the feels.

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 26th, 2017, 8:15 am
by The Swollen Goiter of God

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 26th, 2017, 8:48 am
by Dalty
If you ever read any of his autobios his warmth and genuine humour do come through.

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 28th, 2017, 3:25 pm
by Scotia
Dalty wrote: May 19th, 2017, 1:42 pm Suicide? Awful, awful.
The first movie I ever took my wife to was " Octopussy ". She hated the movie. But I got head that night. So......

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 29th, 2017, 9:26 pm
by Mal Shot First
The Swollen Goiter of God wrote: May 19th, 2017, 8:50 am One of my top five Soundgarden songs is "Pretty Noose." It's from Down on the Upside, their followup to Superunknown. It's kind of devastating to listen to now.

I spent most of the summer of '96 listening to Down on the Upside. I was away from home doing two different college prep programs through two different universities for most of that summer. (University of Alabama and Auburn University, for the curious. Both on faceless, alumni-sponsored fellowships. Because I was young and handsome and looked to be a promising enough scholar, on paper, for people to want to throw money at me. Boy, did I show those assholes.) I had a lot of alone time and spent the majority of it cycling through the fifteen or so CDs I owned.

I think Soundgarden performed on Saturday Night Live that summer, and I'm pretty sure Jim Carrey was the host. My dorm had a TV in the commons. I was pretty excited to see Soundgarden, but my TV-hogging male program colleagues were reluctant to be torn away from their Donkey Kong Country 2 game. I was able to get the females in the program excited enough about Jim Carrey hosting to convince them to convince the the TV-hogging males to let everybody watch Saturday Night Live. Imagine my frustration when the musical guest was introduced and the females told the males they could switch the input and play Donkey Kong Country 2 through the song.

It took some fancy footwork to convince the females that the males would get caught up in the game and that they'd potentially miss some Carrey. Everybody came away from the experience thinking I had a real hard on for Jim Carrey, but so be it.

I broke my toe that night, but that's a different story.

Also, I think it may have been a rerun. I'm pretty sure I missed the episode on its initial broadcast and was afraid I'd never get another chance to see it if I didn't see it then. You know, because the Internet was barely a thing at that time. For me, anyway.

* * *

The first line from "Blow Up the Outside World," also from Down on the Upside, is similarly devastating in retrospect:
I think it's kind of neat that I have a record of the first time that I heard a Soundgarden song. I imagine that for most people the first exposure to the band was through "Black Hole Sun," and that was also the case for me. Unfortunately, I had only caught snippets of it as I was surfing the radio waves sometime in 1996 and recording the session. In fact, I already shared an excerpt of that recording back on CCA2 (here) when I was talking about finally having figured out that a mystery song I had recorded two decades ago was a composition by Ennio Morricone entitled "Marcia Degli Accattoni." Well, if I extend the excerpt a bit on each side, you can hear bits and pieces of "Black Hole Sun," but the excerpt of the "Marcia Degli Accattoni" already starts out with the word "no-one" from the line "no-one sings like you anymore." Fortunately, it didn't take me nearly as long to figure out the source of these snippets as it did with the Morricone piece. I think I saw the video for the song on MTV or VIVA within a year or so of having recorded parts of it on the tape.

Once I really got into Soundgarden in my late teens, I thought it was unfortunate that some of their most recognizable songs aren't necessarily representative of their overall sound. One could argue, I suppose, that tracks like "Black Hole Sun," "Pretty Noose," and "Spoonman" stand out precisely because they're different from the rest, but that would potentially imply that the rest is not worth listening to. It also always struck me as odd how different "Black Hole Sun" was in comparison to other Soundgarden output. There's something about the guitar effect used in that song that sounds like music that would be produced by an insect-like alien race, and it's simultaneously creepy and awesome.

I know the band is usually assigned to the grunge scene, but it seems like a useless term when trying to describe a style of music since it includes bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam, all of which sound pretty different from each other. I'd describe Soundgarden's sound as predominantly heavy metal with a dose of blues. One song that exemplifies this style is "Overfloater," which is among my favorites.



Even though the lyrics are a bit enigmatic, it seems pretty clear that the song is about drug use. That's not the reason I like it, though. I like the way it builds layer upon layer. The riff starts out as a pretty straightforward, relatively clean melody - then the drums join in. By the time the first chorus is done, there's already distortion in the riff and it's played noticeably louder than before (a second guitar also joins in for support). Similarly, Cornell's voice builds in intensity as the song progresses. It's subdued during the first verse, but already by the second verse, there's more pressure in it (and more depth to it due to the track layering), and then it's all-out screaming by the first chorus. It calms down again slightly for the third verse but remains raspy and at a near-scream. The entire track then culminates in an explosion of all these elements in the final chorus before ending on a kind of lo-fi quiet "alone, alone, alone, alone." It all just comes together so beautifully.

Anyway, I was going to write primarily about Chris Cornell, but Goiter's post got me started about Soundgarden. Even though I didn't follow his career anymore after Audioslave, I was pretty crushed when I heard the news of his death. I didn't realize he meant that much to me as a musician, but he clearly left an impression with his unmistakable voice. It's also a bit weird that he had been part of my dream the night before I found out about his death. I don't think he had a major role in it (in fact, I don't even remember what the dream was about), but I woke up that morning having a vague recollection that Chris Cornell was in some way mentioned in it... and then I heard the news on the radio on my drive to work. Maybe that spooky coincidence is part of the reason his death affected me the way it did.

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 30th, 2017, 12:08 am
by The Swollen Goiter of God
I spent a lot of time listening to Cornell's Euphoria Morning during my year in Mannheim. It had some funk influences and some more blatant sixties experimental pop leanings than the majority of his stuff with Soundgarden. (It was always peeking out, even there. It's all over "Black Hole Sun," for an obvious example, and I always thought "I caught the moon today"--the opening line from "Pretty Noose"--was a reference to the opening line of "A Day in the Life." I was amused to discover, years and years later, that Cornell had done a live cover of "A Day in the Life." Again, though, like Mal says, Soundgarden's bigger singles don't necessary reflect the band's usual sound.)

I don't think it was that well liked, but I dug it. The big single was "Can't Change Me," but I remember listening the "Flutter Girl" and "Wave Goodbye" the most. I think I listened to "Steel Rain" a good bit, too. Here's the full album, with tracks timestamped on the YouTube page:



He's lookin' pretty Tony Stark on that cover.

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: May 31st, 2017, 4:37 am
by Dalty

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: June 5th, 2017, 11:02 am
by Dalty
Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) died.

http://news.sky.com/story/wallace-and-g ... 6-10905365

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: August 19th, 2017, 7:19 am
by Dalty
Sonny Landham died.

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: November 20th, 2017, 7:06 am
by The Swollen Goiter of God
Charles Manson died.

I feel blame. I feel like Wolf Kebab Roth Vantage.

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: November 21st, 2017, 2:50 am
by Dalty
Is that Gwyneth Paltrow’s third child?

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: November 21st, 2017, 6:02 am
by Mal Shot First
The Swollen Goiter of God wrote: November 20th, 2017, 7:06 am Charles Manson died.

I feel blame. I feel like Wolf Kebab Roth Vantage.
But you're not mad?

Re: Somebody tell Goiter.....

Posted: November 21st, 2017, 9:30 am
by The Swollen Goiter of God
I could probably go for a little bear ramage.