Soundgarden reunited after a 15-year hiatus.
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > october 25 > 2011
PHOTO BY DANNY CLINCH
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and reunions typically are last gasps for glory. They’re often short-lived, poorly received, quick grabs for cash. In the case of Soundgarden, the band needed help rescuing its library from more than a decade of neglect — from its out-of-print back catalog to getting T-shirts back into record stores, things you’d expect a band like Soundgarden to have available just about anywhere. “Band was gone, record company was gone, management was gone. There was nobody looking after the fact that we don’t have DVDs out, or a website,” says guitarist Kim Thayil. While Soundgarden’s contemporaries Pearl Jam and Nirvana received their respective “20th anniversary” reissues this year, Soundgarden — preceding both bands by several years and albums — is writing music again, together, for the first time in 15 years. Thayil’s been politely dodging adding his two cents to the Pearl Jam and Nirvana retrospective. After all, Badmotorfinger, released the same year as Pearl Jam’s Ten and Nirvana’s Nevermind, was Soundgarden’s third album — not exactly a freshman effort or a rookie in the same Seattle scene. “We’d been together since 1984. ‘Sorry, man, we’d already been together for seven years.’ We’d made four records, done a number of tours in the U.S. and Europe. So I kind of bowed out of some of those 20th PAGE 18
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