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In Guitar World’s exclusive excerpt from Kim Thayil’s memoir A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond, the guitarist discusses the tensions that surrounded the making of 1994 masterpiece Superunknown – and admits they’d been warned about what might happen…
Alive in the Superunknown
When I first heard Chris’s demo of Black Hole Sun, I didn’t like it. Well, I recognized it as a good song, just not a Soundgarden song. If it had been written within our first six or seven years, it might never have made it to a record, because it wasn’t the kind of song that would’ve been adopted and debuted live.
We collectively would’ve said, Oh, this is kind of a cool song, but I just can’t imagine plugging in the amp and whipping it out at the Ditto Tavern or at the Rainbow. It was not a song we would have riffed on or come up with in a rehearsal. So it likely would’ve been shelved.
I knew Black Hole Sun had potential, but it wasn’t in line with the band we had been. We were a band that wrote songs together, jammed and communicated with each other onstage, presenting music that resonated with the audience.
Black Hole Sun felt more like something Chris created alone with his tape deck. Though he understood he had to write something we would all like, it didn’t align with our live, jam-heavy roots. It was more assembled and crafted, which was becoming the trend for much of our new material, including what we wrote for Badmotorfinger.
Chris was doing a large part of the songwriting, but he was making decisions as a songwriter and engineer, more so than as a musician. He was writing more for the studio than the stage, and once the record was out, we’d be tasked with figuring out how to make them work onstage.
It was on one hand liberating in that it allowed us to expand the spectrum of material we could create and the songs that we were writing. So our body of work could move into areas our previous approach never touched on.
But it was also inhibiting in that it took our musicianship, which was both our relationship to our instruments and our relationship with each other in real time, and kind of put us in a small room (a studio) with the parameters already defined.
Though I eventually embraced Black Hole Sun as a great song, Chris understood that some of his ideas would be rejected, and thankfully, it didn’t discourage him. We all had sensitivities to rejection. If we put effort into something we believed in, it could hurt when the band didn’t like it. For me, it was tough to bring a song to the table only to hear it wasn’t liked, though we’d all faced that.
Chris, though prolific, learned not to take criticism personally and didn’t second-guess himself. He took risks without worrying about the band’s judgment or how the audience would react. If the band didn’t like it, fine – there were other songs. If they did, even better, because our best work would be what we all liked, and that’s what the audience would connect with.
When we went to record our follow-up to Badmotorfinger in 1993, Chris found a like-minded partner in producer Michael Beinhorn. After working with Terry Date on our previous albums, we wanted a change. Michael had worked with bands we respected (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soul Asylum, and some Seattle bands like Hammerbox and Love Battery), so we felt he’d understand our sound and wouldn’t radically alter our songs.
We liked the records he made. As always, we wanted someone who could capture good sounds and offer fresh ears – we didn’t need input on songwriting or arrangements, since we’d already rehearsed and preproduced most of the material. What we didn’t realize was that Michael’s approach was much more hands-on, using the studio itself as an instrument, much like Chris, crafting songs in the studio.
Michael could direct and mold Chris to accommodate his production ideas. He had a tougher time doing that with me
To a person, however, Michael’s approach – his Beinhorn-isms, that we eventually butted heads over – seemed to ultimately alienate all four of us. I can’t say that we weren’t warned, though. When word got out he was producing our next record, musician friends called us up and said, Hey, man, you might want to think twice about hiring this guy. In our arrogance, we thought, No, we know what we’re doing. We’re pretty strong-willed and assertive, and no-one’s gonna fuck with us. But it felt like to me that he did.
Michael seemed to operate under the notion that great art comes out of conflict and tension, and I often felt that he fomented this in various ways, by creating friction and conflict within the band and with him.
He would complain about the things I did and the way I did them, and he’d do the same with the rest of the band. He was also bad at eye contact. He’d chew on a straw and kind of look away while he was talking to you, which gave me the indication that he was bullshitting a lot.
Even the way he worked seemed inefficient and silly. It’s like, if you want to get to Vancouver, BC, from Seattle, you can just drive straight up Interstate 5 and you’re there. Or, you could drive east on Interstate 90 to Detroit, cross the border to Canada, drive the Trans-Canada Highway west, and end up in Vancouver, but that would be a circuitous, expensive, and time-consuming route.
I felt that Michael always took the circuitous, expensive, time-consuming route. It seemed like there was a way he felt comfortable doing things, and it didn’t jibe with the way that we wanted to do things. It was very difficult and contentious, and felt a little bit overdone and at times nitpicky. Every member of Soundgarden experienced it.
Matt turned up at the studio one day, and Michael had an excessive number of microphones set up on his relatively modest kit. It was outrageous. There were so many mics that they were impeding Matt’s access to his drums. He goes, “What the fuck is all this shit?” as he was trying to step over all the mic stands to get to his fucking drum throne.
I’ve never seen Matt that angry. He started walking around the drum kit pushing the extra mics out of his way. We ended up removing half the mics Michael put on Matt’s set, leaving just one for each drum.
Michael certainly understood things about music, but it was from the perspective of a keyboardist. He seemed oblivious as to the interests or needs of a guitarist, or at least to mine. Michael could work with Chris, because guitar wasn’t Chris’s voice yet; it wasn’t a way to express himself. To some degree, Chris was a tabula rasa and Michael could direct and mold him to accommodate his production ideas.
We were very happy with the album but its success came despite, not because of, the conflict with Michael
He had a tougher time doing that with me. I disagreed with how Michael wanted the guitar to sound and with his entire process. I knew my sound and how to achieve it with my equipment, but he spent, what I felt, was an excessive amount of time trying to dial in sounds I didn’t want, making me repeat takes endlessly.
It felt like a waste, and when it started impeding or getting in the way of my interest in playing guitar the way that I wanted to play it, I would say, “I don’t want to do that.”
Eventually, I snapped, flipped him off, grabbed my coat, and stormed out of the studio. As I walked to my van, he chased after me, lecturing me, but I flipped him off again and told him to “get Steve Vai” before driving home. That was the low point in my relationship with Michael. Ben had his own conflicts – either spitting at or throwing a mic at the control room window. Michael, though, was too scared of Ben to confront him.
Chris got so fed up with Michael’s interference that he ended up recording his own vocals. He kicked Michael out of the control room and said, “Just show me how to start, stop, and rewind the tape machine.” Michael showed him how to do that, and Chris insisted that Michael and lead engineer Jason Corsaro leave the room. He allowed the other engineer, Adam Kasper, to stay in case he needed something technical. It was hilarious.
I just don’t feel like Michael developed a relationship dynamic with us in a way that would get the best out of us. We did our best in spite of him, and sometimes by going against him. Let’s just say, it seemed to me that he didn’t make any friends in Soundgarden during the recording of Superunknown. None of us kept a relationship with him afterward.
The process was, in my opinion, unnecessarily difficult and frustrating, though the record itself turned out great. We were very happy with the album we made with Michael Beinhorn, but its success came despite, not because of, the conflict with Michael. And while it still sounds like us, there’s a different ambience, due to the production and mixing.
The biggest shift is probably Black Hole Sun, which feels more like a piano song played on guitar. The construction and arrangement were unlike tracks like Beyond the Wheel or Power Trip. But I wouldn’t say Superunknown was a huge departure – it has a different feel than Badmotorfinger, but it makes sense in the band’s growth and trajectory.
Having made Superunknown the way we did – very focused on what we could do in the studio regarding different sounds and effects – we kind of had to reinvent ourselves in order to present the songs to our fans. It seemed a little bit awkward, because it wasn’t natural for the kind of band I felt like we were and had been from the beginning.
I don’t think Chris understood that my guitar sound and style were my voice, and key to what made Soundgarden unique
We were no longer just being a rock band easily capable of delivering our new material as it appeared on the record. Now we had to adapt the material we created for the record to the kind of band we were live. Initially, though, Chris wanted to try to more closely represent the sounds on Superunknown.
He put a lot of time and energy into trying to replicate those tones and sounds. He went out and bought a bunch of digital rack-mounted effects and a pedal board that allowed him to click on and off preset effects. He worked with his guitar tech to design all the presets. I didn’t get this approach at all. It was antithetical to what we were about.
I thought, Fuck that. Why? That’s not natural. Something about that just felt like what the Electric Light Orchestra would do; it seemed wrong for Soundgarden. Rather than attempting to replicate what the songs sounded like in the studio, I felt like we should interpret them for our live sets.
I don’t think Chris understood that my guitar sound and style were my voice, and key to what made Soundgarden unique. Even though Chris played guitar, he wasn’t experienced enough for it to be his voice. His voice was, well, his voice. At that point, Chris used guitar mainly to record song ideas on his four-track or eight-track, so his understanding was more from an engineer’s perspective than a guitarist’s.
Before we went on tour to support Superunknown, he spent a lot of time preparing to replicate the studio sound onstage. I’d show up at rehearsal, and he’d have this elaborate digital foot pedal setup with preset effects for different songs. He’d switch between effects for Hands All Over or Loud Love, then kick on a roto vibe for the verse of Black Hole Sun and a Leslie cabinet for the chorus. It started to feel really corny.
My attitude toward all of this began to cause some friction. Chris would come in hours before rehearsal with his guitar tech to work out the presets, and when I’d turn up he’d say, “Aren’t you going to do any of this?” I already had more pedals than I needed, so why would I want to start using digital mounts? I’d be just getting further away from being a guitarist and I’d start becoming something else. I was not into that.
Chris may have taken that as a slap against what he was doing. I think he saw himself as doing work and the rest of us weren’t putting in as much effort. But we felt that he was trying to build something that we didn’t need, and that wasn’t us.
I admit, I didn’t want to change the nature of how I played and how I wanted a guitar to feel on my fingers, because that was the kind of guitarist I’d been for the last eighteen years. That was my voice. It wasn’t just what came out of the amp. It was what my fingers were doing on the fretboard. I saw no need to change, not even for Black Hole Sun.
- Excerpted from the book A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond by Kim Thayil. Copyright © 2026 by Kim Thayil. From William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
