Soundwave Festival at Melbourne by Rolling Stone

Kim’s first band was called Identity Crisis out of Forest Park, Chicago in 1980.

Drums – Joe Zake
Bass – John Pavitt
Guitar – Kim Thayil
Producer – Andrew Clark*, Identity Crisis (3), Marc Gitterle, Robert Conte
Vocals – John Ross

As best as anyone can tell, the seeds that would eventually become Soundgarden were sown in 1981, when Kim Thayil and Hiro Yamamoto (who would serve as the band's bassist until 1988), living in Park Forest, Illinois, and having kicked around in local bands for a few years, graduated from Rich East, an alternative high school. Wanting to continue their educations in a similar manner, the two set out for Olympia, Washington, planning to enroll at the progressive Evergreen State College. Unable to find jobs once they got to Olympia, and admiring the crop of bands that had sprung up in Seattle, where Thayil had lived until the age of five, they moved there instead. Thayil enrolled at the University of Washington, where he eventually earned a degree in philosophy.

Probably the earliest incarnation of Soundgarden was a short-lived cover band called The Shemps, which was founded by Thayil's roommate, a guitarist named Matt Dentino. Chris Cornell, then nineteen, had started as a drummer, but he wanted more musical input than drummers were typically allowed. "I always figured I would just end up being such a good drummer that the best band in the world would ask me to be in it," says Cornell. "I guess I lost that attitude pretty quick." Deciding to try singing, Cornell answered Dentino's vocalist-wanted ad. When Cornell joined the Shemps, Yamamoto was playing bass; he subsequently quit and was replaced by Thayil.

"When I met Chris," says Thayil, "my first impression was that he was some guy who just got out of the navy or something. He had short hair and dressed real slick. He had a great voice -- even though we were doing shitty material." As Thayil tells it, Dentino was "obsessed with people who died," and the Shemps' repertoire consisted almost entirely of Doors, Hendrix, Otis Redding, and Buddy Holly tunes. Their only original was a snappy Dentino composition called "Marilyn Monroe" ("We're all looking for Marilyn Monroe/She's just a girl that I could go for . . .").

Cornell and Thayil often crossed paths with Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd around this time. Cameron was drumming in a band called Feedback, which would eventually evolve into Skin Yard, and Shepherd was the guitarist for a local hardcore outfit called March of Crimes. That band's biggest claim to fame, says Shepherd, was a tape that sold a few copies in Finland. "And," he adds, "we got to meet Jello Biafra [of the Dead Kennedys] because he liked our name."

By 1984, the Shemps were history, and Cornell, looking to get away from a flaky roommate, had moved in with Yamamoto. "I was a drummer, and he was a bass player," says Cornell, "so it was sort of like the law that we had to start a band." After jamming around with some guitarists, the two invited Thayil into the fold. Christening themselves Soundgarden after a pipe sculpture in Seattle's Sand Point that makes unearthly howling noises in the wind (check out a great illustration of "discovery" of the Sound Garden, scanned from a comic book), the trio began gigging, Cornell doubling on drums and vocals. The band's first show was with a New York band called Three Teens Kill Four; its second was with the Melvins and Husker Du. For sources and more information on the beginnings of Soundgarden, including drummers and bassists, click here.

It’s safe to say that Kim was the first to plants the seeds of Soundgarden, making him a founding father of this band we love so much. Here are the songs Kim played a heavy role in, including other collaborations he has done with various bands and projects:

“It’s a name that conjures up powerful visual images, although at one point we thought it might be too soft! But there was something about the name that we liked. One of our hopes is that people come to see us thinking they’re gonna get something pretty, and then get their heads blown off and walk away feeling like they got more than they expected!”

— Kim on naming the band Soundgarden

UltramegaOK (1988)

Nominated for a Grammy, Ultramega OK is the only album that Soundgarden recorded for SST Records -- it spawned the Flower EP, which contains the bonus track, "Toybox."

· FLOWER
Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©1988 Loud Love Publishing (ASCAP)

"This song marks the first time I ever blew on a guitar. I put the guitar down on the ground near the amp to get a humming feedback, as opposed to a squealy one, and blew across the strings in rhythm with the drums. There's probably some obscure Mississippi blues guitarist like 'Blind Lemon Pledge' who's done that before, but 'Flower' is the first time any rock band had recorded the sound of someone blowing across the strings. It sounds like a sitar." -Kim Thayil

· ALL YOUR LIES
Music: Thayil, Yamamoto; Lyrics: Cornell
©1988 Loud Love Publishing (ASCAP)

"That song is very industrial sounding. I love the solo; it's wild and loose. We did a backward guitar intro, which gives the song a nice sweep. Chris wrote 'Beyond the Wheel,' recorded it on a four-track, and brought us the demo. We thought it was a great trippy, heavy song. But Chris thought there was something missing from the middle section. He asked me if there was some kind of drone thing I could do to fill it up. I came up with that part that goes beeoop beeoop, which gives the song great dynamics. That solo is one of my favorite things I've ever done, and one of the best Soundgarden solos." -Kim Thayil on Beyond the Wheel

· CIRCLE OF POWER
Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Yamamoto
©1988 Loud Love Publishing (ASCAP)

· INCESSANT MACE
Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©1988 Loud Love Publishing (ASCAP)

“Originally “Two Minutes of Silence,” Soundgarden cut out Yoko Ono’s part. When asked why they included it on the album, the band members had typically witty replies:
Hiro: “We had a minute to fill on the record.”
Chris: “We appreciated the Lennon arrangement so much.”
Kim: “We thought it was so good, we could add a little something to it. It’s the heavy metal version.”
Chris: “The real deciding factor was that we knew there wouldn’t be any publishing problems because you can’t copyright silence.”

— Soundgarden on One Minute of Silence

"I play guitar because I like to make loud noises. And the guitar is the coolest way to make a loud noise." - Kim Thayil

Louder Than Love (1989)

Rumored to have been originally titled Louder Than Fuck or Louder Than Meat. It was released as a US promo-only picture disc without a picture sleeve or insert on 12 July 1989. A limited number were released on red, green, and yellow vinyl, with the green vinyl being the rarest of all Soundgarden releases: there are only 250 copies of it. All vinyl issues of Louder Than Love are pressed on audiophile-grade vinyl with Direct Metal Mastering, something that was not openly advertised by A&M. This was Soundgarden's last album with bassist Hiro Yamamoto.

· HANDS ALL OVER

Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©1989 Loud Love Music (ASCAP)

“The video for that song was one of the lamest ever made. It really sucked. What I liked about the song was that it was just one simple riff — one note, one chord — but with a lot of dynamics. In some ways it’s simple and basic; in other ways, it’s very sophisticated in how it was layered. We don’t really have many songs that are like ‘Hands All Over.’”

— -Kim Thayil

· GET ON THE SNAKE
Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©1989 Loud Love Music (ASCAP)

“In ‘Get on the Snake,’ we developed a great riff, but it turned out to be in 9/4 time. You can’t dance to it, but it sort of sneaks up on you anyway.”

— Kim on the song Get on the Snake

“The intro was a feedback melody. Many people think we used an E-bow. I’ve seen transcriptions that have said to use an E-bow. The truth is, I’ve never even seen an E-bow. I simply stood in front of the amp, got the note ringing until it was feeding back, and slid my finger up the fret on the string and dragged the feedback with it.”

— Kim Thayil on song Loud Love

1989 Montreal“We're sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll without the sex and drugs.” — Kim Thayil — 1989 Montreal
“We're sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll without the sex and drugs.” — Kim Thayil

“Hiro, our bass player at the time, hated that song. He thought it was obnoxious butt rock, a total rock’n’roll cliche. We tried to explain to him that the song was making fun of butt rock. We were fed up with bands beating about the bush, just using euphemisms and metaphors for the sex act. We thought we’ll ditch all the euphemisms and say what all the disco dance bands had been trying to say for a decade. We were simply trying to kick all the lame-ass rock’n’roll and dance music of the ‘80s and late ‘70s in the butt. It’s a parody of the whole genre of stupid rock.”

— Kim Thayil on Big Dumb Sex

“The thing about this song that’s so distinct is that the tempo starts off slow and gradually speeds up, but it doesn’t walk up steps or come to sections that are faster. It just speeds up until it culminates in a big jack-off guitar solo. Then it slows down again. It’s a fun song to do live because Matt [Cameron, drummer] always speeds up way too fast. Faster than we can play.””

— Kim Thayil on the song Gun

"Sometimes I can hear the audience more than I can hear Chris who's standing right next to me. We also get to see how each different city chants Soundgarden -- the fateful three-syllable band. In Florida, they just go, 'Garden, Garden.' In Germany, … — "Sometimes I can hear the audience more than I can hear Chris who's standing right next to me. We also get to see how each different city chants Soundgarden -- the fateful three-syllable band. In Florida, they just go, 'Garden, Garden.' In Germany, they stress each syllable with equal ferocity. In Britain, they just go 'Mud-hon-ey.'" -Kim Thayil

Screaming Life/Fopp (1990)

A Sub Pop reissue on CD and cassette that includes Soundgarden's first two EPs, Screaming Life and Fopp. While the combined reissue is widely available, copies of the two EPs on vinyl are extremely rare and go for large sums of money, especially those on colored vinyl.

· HUNTED DOWN
Music: Kim Thayil; Lyrics: Chris Cornell
©1990 Loud Love (ASCAP)

“That song wasn’t supposed to be as heavy sounding as it turned out. We just started jamming on the riff and it took on the ‘noise rock’ dimensions, kind of a rhythmic thing. And that solo is a noise solo. It’s very dissonant. That song was also the first song on the Sub Pop “hold” music tape. You would call them up, and when they put you on hold you heard ‘Hunted Down.’”

— Kim Thayil

· ENTERING
©1990 Loud Love (ASCAP)

· TEARS TO FORGET
Music: Kim Thayil, Hiro Yamamoto; Lyrics: Hiro Yamamoto
©1990 Loud Love (ASCAP)

· NOTHING TO SAY
Music: Kim Thayil; Lyrics: Chris Cornell
©1990 Loud Love (ASCAP)

“This song was originally from an unsigned-band compilation tape made by a KCMU disc jockey. It was called Bands That Will Make Money — it had a little piggy bank on the cover and was distributed to all the record companies. Labels started calling us when they heard the song. I was working at Seattle Filmworks along with Mark Arm from Mudhoney, Bruce Fairweather from Mother Love Bone, and Owen Wright from My Sister’s Machine. I got this phone call while I was doing some splicing and it was Chris. He said, ‘You’re not going to believe this — A&M called!.’ The rest is history.”

— Kim Thayil

· LITTLE JOE
Music: Kim Thayil; Lyrics: Chris Cornell
©1990 Loud Love (ASCAP)

· HAND OF GOD
Music: Kim Thayil; Lyrics: Chris Cornell
©1990 Loud Love (ASCAP)

· KINGDOM OF COME
©1990 Loud Love (ASCAP)

· SWALLOW MY PRIDE
© Better Than Your Music (BMI)

Badmotorfinger (1991)

“The tuning on that song was pretty nutty. It’s recorded with a wah wah in the low position used as a filter. That was the first time we did anything like that. It was Chris’ idea; he wanted to get that weird tone that you can’t really dial in on an amp. But if you use the wah wah as a filter, it gets an incredibly weird sound. And if you listen to that riff, especially if you’ve heard the original demos of it, it almost sounds backward.”

— Kim Thayil on Rusty Cage

“That’s the second song we did where I blow on the guitar. I’d do it live and people would think I was playing with my tongue or my teeth or my beard. ‘Hey look, he’s playing guitar with his beard!’ No, I was blowing on it — making a wish!”

— Kim Thayil on Slaves and Bulldozers

· JESUS CHRIST POSE
Music: Cameron, Shepherd, Thayil, Cornell; Lyrics: Cornell
©1991 Walpurgis Night Music/Noyes/In One Ear And Out Your Mother Music/You Make Me Sick I Make Music (ASCAP)

“That was our first single off Badmotorfinger, but it never got any airplay because of the references to Jesus. And MTV wouldn’t play the video because they didn’t like the idea of a girl on the cross. There are no guitars in the video at all. There’s not even a picture of a guitar in the video. It’s like this hard, rock-fast, punk-metal video that has no instruments in the whole thing. And it’s a six minute video! The song’s groove reminds me of helicopter blades. I bent the strings at the beginning and end of the song. That’s all I remember.”

— Kim Thayil

· ROOM A THOUSAND YEARS WIDE
Music: Cameron; Lyrics: Thayil
©1990 Walpurgis Night Music/In One Ear And Out Your Mother Music (ASCAP)

· NEW DAMAGE
Music: Thayil, Cameron; Lyrics: Cornell
©1991 Walpurgis Night Music/In One Ear And Out Your Mother Music/You Make Me Sick I Make Music (ASCAP)

I think one of the reasons we're considered so macho is because we're unavailable.” - Kim Thayil in Spin Magazine, 1994 Photo: Photo by Ross Halfin

Superunknown (1994)

· MY WAVE
Music: Cornell, Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©1994 You Make Me Sick I Make Music/In One Ear and Out Your Mother Music

· SUPERUNKNOWN
Music: Thayil, Cornell; Lyrics: Cornell
©1994 Noyes/You Make Me Sick I Make Music/In One Ear and Out Your Mother Music (ASCAP)

· LIMO WRECK
Music: Cameron, Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©1994 You Make Me Sick I Make Music/Walpurgis Night Music/In One Ear and Out Your Mother Music (ASCAP)

“It’s a riff Matt wrote and I like it because it’s so creepy, I don’t even know how to describe it. The song has amazing depth and emotion. It’s very dark, but at the same time, very powerful and angry.”

— Kim Thayil

· KICKSTAND
Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©1994 You Make Me Sick I Make Music/In One Ear and Out Your Mother Music (ASCAP)

· NEVER THE MACHINE FOREVER
Music & Lyrics: Thayil
©1996 In One Ear And Out Your Mother (ASCAP)

“Kim Thayil wrote “Never The Machine Forever” about a “life and death struggle,” ”

— KERRANG! magazine.

“ Collaboration was paramount in our early music, especially right at the beginning when it was me on guitar, Hiro on bass and Chris on drums,” but eventually all four members became songwriters of their own, “all writing guitar parts that I had to learn.” This led him to do “Never the Machine Forever” all on his own, as Thayil thought “Well, if I’m going to have a song on this fucking record, I’m going to have to write lyrics.””

— Kim Thayil

Telephantasm (2010):

· BLACK RAIN
Music: Shepherd, Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©2010 A&M

King Animal (2012)

· NON-STATE ACTOR
Music: Shepherd; Lyrics: Thayil, Cornell
©2012 Republic Records

· BY CROOKED STEPS
Music: Cameron, Shepherd, Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©2012 Republic Records

· A THOUSAND DAYS BEFORE
Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©2012 Republic Records

· BLOOD ON THE VALLEY FLOOR
Music: Thayil; Lyrics: Cornell
©2012 Republic Records

Echo of Miles: Scattered Tracks Across the Path (2014)

Soundgarden | Denver 2011

Kim Thayil with Dark Load- Brewicide (1996): Kim Thayil ventured into a few side projects while still in Soundgarden in the mid 90s. One of them is playing in some sort of a supergroup called Dark Load. Not much is known, but eventually Kim decided to stick with Soundgarden. There's rumor of a 2nd song he recorded with Dark Load, not much info on that either.

After the 1997 breakup of Soundgarden, Thayil went on to contribute guitar to work by Pigeonhed and Presidents of the United States of America.

Johnny Cash - "Time Of The Preacher" (Feat: Sean Kinney, Kim Thayil & Krist Novoselic) From: "Twisted Willie: A Tribute To Willie Nelson" 1996.

Soundgarden | Jones Beach 2011

No WTO Combo (2000)

Live from the Battle in Seattle (2000)
The No WTO Combo was a one-shot punk rock band started by Krist Novoselic (former Nirvana bassist). The band consisted of Jello Biafra (former frontman of Dead Kennedys); guitarist Kim Thayil of Soundgarden; and the rhythm section of Sweet 75, with Gina Mainwal on drums and Novoselic on bass.

V.O.G. by Ascend

Thayil also plays lead guitar on a track called "V.O.G." by Ascend, which features Gentry Densley (Iceburn, Eagle Twin) and Greg Anderson (Sunn O))), Engine Kid, Goatsnake). Ascend's record, titled Ample Fire Within, was released in 2008 by Southern Lord Records.

Probot (2004)

Probot was a heavy metal side project of ex-Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters rhythm guitarist and lead-singer Dave Grohl. Described by Grohl as "a death metal Supernatural," the album mixes instrumentals recorded by Grohl himself with various metal singers whom the musician admired. The album was released in February 2004 by Southern Lord Records. It featured one single entitled "Centuries of Sin"/"The Emerald Law".

Probot (2004)

Sunn O))) and Boris (2006)

American experimental metal band from Seattle, Washington that formed in 1998. The band is known for an extremely heavy sound that blends diverse genres including drone, black metal, dark ambient, and noise rock, and for very loud live performances. Supported by a varying cast of collaborators, the band was formed by two core members: Stephen O'Malley (also of Khanate and Burning Witch) and Greg Anderson (of Goatsnake and Engine Kid).

Altar (2006)

Alice in Chains & Kim Thayil - "It Ain't Like That" The Moore Theatre, Seattle, WA, May 16. 2006

Kim Thayil, Mark Arm, Tom Morello - Kick out the Jams @ Crocodile (2010)

A Storm of Light

Appropriately, the heavy, doomy, truly lighter-lifting 9-song collection includes Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil on two tracks

Pearl Jam - Search & Destroy with Thayil, Turner & Arm - Safeco Field (August 10, 2018) (this was also done in 2013 with Pearl Jam)

Pearl Jam - Sonic Reducer with Kim Thayil & Steve Turner & Mark Arm - Safeco Field (August 10, 2018)

MC50- Kick out the Jams Tour (2018)

In May 2018, Wayne Kramer announced the MC50 tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Kick Out the Jams, with a line-up including himself, plus rock stalwarts Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron of Soundgarden, Brendan Canty of Fugazi, and Doug Pinnick of King's X, as well as Marcus Durant and Don Was.[21] Pinnick was eventually replaced by Faith No More bassist Billy Gould.