Kim Thayil has always felt like an outsider. For example: the Soundgarden guitarist has lived in Seattle, a city infamously addicted to coffee, for more than four decades, but only started drinking the stuff himself during lockdown. “I was pretty against-the-grain to my Seattle friends, who always wanted to meet up at coffee shops,” he grins, cradling a freshly brewed cup of java in his kitchen. “My girlfriend in the 80s and 90s even worked at the original branch of Starbucks and made coffee with a French press every morning. But I drank tea, because my parents are Indian.”
Thayil and Yamamoto hailed from Park Forest, a suburb of Chicago. “We grew up as immigrants and outsiders,” Thayil says. “I was raised on American culture: the Monkees and the Brady Bunch and Superman comics. But there was this distance – I wasn’t necessarily a member of this club.” This distance wasn’t entirely a bad thing, especially when he got into weird, heavy music. “I had no obligations to these subcultures I was not a member of. I could explore, without expectation, with no canon I had to adhere to.”
Thayil’s gateway to heavy rock was Kiss, but the hair metal that dominated the 80s was, he says, “the Partridge Family, but with a fuzzbox: hopelessly suburban, white and milquetoast. I was a skinny, long-haired brown guy, and the idea of all that spandex and hairspray and makeup …” He tugs at his grey beard and grins. “This was not a fitting palette for that kind of display.”
Thayil’s Indian heritage also set him apart from his peers. In his new memoir, A Screaming Life, he writes that when he and bassist Hiro Yamamoto formed Soundgarden in 1984, the group was “two-thirds Asian”, and that “as liberal and accepting as the punk scene was, it was still largely white, and I was ever aware of that”. Nevertheless, Soundgarden went on to become pioneers of Seattle’s grunge movement, a multiplatinum-selling, critically acclaimed, Grammy-winning group whose breakthrough hit, Black Hole Sun, transcended their gnarly milieu to become an enduring anthem.
