Album: Down on the Upside
Year: 1996
. . .
The fifth and final studio album of the initial phase of Soundgarden’s career, Down on the Upside, came out in the spring of 1996, and it’s one of those records that I associate with a specific place and time in my life. In this case, it was the transition from Art & Science, the first web digital agency I ever worked for, to the much larger and more stable Organic, where my first assignment was to build out a special 1996 Olympics website for a little shoe company in Portland called Nike.
Of course, in 1996, Nike was hardly “little,” having ridden Air Jordans and their clever TV ad campaigns to the very top of the athletic world, and I remember getting to fly up there for a tour of their campus and being more than a little impressed. Anyways, because that Olympics project had the hardest of hard deadlines — Carl Lewis was going to unveil it in 9:00AM Atlanta time the day of the Opening Ceremonies — I worked the longest hours that I ever had and will work for any company before or since. Lots of post-midnight drives back across the Bay Bridge that summer, and my weight ballooned because of bad food and no exercise.
Anyways, at Organic, you could listen to music two ways: there was a communal CD player that was wired to speakers spread out all over the floor, or you could plug your headphones into a music player. The former, of course, meant that you had to have enough confidence in your musical taste to share it with dozens of people who didn’t probably share your tastes, and the latter meant “leave me alone, I’m working.”
And that summer, as I honed my HTML skills to the best that they were ever going to get, I listened to Down on The Upside a lot. Both ways.
At the time, of course, I had no idea that Soundgarden would be broken up within a couple years, so I appreciated Down on The Upside as a continuation of the musical experimentation that marked Superunknown, but I didn’t like it quite as much, mostly because a lot of the pop hooks and psychedelia that were earmarks of Superunknown where nowhere to be found.
That said, the songs I loved from Down on the Upside, I really loved, like the full-tilt rager “Ty Cobb,” a collaboration between bassist Ben Shepherd and frontman Chris Cornell. Shepherd provided the punk rock speed music — a far cry from his eastern-influenced Superunknown songs like “Half” and “Head Down” — and Cornell provided the lyrics.
I’m sitting in a magic hat with smoke and mirrors
And tire-rubber fires watch me disappear, yeah
What made it slow you down sucking on a ball and chain
Another motherfucker down the drain, yeah
The first thing to know about “Ty Cobb” was that it wasn’t really written about Ty Cobb. Instead, when Cornell wrote the lyrics, he was just inhabiting a generalized pissed-off asshole. But Shepherd decided to title it after a specific pissed-off asshole, which completely tracks with the chorus.
Hard-headed fuck you all
Hard-headed fuck you all
Hard-headed fuck you all
Just add it up (to the hot rod death toll)
Hard-headed fuck you all
Hard-headed fuck you all
Hard-headed fuck you all
Just add it up (to the hot rod death toll)
The other cool thing about “Ty Cobb” was the off-beat instruments that colored the whole thing: mandolin and mandola. The former was played by Chris Cornell and the latter was played by Ben Shepherd, and they give “Ty Cobb” extra depth and extra frisson at the same time, making it enough of a standout track that it was released as one of the albums four singles. Though radio didn’t agree with me, as it didn’t get any airplay, the only one of their mid-90s singles to be completely rejected by radio. Which makes sense given the number of times Cornell sings “fuck you all” in the song.
“Ty Cobb”
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