9/5/1989
La'ies and gen'lmen, A&M Records presents, the first grunge record on a major label! Herb Alpert, you magnificent bus stop! Sometimes I forget Terry Date produced records with good music on them!
"Ugly Truth"--Dion for Zappa, this. (What's that mean?) Unlikely opener. Hypnotic, regards be damned.
"Hands All Over"--AKA, "Full On Everyone's Mom." The first Soundgarden tune I ever heard is a plea to respect the Earth. Chris Cornell's voice is fit to prop up trees and mend ozone holes. To say nothing of Godzilla cheering him on. The bottom line is the same now as then: the planet is fucked.
"Gun"--Ideal if you're counting your daily steps. Oh yeah, guns were a problem then too. Man's primal urge to kill things with fake dicks will only die when man does.
"Power Trip"--Expose the frauds, then? Possesses little power, doesn't travel very far.
"Get On the Snake"--Not a sex metaphor. Phew.
Soundgarden played with time signatures more frequently than I played with my Snoopy Sno-Cone Maker. Unusually, the lyrics here are memorable: "cola-colored sky," "road-worthy, hungry and mean." Well, fragments of the lyrics are memorable. Ode to the road, snakes upon snakes, diet of eggs/hot dogs/root beer, sleeping with one eye open to save a buck. Eh, gimme the bus schedule.
"Full On Kevin's Mom"--Based on a true story! Here be the speediest Gonzalez, and beyond that--oh, and the merciless vapidity of the lyrics--I can't shake the sensation that Chris got it backwards. He should've sung the chorus in the style he sang the verse, and vice versa. Would that have improved "FOKM" any more than slightly? No, but slight improvements are still improvements.
"Loud Love"--Bully pulled from the pit and locked in the club basement. Cases of beer surround him…and all of them warm.
The siren…she calls me…she's a dude, with long hair and a swimmers build…I told her I preferred to text.
"I Awake"--Lyrics based on a letter to Hiro Yamamoto from his girlfriend, so of course they're gas-splashed trash. Still, kudos for enduring all those time signature shifts like a champ.
"No Way No Right"--Whoa, vortex. Jesus, lemme put a bra on first, won't'cha. I don't trust of the signs I see. Yield--to what? Stop--for who? One way--how you figure?
"Uncovered"--A call from a misplaced spirit. The difference between being sucked in and suckered in is in the quality of the questions asked.
"Big Dumb Sex"--Even the riffs are in on the joke. Hilariously sleazed-out (insistence makes a funny thing more so, almost always). Poison, Motley Crue, open up and swallow those cow hearts.
(Stone Temple Pilots would try a similar trick a few years later, only to fuck it up by shooting a video that undercut the ambiguity of the lyrics.)
Still, "Big Dumb Sex" got shit catapulted at it from all sides because of the title and blunder-headed chorus. I've never loved it, but compared to the likes of "Full On Kevin's Mom," this is downright Cohen-esque.
"Full On Kevin's Mom (Reprise)"--No one asked for this! Well, besides Kevin's mom.
What you say is not clearly not as vital as what you play; that's the Soundgarden way.
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