fell on black days

The recently cut grass smelled so fresh today. You won’t smell the grass anymore. I woke up to news of your suicide this morning and now I’m typing this, hours later. I spent part of today in a medical center. It was a strange place to spend part of a day and the last few months have been the most difficult—in a long, meandering, endlessly exhausting way—of my adult life, and here today we have a story, a thing that has happened too fucking many times over the years.

You aren’t here anymore. But you left music. Beautiful, beautiful music.

Memories…listening to Badmotorfinger one afternoon in my Spokane apartment, smoking cigarettes and writing. The music carrying me along, giving me strength to pull words from a dark place still raw. It was sunny and hot. No one else was yet living in that apartment. I was tentatively sober (it wouldn’t last.) I was so inspired by the music! It propped me up, revitalized my bones. Made it ok to be alone. Several months later, in that same apartment, someone said I looked like you. But I didn’t. My goatee was stupid and I was ugly. You were beautiful though. You really were.

I stapled the cassette foldout from Louder than Love on my teenage bedroom wall to cover a hole I’d kicked in during a fit of anger one night. It stayed there until I left home for good. I’m sure it was probably burned, like many things after I left.

You produced Uncle Anesthesia, considered by most to be the worst Screaming Trees album. Yet I always liked it, and it led to Sweet Oblivion, to these ears the greatest rock record ever released. Perhaps it would never have existed without Uncle Anesthesia. For that alone it’s a gift. One that took me beyond these horizons.

Many more…Walla Walla Superunkown debates. Rainy Down on the Upside days. Trepidation when Soundgarden reunited…only to fall deeply in love with King Animal. Three years later, it’s still on regular rotation.

And then there was seeing Soundgarden live in 1994, a little over a month after Kurt killed himself. An emotional show, a beautiful show, and then you yelled “This one’s for KURT!” and played an absolutely devastating Head Down that set the whole place on fire. I was somewhere that made sense. This was my world. The rest of the world was already moving beyond it, and that was fine. Maybe it would revert back to me, to us, the ones there in the beginning for the music and not the fashion. Maybe it could be intimate again. Because it felt intimate, even in a huge sold out show. It felt personal. It was personal.

And magic can never be recaptured. I know that now. And the darkness always comes back around. That’s why we fight for the beauty, the light. Darkness is what most of the universe is made of. It never leaves, only recedes for a bit if we are lucky.

You killed yourself at 52. I’m 44. I tried to kill myself at 17. I like to think I learned to deal with the demons over the years. Your peers were younger when they killed themselves. I thought you’d survived. Made it through the crux. Maybe we never make it through that crux. It’s a reminder that I need to be vigilant. Not assume the work is ever done. Not assume things are ok.

Nirvana, Alice in Chains, (early) Pearl Jam—these bands wore their hearts on their sleeves. And fuck yes did that connect. Soundgarden were more inscrutable. They were every bit as dark, but the strange tunings and mess of styles and odd touches created something a bit distanced, but all the more overwhelming for it. Soundgarden were cosmic, a philosophical conversation with your best friend after a few beers. Yet I do not wish to imply there was no connection—there was. Very much so. It was a different connection, one that always felt more mature, more reasoned and more complex. Their music was dramatic, but they didn’t seem to be. The other bands revolved around volatile figures. Soundgarden weren’t a cult of personality. They were an entity. And when that entity frayed, they broke it apart rather than let it become a caricature. They didn’t come back until years later, when none of the stupid shit mattered anymore. When it really could just be about the music.

That’s what hurts. This is supposed to be the victory lap, dammit. No external pressures to carry any torches. Just tunes. Awesome tunes.

Goddammit.

It’s been three weeks since I bought the remastered Ultramega OK. Beautiful vinyl packaging, incredible sound, rediscovering this record has been a joy in a not particularly joyful spring. I was looking forward to more reissues, maybe finally getting Louder than Love on vinyl, the only one I don’t have on vinyl. Those reissues might still come, but now they will be weighed down with an unexpected sadness. The joy will still come through, but it will be tinged with sadness and regret.

And there was one great Audioslave song. Actually there were several pretty good ones, but Like a Stone, which is so overwhelmingly impossibly sad to me as I listen to it at this moment, seemed at the time to me an elegy of the raw excitement of Seattle music circa ’88-’92. Music, like all art, is about how you connect with it—the intention of the artist rarely, if ever, matters. Perhaps you wrote it about all the turmoil in your life at the time, perhaps you wrote it because of the way the sunlight caught dust motes one particular afternoon, perhaps you had no idea why you wrote it. But you wrote about lying on your deathbed in that song, and it’s so fucking sad to me now, because you never gave yourself a chance to lay on the deathbed.

Exit.

R.I.P. goddammit, R.I.P.