August 1990 CityHeat Cover

Soundgarden. Yeah! City Heat’s got ’em. Had to travel for it tho. You think these guys would make it easy for Seattle’s Music Magazine by granting an interview in Seattle? No way! So we motored down to Portland for their show with Alice In Chains at the Melody Lane Ballroom on July 25th. Okay, truth is we were stoked for the road trip and the killer double bill!

Getting dinner and a photo shoot behind them, we sat down with Kim, Chris and Ben to get the exclusive poop. What’s that? Ben who? you say? On their records you know Hiro Yamamoto was playing bass. Then after the release of Louder Than Love you heard about Jason Everman dropping six in Nirvana to play four in Soundgarden. Now, who’s this Ben chap of which we speak?

Briefly, 21 year old Ben Shepherd has lived and played on Bainbridge Island for the past 18 years. Some of you relics out there may remember him from the days of Gorilla Gardens and The Metropolis when he was in, what he termed, a melodic punk rock band called March Of Crimes. Laying low, he’s since sang, played nad wrote for a band (who shall remain nameless) that played a very few shows in island towns before its swift demise.
Then from out of his relative obscurity, he is suddenly an integral cog in the critically acclaimed machine that is Soundgarden. We asked Ben to tell us the whole story of his transformation into SG’s ‘politically correct’ bassist.

Soundgarden

Ben Shepherd: “Well, I’ve known Kim for a while, so he hunted me down and asked me to try out.”
City Heat: “Then what?”
BS: “Then they, ah………they fucked up (laughter all around).”
CH: “Like how?”
BS: “They took the wrong bass player.”
Chris Cornell: “Actually I had a dream, Ben. Did I tell you that? I had a dream I was in a room with your brother, apologizing to him for not choosing you in the first place. [Again addressing me] That was after we’d already chosen him.”

After Louder Than Love came out they held auditions for bass players. When Hiro decided to travel a different path it left the band in a lurch with not-a-lot of time to spend deliberating over a replacement.
BS: “I practiced or jammed with them a couple of times, I didn’t even know their songs worth a crap tho at all. But it was totally fun jamming with them. I hadn’t jammed with anyone for a while and it was flattering as fuck.”
CH: “Then what happened? You came in, jammed about a week….”
BS: “Not even a week, twice. Then Jason knew the songs better and they were in a really awkward bind at that time. They had the record out and needed to tour immediately, so they had to make a quick choice. So they chose Jason and the chemistry didn’t work.”
By the end of the tour they’d made up their minds to give the job to Ben.
CC: “We made the decision to play with Ben simultaneously with deciding that Jason wasn’t the right guy.”
Although both players had auditioned at the same time last year, member replacement is seldom easy and far from an exact science.
CC: “You can’t predict from a few meetings exactly what someone’s gonna be like and how they’re going to interact with the band. Mainly musically, but in most ways, we just didn’t click. It wasn’t anything necessarily ‘wrong’ with Jason. Band chemistry is really fragile so you can’t just make a choice and be one hundred percent correct.
CH: “So they got home and Kim called you up?” What did he say to you, ‘you’re on the team’?”
BS: “Actually Chris asked me. We were all looking at his little dog, hanging out at Chris’ place and he said, ‘Well, we were wondering what you’d think about playing with us?’. I just looked at my shoes real quick, ‘Fuck yeah!'”
So they had a few days to practice and after playing a couple opening numbers for Alice at the Lake City Concert Hall, were whisked off to Europe. The opening date of that tour happened to be the festival in Roskilde, Denmark.
CC: “His first actual show with us was in front of about 5,000 people.”
Karen Mason: “Was that a rush, first time going out?”
BS: “Well it was definitely a rush knowing my bass was plugged into a direct recording thing. That tripped me out ’cause the could hear every little sound.”
CC: “We were being recorded for broadcast by some radio station over there.”
After playing another big festival and a few more club dates, they’re back stateside and working up new material together. The band as a whole seems to gel well and all are contributing to the new songs. They’ve got a song on the soundtrack fro an upcoming movie and for those fortunate (intelligent?) enough to be members of Sub Pop’s Single of the Month Club, a tasty surprise.
The seven inch featuring H.I.V. Baby (produced by their sound man, Stuart Hallerman) will be available only to those elite peoples. But that’s not to say you may never find the tunes on a future full-length. Cornell likens Sheperd’s contribution (“H.I.V. Baby”) to a 90’s feeling “My Generation”.
CH: “What’s on the B-side?”
Kim Thayil: “Room A Thousand Years Wide.”
CH: “So you wrote H.I.V. Baby and play on both tracks?”
BS: “Yeah.”
CC: “Actually we were deciding between three songs that were his, but we have trouble with that kind of thing. If somebody writes for a movie or a single or something, a lot of times the songs will end up better than we’d expected and we want to save it for a record. So we kept juggling all these songs and couldn’t decide what to use.”
Next up is another (another? yes, another) U.S. leg supporting their Louder Than Love tour. Once the tour is finally over, they’ll be thinking about a new album which will be recorded either here in Seattle, Vancouver, B.C. or San Francisco. Just about anywhere but Los Angeles which, they all agree and inform me, is ‘completely uninspiring’.

Ben Shepherd onstage at Melody Lane Ballroom, Portland, OR, July 25, 1990.

Shots from this photo shoot are available directly from Karen Mason-Blair.
http://karenmasonblair.com/