Michael Beinhorn, the man behind the desk for Soundgarden’s six-time Platinum record Superunknown, says Chris Cornell’s writing at the time was misdirected. But one piece of advice changed everything and helped the guitarist give birth to one of their biggest songs.
The genre-bending Seattle band and Beinhorn began the project in a great place. Soundgarden were riding the success of their third studio album, Badmotorfinger, from three years earlier, with tracks like “Jesus Christ Pose” and “Rusty Cage” — later covered by Johnny Cash — putting them at the forefront of the contemporary rock scene.
Beinhorn, meanwhile, came into the sessions off the back of work with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soul Asylum and Living Colour, his reputation in good standing.
Cornell, in particular, was churning out material for his band’s next record, eager to maintain the momentum its predecessor had generated. But Beinhorn felt everything he presented had a major flaw.
“He was trying to write songs for Soundgarden fans,” Beinhorn says (via Ultimate Guitar). “I strongly urged him against it, because my feeling is like, ‘Look, if you write the song and your band plays it, it’s going to sound like Soundgarden.’
“You don’t have to write songs that are going to please the constituency of your fans; they’re either going to stay fans or they won’t. All you have to do is write songs that you really love.
“About two weeks after that conversation, he sent me a cassette tape. There were four songs on it. The first was ‘Fell on Black Days,’ the last was ‘Black Hole Sun.’”
Both songs would go on to become two of Superunknown’s strongest tracks, the latter in particular garnering huge airtime on MTV, which at the time was a hugely influential platform. It would even win Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.
“From the first few notes of ‘Black Hole Sun,’ I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is incredible,’” Beinhorn remembers. “I listened to the song many, many times. I just kept playing it over and over and over again, and I called him up, and I was like, ‘This is incredible. We’re ready to record now. You’ve basically got the most important track on the whole record, and it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever heard.’”
Ironically, the band’s lead guitarist, Kim Thayil, found a portion of that song unusual beneath his fingers. Taking Beinhorn’s advice to play only what felt good to the player, not what they thought their fans would like, Thayil left Cornell to track the electric guitar for that section.
“The ‘Black Hole Sun’ arpeggios were stylistically unusual for me,” he tells Guitar Player. “I’ve described it as sounding like the right side of a piano, or little fairies dancing on the head of a pin like ballerinas. It was very delicate, and I thought, ‘This is not me.’
“Every time I tried it, I would fuck up,” he concedes. “Finally, I told Chris, ‘You wrote the part — you track it!’ I thought he would do it better than me.”
Soundgarden was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, which Thayil believes to be hugely important to Cornell’s legacy. The band is now working on a final album, completing demos recorded before Cornell’s passing in 2017.
