Skeptics

"I think movies can replace reality and in the case of my story I wouldn't trust many people with doing that."

"What ends up happening with musicians and actors is, they're famous, so when somebody has an issue, it's something that gets talked about. People die of drug overdoses every day that nobody talks about. It's a shame that famous people get all the focus, because it then gets glorified a little bit, like, 'This person was too sensitive for the world,' and, 'A light twice as bright lives half as long,' and all that. Which is all bullshit. It's not true."

"It was given to me by the late Shannon Hoon, who fashioned it out of a fork he got in Denny's (a US fast food chain) on the first tour Blind Melon ever did, which was opening for us. I really liked it, but I stopped wearing it after he died. Because the other thing I wore was this ring that belonged to Andy Wood, who died. It's like, 'I don't wanna wear these f**king things from people who died.' A girl outside the hotel tonight had a similar fork, and I've had people throw them on-stage. I've seen hundreds of those forks, but it always reminds me of Shannon. They're making them cos they're thinking of me, but really it's him. Which is cool."

"I wish I had my dogs with me. We have a white German Shepherd and two Pomeranians. That's one big and two little. We used to have two big and three little. Then one of the bigs ate one of the littles, so we had to give him away. That was hard. We essentially lost two dogs in one four-minute incident. You have a sense of responsibility and a bond with this creature, whether it's a human or an animal, and we've always had an amazing bond with animals. We didn't even know we had that in common when we first got together, because neither of us had any pets. Then I got Susan [Silver] a cat from the pound, and she just freaked out on it. She still has that cat. It sleeps on her chest every night. As time went on, I realized, 'Wow', not only is she a great pet owner, she'd be a great mother'. I've noticed that when I get around human babies, the role of the pets changes. I don't know why. Maybe because looking into the eyes of a baby is different from looking into the eyes of a Pomeranian."

"I was so fiercely independent that falling in love was a really terrifying experience. The first time I was in love to the degree that I realized this person has suddenly become so important to me that I can't imagine life without her."

"No, I think that's the worst f**king thing. I mean, can you imagine having to get up at 4am and sit in a trailer while someone puts makeup on you? Then stand in front of a camera and say the same lines 60 times. I feel sorry for actors and I never want to do it. I stood in front of a camera in Singles and that's about it."

"Susan [Silver] was really busy with one of her bands, and there was about a month where I never left the house. I didn’t go out in public; I didn’t talk to anyone on the phone—I went a little psycho. If I hadn’t been alone so long, I would not have gone as far as I actually went. But one day, I went from wondering what I would look like with a shaved head to ‘That’s pretty cool.’ Then I put my hair in a big envelope and mailed it off to my wife. The funny thing was, I did this really silly, personal thing for no reason, and then all of a sudden it was on MTV News and in Newsweek, and I still hadn’t left the house. I thought it was strange, because I don’t know how anyone found out about my hair, and I don’t know why they cared."

"Susan [Silver] gives me a huge amount of room to be that recluse, and also the incentive to not be. It’s worth a lot to see her be excited about being around someone who’s not afraid of his shadow. It’s good for her. She digs it. But we’re becoming more alike. When she comes home to me from a day at the office, where she’s talking to people from all over the world about all sorts of important things... well, I probably haven’t answered the phone in seventy-two hours. She knows that when she comes home she’s going to get privacy, because I’m not like ‘These are my South American friends and... honey, have you ever really listened to that first Van Halen album?’ She’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. People are sort of perplexed, as to how this could possibly work in this grunge-music, super-druggy era where everybody is so emotionally screwed up. Not only is Soundgarden not OD’ing on heroin, but the singer’s wife manages the band, there’s no weird Yoko Ono trip, and she’s not trying to make us dress up like lions and unicorns."

"What I hear in my brain (brain radio) dictates the beginning of any attempt at a new song."

"When you write your own lyrics, you tend to be over-analytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid. One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button."

"Melody Maker: Did Andy Wood's death and then Kurt Cobain's affect your attitude to drugs?"

"Team Rock: Away from the band [Soundgarden], do you guys still hang out together?"

"The rest of the band [Soundgarden] thought it was silly of the press to concentrate on the beefcake when I was writing songs, singing, and playing guitar for the band. Even now, some people will stick a paragraph about my hair in the body of a review."

"I always had a knack for it [music]. I bought a drum kit for like 50 bucks, and within three weeks I was in a band. Not only was I in a band, but people were saying that I was really good. Being someone with a short attention span who didn't have much patience for anything, that was great, 'cause it didn't take much. I could just sit down and do it instantly. I could play a basic rock beat right away, so it didn't require much patience, and that's probably why I ended up doing it. As I got some of the rewards for it, it fueled me to want to be better. Then the rewards thing gets old, and what you really want is to be good and understand it, 'cause you're so enthused by it. That's what got me into all the other instruments and songwriting and singing."

"I’m completely self-taught on guitar- limited me in some ways but very helpful in others. My only goal to playing was to write songs."

"I couldn't do it. I'd go there, and it just made me sick to think about sitting down and applying myself to the shit they were trying to teach me. Not that it's not useful. In a lot of ways, I regret it now, especially in terms of being a writer. I wish I had more skills and knowledge of the language. I have a fairly good vocabulary for how far I went in school, but I always wish it could be better. In a lot of ways, it screwed me up, but I just did not have the attention span for school. My mind would wander, and it would refuse to focus on something that, to me, was devoid of anything exciting or inspiring. A lot of kids really were excited by what they were learning, but I seemed to be a lot better at staring out the window and dreaming."

"A certain scenario kept repeating itself. The people from the magazines would take two or three shots of the band. They’d start to pack up. And then they’d sort of take me off into a corner by myself. After about the thirtieth time that a photographer asked me to take my shirt off, I started to get the picture."

"I think Freddie Mercury is probably the best of all time, in terms of a rock voice. There was a vulnerability to it, his technical ability was amazing, and so much of his personality would come out through his voice. I’m not even a guy to buy Queen records, really, and I still think he’s one of the best."

"Not really. I don't even have enough time to pursue everything I want to do musically. Also, there's a lot of people out there who spend a lot of time trying to act, so I think most of the good acting jobs should be reserved for those people."

"There's always a sense of camaraderie between bands. The only thing that I ever remember that starts to go outside of the normal healthy competition was when Kurt [Cobain] was slamming Pearl Jam. Once you get outside of your local little scene, lot of cases, writers will bait you and lead you down that path as cunningly as they can. I've seen it happen dozens of times. I've had people say, "Well, so-and-so said this about you, what do you say about that?" And they might be misquoting them, or maybe that's not what that person meant, or maybe that person was just in a bad mood. It's provoked out of you. They'll get you in a position where you start firing and they'll throw out little things about different people. But everyone that anyone would know as a successful Seattle band, or even an integral part of the scene, are all friends. Always have been."

"The title came from us being on the L.A. freeway about three years ago. I just started looking at the traffic and realizing there was such an array of vehicles, from Mexicans in f---ed-up Chevys with dents and white guys in f---ed-up pickup trucks to guys with orange sun-bed tans in Porches and limos. And you'd always see these f---ed-up cars on the side of the road. The idea of seeing a couple of limos smashed into one another, I'd never seen that before, and I thought these people in expensive cars - especially the limos where the windows are blacked out and someone else is driving - they seem to have a feeling that they're not susceptible to mortality. During our trip down the freeway, I was talking to this guy who drove a limo, and he said that once this guy was in the back and some supposed vagrant came up and started knocking on the window. The guy opened the door like, "F--- you, you can't touch me, I'm in a limo." And a bunch of other vagrants came up and beat the shit out of the guy, almost killed him. The song describes that sort of decadence and this strange perception that you're so high on the social or political ladder that you're somehow beyond all that. But it's not true."

"Yeah, especially this postmortem trip when people die and then everybody writes about what they felt that person is going through. It's really surprising to me that anyone can think that they have those kinds of insights or spend that much time really worrying about somebody else. I think they should spend more time trying to figure out who they are. That's my whole trip. I can't imagine anybody knowing me through my lyrics, because I don't particularly feel like I know myself. And I have more than the benefit of just lyrics to go on."

"RockNet: Were you terribly uncomfortable at the recent Grammy Award Show?"

"Have you noticed how Lollapalooza isn't this multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-racial event at all? What Perry Farrell never admits is that it's just a slick rock concert with a good name and his ambition is to make a lot of money. Perry has a very good manager. He even has a percentage on the parking. It's a huge draw, and what people don't realise is it's far from being just the 'alternative college' crowd who go. It's very mainstream and very middle class. Even when we did it in 1992 with Ice Cube, the whole audience was entirely white."

"That Guns N' Roses video, the one with the dolphins in it ["Estranged"]. A big chunk of the video is Axl [Rose] coming out of this huge mansion on a hill with a bunch of servants wearing white and him getting into this huge stretch and having a motorcade of police wearing white ice-cream-salesman suits. Who the f--- does he think he is going to honestly connect with besides Donald Trump? Who else is going to give a shit about the fact that he can afford that kind of attention? It goes beyond decadence; it's spitting in the face of the people that have put you there. I was offended by it, and I don't get offended by much."

"Yes. I battle with that all the time. "Let Me Drown" is probably one of the most disturbing songs I've ever written. Usually, if I write lyrics that are bleak or dark, it usually makes me feel better. That one didn't. It made me question whether it was a song that was all right to play. Should we even do this? It was so negative. But that's the only one I can think of that's like that. Otherwise, it's like watching a horror movie: It makes you feel better after feeling worse."

"That shit's really depressing to me. I couldn't watch it. You can't expect to live in some utopia where everybody plays music you like, but it's gotten to the point where noone's playing music you like—at least that's being presented on television... The music channels don't even show much music anymore. They're more interested in documentaries. They're going to start doing documentaries about David Crosby's dog pretty soon."

"I don't know how everyone else feels, but I definitely go through periods of extreme self-confidence, feeling like I can do anything. Perhaps a fan will sense that, like in a performance, and the hero image creeps out. But then someone will say something, however insignificant, or I'll get something in my head and, all of a sudden, I'm plummeting in the opposite direction, I'm a piece of shit, and I really can't do anything about it. That's where 'Outshined' comes from, and why I'll never consider myself a hero."

"Somebody can sit at home and say, "What does this guy have to complain about?" But at the same time it's a comfortable chair to be sitting in and make those judgments. When all of a sudden you're successful and sought after overnight, you are instantly opened to a lot of sides of humanity that the average person is never going to see. And those can often be pretty disheartening, and it can make somebody pretty lonely."

"I try to solve my problems by writing music and recording albums, but you know what's really funny about that? Once the album becomes a success, it doesn't solve your problems. It just gets harder to write the next album."

"We were never looking for a different lifestyle. We weren't doing it for fast cars and big houses and there doesn't seem to be any regulation in terms of lots of model chicks following us around like idiots. It's not like we have to reach back and try to hang on to our roots. We never left them. Our lifestyles haven't changed. Maybe we're making mortgage payments now instead of rent payments, and we own the car we're driving instead of making payments on it, or maybe we're driving a new car instead of a $500 15 year old car. But we're still driving to the same places, we still live in the same neighborhood, we still have the same friends."

"I think Euphoria Morning is an album you can always listen to, even in a couple of years; it isn't dated. That's what I was striving for with every Soundgarden album, something lasting, something you want to listen to, again and again. Since it was always part of my approach it wasn't too difficult to record an album like Euphoria Morning. I didn't have to re-invent myself."

"I've never been big into self-promotion. It's awkward for me. Just seeing my name on a T-shirt freaks me out."

""Tighter and Tighter" was actually written around the same time as "Black Hole Sun." In fact, I did a demo with four songs on it to play for the band. "Black Hole Sun," "Sounds Like Days," "Tighter and Tighter" and a song called "Anxious." We blew off "Anxious" entirely and recorded "Tighter and Tighter" for the last record. It was the last song we did. It was number 16 and we ran out of studio time. We had the rhythm tracks done and it was just needing vocals and my guitar solos. We just ran out of time. It was falling flat anyway. I changed the arrangement a little bit."

"Chris’s death affected me, but I wasn’t that surprised. He always had gallows humor about being lonely in hotel rooms. ‘The only thing missing is a noose,’ he’d say. And it was like ‘oh, Chris.’ And he’s like ‘[I’m] too tired, the road is too hard, too impersonal.’ He was darkly joking.”"

"Well, we haven't had what I would understand as the sort of sudden pressure that seems to screw a lot of people up. We've been under pressure for years. Most of the bands I can think of that have had severe problems with success pretty much had their first or second album go over the top, commercial success like we haven't even seen. And for me personally, and to a degree the rest of the band, none of us are really super social in particular. So we're not in situations on a daily basis where being somebody that's famous is going to become really annoying, or you can't go anywhere because everyone recognizes you. I don't go out too much anyway, 'cause I've never really liked crowds or been that comfortable around a lot of people. In that case, I've been really lucky."

"Everything's different. You have to recognise the fact that I'm different. Time goes on, and you change. I'm coming into this as a different guy, that's probably the biggest thing."

"Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real. Therefore, atheism shifts the basis of morality from faith in god to obligations of social living. Moral conduct is not a passport to heaven; it is social necessity."

"Atheism ensures morality. Morality is a social necessity. The immorality of one disturbs the happiness of another in social relations. So checks and counter-checks maintain morality."

"We respect law, when the law respects our needs. Whenever legality clashes with morality, legality should be opposed and morality should be upheld."

"Soul is as much a falsehood as god is. The stories connected with ghosts, spirit communication, salvation and life after death are fancies of the primitive mind which answered the question of death in a primitive way. Now we understand death as the failure of the mechanism of the body either due to wear and tear or to an accidental obstruction. Advances in medical science can repair the body and can, likely, protect it from death altogether."

"Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in god is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality. Atheism alone is the surest way to morality. Those who oppose atheism in any form betray their vested interests in inequality of some kind of other."

"Positive secularism is not tolerance of all religions, but it is the total denial of religious beliefs: it is the emergence of homogeneous human outlook which is based upon verifiable facts of life."

"Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality."

"Right wins only when we dare and act."

"Further, economic systems … have never arranged themselves by themselves. It is men who do the ordering according to their attitudes, desires and understanding of things. Changes take place, not independent of man's will, but on account of man's wills. Civilization has progressed by man's interference with material conditions."

"Human problems are more psychological than materialistic. This is not only true of individual behaviour, but in mass action also. A suggestion from a leader sparks off a revolution. Material circumstances help mass action, but in themselves do not raise action. The conditions of untouchability and of poverty in India, especially at the time of famine in Bengal in 1945-46, when thousands of destitute died of sheer hunger in the streets of Calcutta City, are such as would provoke an immediate revolution. But the revolution does not come off in the Indian masses. The reason is clear. In India there are revolutionary circumstances, but there is no revolutionary consciousness among the people. If the revolutionary consciousness is present, people would revolt against any injustice on the slightest pretext. And consciousness is essentially psychological."

"Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?"

"[N]o such individual would find the Golden Rule surprising in any way because at its base lies the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and it can be found in countless texts throughout recorded history and from around the world--a testimony to its universality."

"We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves."