New Cd Shows Soundgarden’s Rock Roots

Seattle band Soundgarden knows its place in rock’s family tree. “We’re all children of Zeppelin. We’re all Hendrix babies. We all grew up on that stuff,” says drummer Matt Cameron. “And we loved all the ‘70s rock icons - Bowie, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith. They’re all in there.”

Let other bands arrogantly claim to be total originals, as if they were hatched in a vacuum. Soundgarden is refreshingly candid about respecting rock history, whether it’s the Beatles or Bauhaus. All of it is reflected, refined, then blown into exhilarating new shapes on the Soundgarden disc “Down on the Upside,” which comes out Tuesday.

It’s the raw, stripped-down follow-up to “Superunknown,” a more glossy work that sold 3 million copies and boasted the radio/video mega-hit “Black Hole Sun.”

“The perception out there was that we finally gained some commercial success with ‘Superunknown,’ ” says Cameron, whose group is on this summer’s Lollapalooza tour with Metallica, the Ramones and Rancid. “That success can color a lot of people’s opinions on how we are as a group. But it didn’t change how we write music or function as a band.”

Soundgarden functions as an intelligent hard-rock band that pleases alt-rock and classic-rock audiences alike. The band members - Cameron, singer Chris Cornell, guitarist Kim Thayil and bassist Ben Shepard - simply refuse to play by any formula/format rules.

The new album is all over the map musically. The song “No Attention” builds to a vicious punk snarl (“Suck on my brain and I’ll pay no attention,” Cornell bellows), then suddenly veers into a retro-psychedelic solo by Thayil, who even quotes Ted Nugent’s arcing notes in the Amboy Dukes’ cult-trippy hit, “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” from back in 1969.

Part of the fun in listening to the new album is detecting its sources. There’s a riff from the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” in the dreamy “Blow Up the Outside World.” And Pink Floyd’s “Us & Them” appears to be the inspiration for “Boot Camp,” which also spoofs the Army in its verse “I must obey the rules, I must be tame and cool.”

The new album is Soundgarden’s fifth, but its sonic girth suggests the band still has untapped potential. “I think we’ve also got a good free-jazz record in us somewhere down the line; and a good, strictly psychedelic record in there somewhere, too,” says Cameron.

Collectively, Soundgarden’s chief influence, at least on the new album, is Led Zeppelin. Zep’s guitar boogie colors “Rhinosaur,” in which Cameron also plays a Moog synthesizer (“The Moog is slowly making a comeback; it’s just a good, natural sound,” he says). The Zep connection is further heard on the acoustic-guitar-flecked “Zero Chance” and the screeching, electricguitar-soaked “Never the Machine Forever” and “Switch Opens.”

Although Soundgarden has never won the fame accorded Seattle peers Pearl Jam and Nirvana, that may change with the new disc, which has some spectacular moments. But don’t look for Soundgarden to turn into superstar neurotics because of it.

“We don’t fall into the same traps as other successful rock bands, like drugs or whatever,” says Cameron. “We’re all pretty stable individuals.”