Soundgarden’s ascent from Seattle’s punk scene to rock’s upper echelon wasn’t preordained, but it was probably inevitable. Their first full-length, 1988’s Ultramega OK, expands upon the promise offered by their two Sub Pop EPs, the careening Screaming Life and the glitchy, funked-up Fopp. The band’s assault is sharper and more focused, their musical ideas borrowing from blues (and blooze), punk, tape-manipulation experiments, and dredged-in-mud riffing. It originally came out on the even-then-it-was-legendary punk label SST, although its 2017 reissue on Sub Pop puts a neat little bow on the band’s long career. Soundgarden’s path led them to arena tours and classic-rock-radio canonization, and Sub Pop has grown from a fanzine into a powerhouse, persisting and thriving through multiple independent-rock gold rushes. Both entities are keenly aware of their legacies—and the fact that they’re worthy of exploration.
“Flower,” a swirling tale of a woman whose hard-partying lifestyle leads her to an early grave, opens Ultramega OK. Years after more straightforward Soundgarden tracks like the glittering “Black Hole Sun” and the hiccuping “Pretty Noose” became rock-radio staples, it’s still one of the band’s best pop offerings, anchored by a chug that blossoms out of gauzy reverb, given depth by sonics that recall a muddied-up copy of Physical Graffiti (guitarist Kim Thayil has said that the humming feedback came from him placing his guitar on the floor near his amp, then blowing on its strings). The arrangement is animated by Chris Cornell’s gritted-teeth vocal performance, which only comes into full-voiced yawp briefly. Its appeal to both sides of MTV’s late-’80s late-night rock aisle—Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes—presaged the eventual cultural dominance of “the Seattle sound” and the alt-rock gold rush that followed.
Ultramega OK’s most instructive lesson, though, is how that craved-for aesthetic stemmed from an ever-shifting ideal. The twisted thrash of “Circle of Power,” led by a gasping vocal from bassist Hiro Yamamoto, gets extra tense because of its momentary pauses for breath; the creeping-death march of “Beyond the Wheel” is sandwiched between the tape-warp interludes “665” and “667” and a masterful vocal by Cornell to give it extra eeriness at the height of PMRC-stoked mania about “occult music”; the sludgy cover of the blues chestnut “Smokestack Lightning,” which pairs Cornell’s wail with the band’s 45-at–33 grind, flips the idea of cocky ’80s rockers taking on the blues face-first into a moss-swarmed bog. (“We learned the Howlin’ Wolf version,” Cornell told Sounds. “We didn’t know it had been covered a lot.” Yamamoto deflated Cornell’s insistence: “I did and I told you not to put it on the record. It’s a bit crass—a bit like getting B.B. King to sit up on stage with you.”) Humor was also key, as it was for so many of the band’s compatriots; crediting the album-ending patch of tape hiss and amp-unplugging to “One Minute of Silence” (an homage to his and Yoko Ono’s “Two Minutes Silence”) is one of the album’s more obvious jokes.
Skin Yard’s Jack Endino, whose list of ’80s production credits could double as an early greatest-hits list for Sub Pop, remixed Ultramega OK for this reissue; Thayil’s liner notes go into diplomatic depth about why the band was ultimately unhappy with the SST-released version of the album. Endino’s tweaks don’t render the album spit-shined, thank God, but they do accentuate certain instrumental details more clearly—the clashing guitars on the loop-de-loop slacker portrait “He Didn’t,” the snap of Matt Cameron’s drums on the paranoiac “Head Injury.” (The most notable difference between the two versions is the absence of then-labelmates Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69,” a sample of which served as a radio-static-swathed transition between the sludge of “Smokestack Lightning” and the anxiety of “Nazi Driver.”)
Endino’s liner notes delve into the details of crafting the new mix—sourcing the effects unit that made “665” and “667” so immediate and freaky, fixing a missing snare hit on “Flower.” Endino also recorded the early-stage versions of a few Ultramega OK tracks that round out this reissue; they add to the story by showing how much more precise the band got in the year or so after they recorded the Screaming Life EP, with the two versions of the single-chord grind “Incessant Mace” showing how that song’s brimming dread was the result of a fair amount of experimentation.
Revisiting Ultramega OK, it’s obvious in retrospect that Soundgarden were going to clamber to an exalted position in rock. They managed to balance their mad-scientist tendencies with an innate savvy about how to craft a rock song—even when they were six minutes long and based around one chord. The album captures the band on the eve of being swept into the major-label system, and it predicts how they would wring rock hits out of unexpected building blocks.
