Victoria writer co-authors book with Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil

A Victoria writer has co-authored a book with the lead guitarist of one of the biggest bands in modern music history.

Adem Tepedelen, who at 17 had an Almost Famous moment, interviewing a member of Metallica, and had done some writing for Rolling Stone magazine, is the co-author of a new book released last week on grunge music icons Soundgarden.

Alongside—and really, a bit ahead of—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, Soundgarden were pioneers of the grunge wave that emerged from Seattle in the mid-1980s and took over North American radio airplay. As the book points out, Soundgarden led the way, becoming the first grungers to sign with a major label when they hooked up with A&M Records in 1988.

The foursome split in 1997, reunited in 2010, and disbanded for good following the suicide death of lead singer Chris Cornell in 2017. However, Soundgarden’s appeal lives on—just this spring, the band’s 1994 hit “Black Hole Sun” surpassed one billion streams on Spotify.

“At some point, 20, 30 years down the road, they'll be considered to future generations what bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones and others were maybe to us,” Tepedelen says.

In A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond (HarperCollins Canada, publisher), Tepedelen joins Kim Thayil, the band’s founding guitarist, to explore how Soundgarden broke traditional rock rules and helped forge a new musical genre, selling 30 million copies of their albums along the way.

So, how does a writer from Victoria get the opportunity to sit down to collaborate with a founding member of one of the biggest acts in rock ‘n’ roll? To answer that question, one must first explain how a 17-year-old kid got a chance to go backstage with Metallica to write an article about the “Enter Sandman” dudes.

It was 1984, and Tepedelen was publishing his own fanzine, Heavy Heroes. He contacted Metallica’s management and asked to interview the band when they performed at a club in Portland, Ore. This was before Metallica made it big and well before any Sandmen had entered the picture. Tepedelen had the opportunity to interview guitarist Kirk Hammett. Although a bit nervous, the young writer learned something that would come into play later on.

“Those guys weren’t that much older than me. It was more like talking to a peer who had similar interests—but who was a really good guitarist.”

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In the beginning...

Tepedelen, who would eventually move to Victoria from Washington state in 2003—and become a Canadian citizen shortly thereafter, started as a journalism student before switching his major to anthropology. But it was writing that he loved. And music.

Hanging out in Seattle during the grunge scene, Tepedelen played in a band and even owned a small record label. In 2017, he got to spend some time with each member of Soundgarden while putting together a seven-page feature piece for Decibel magazine, a music periodical out of Philadelphia. He had two “epic” interviews with Thayil.

“They were supposed to last, like, 30 or 40 minutes, but you know, I think we ended up talking for three hours in total,” he says. That connection went pretty deep, and two years later, when Tepedelen was looking for a project and searching for someone in rock to write about, he thought, hey, this might be the guy.

“He was, you know, from immigrant parents, Indian immigrant parents. There aren't a whole lot of Indian people playing rock music that you probably are well aware of. So, yeah, I just thought there were a lot of really interesting aspects to it.”

Tepedelen was still in touch from time to time with Thayil, but these were the days of the pandemic, and the guitarist wasn’t comfortable taking on the project over the phone or over Zoom.

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But first, another project...

The idea would have to wait. Still needing to tap the keyboard for a paycheque, Tepedelen moved on, and he got a great opportunity to help write another book about a different Seattle band, one that would release 12 studio albums and also be seen as pioneers, although they would never see the superstar success of Soundgarden.

“I connected with Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner and basically made the same pitch to him, and he was like, ‘Yeah, let's go.’”

A year went by, and so did the pandemic, and Tepedelen reconnected with Thayil. The time was right. The two got along quite well, and their shared time seven years earlier established trust and camaraderie. They signed a contract to write a book together.

“I just ended up relating to him as a person, as a friend, as a, you know, a peer in a way,” he says of Thayil. “He's seven years older than me, but you know, we're of the same generation, and we lived in Seattle during a lot of the same years, so we have a certain level of shared experience.”

Turns out the two had similar interests beyond music.

“He loves baseball, and I'm a huge baseball fan, so you know, the fan part of me was enjoying just hearing the stories and learning stuff about him.”

A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond touches on these and other storylines:

• How Soundgarden’s founding members—Thayil, Hiro Yamamoto, and Chris Cornell—first got together
• The ways Soundgarden was shaped by its creators’ diverse backgrounds, including Thayil’s Indian heritage and Yamamoto’s Japanese-American ancestry
• The story of Soundgarden’s first attempt at recording an album, which was eventually scrapped and never released
• How Soundgarden led the way in the Seattle scene—at the forefront from the start, before Nirvana and Pearl Jam
• The real reasons Soundgarden broke up in 1997
• Thayil’s relationship with his friend Cornell, the lead singer, who tragically died in 2017

A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond went on sale this week and is available at leading Victoria bookstores as well as Indigo and Amazon.