KIM THAYIL reveals why SOUNDGARDEN’s “Black Hole Sun” FRUSTRATED him, ultimately leading him to hand over guitar duties to CHRIS CORNELL. “Halfway through I’d f*ck it up.”
Released in 1994 on their fourth studio album “Superunknown,” “Black Hole Sun” is arguably one of Soundgarden’s biggest hits. In a recent interview with Guitar Player, Thayil admits that he was forced to pass some of his guitar parts on the song to Cornell because he just couldn’t get it right.
“I love playing arpeggios when you have delay or chorus on them, maybe some sustain or distortion. We would double them with high stringing from a 12-string guitar. Producer Terry Date introduced us to that on ‘Louder Than Love’. But the ‘Black Hole Sun’ arpeggios were stylistically unusual for me,” he said to Guitar.
“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. Chris said, ‘You’re good at arpeggios. Go ahead and do it.’ I’d start to do it, but halfway through I’d fuck up. I was like, ‘All right, punch me in.’ But they said they couldn’t punch me in because I was going through a Leslie cabinet.
“You can’t punch in if the speaker is rotating because it’s always going to be in a different position. So it was like, ‘Kim, you have to play the whole thing straight through, or else the difference in the sweep will be noticeable.’ Every time I tried it, I would fuck up.”
Soundgarden guitarist gave up
Eventually, Thayil gave up and passed the part onto Cornell.
“‘You wrote the part – you track it!’ I thought he would do it better than me,” Thayil admitted.
But, despite writing the part, Cornell struggled as well.
“He started tracking it, and I went out in the lobby and had some tea. After 20 minutes, I went back in and looked at Chris. He shook his head and said, ‘Let’s try it again.’ In the end, he was less likely to be psyched out than me. He did the part, and I was like, ‘Whew! I’ll play on the next part.’”
