As with all emergent scenes, labelling bands with comparisons to who and what came before them is a superfluous task that only serves to categorise a sound that will inevitably speak for itself in due course. The term ‘grunge’ wasn’t as well-defined during the late 80s, and it’s only with the gift of hindsight that it’s easier to encapsulate the sound and the surrounding culture that was coming out of Seattle. Speaking to Phil Alexander of Raw Magazine in 1989, guitarist Kim Thayil described SOUNDGARDEN’s output at the time as a “heavy muddle”, and that lack of definition is something that was apparent when it came to the critics of the time. Somewhat undue comparisons to LED ZEPPELIN and BLACK SABBATH were skirted across their bow in these early days, bands that have and will continue to influence thousands of musicians, but the exact energy of this sound would soon evolve into its own thing entirely as the band grew into one of the premier rock bands of the 90s and beyond.
Though the genre was still in its nascency at the point where SOUNDGARDEN’s Ultramega OK was released on Halloween of 1988, many of the key players in grunge were active by this time. NIRVANA’s debut single Love Buzz would be released the month following, and Layne Staley had already crossed paths with Jerry Cantrell to form what would soon become ALICE IN CHAINS. However, SOUNDGARDEN were among the first in the scene to record a full-length LP – albeit one that they themselves consider to be a step away from their original mission statement. At this time, the band were batting away major label attention after departing from Sub Pop Records, a Seattle-based independent record label that was gathering major momentum in the Seattle scene towards the end of the 80s, but at the time of their departure the record label couldn’t offer what the Seattle four-piece believed they needed.
The result of this departure was their decision to sign with SST Records based in Long Beach, California. Speaking to Kerrang! in August 1995, frontman Chris Cornell stated “I think we made a huge mistake with Ultramega OK, because we left our home surroundings and people we’d been involved with and used this producer [DREW CANULETTE] that really did affect our album in a kind of negative way.” Cornell had previously attributed this disappointment with the sound they achieved on the record to be down to their move away from Seattle to record, telling Raw Magazine, “Production-wise we left Seattle and it showed. It wasn’t exactly what we were after.”
This feeling of disappointment followed the band for years, and in March 2017 Cornell spoke to Adam Tepedelen of Decibel about the production of the album. “That was the single-most exasperating and terrifying moment of my career as it pertains to Soundgarden. Because it was a crucial moment for us to not get this wrong. We had offers from virtually every major label worldwide and we couldn’t really afford to screw that up. And yet it seemed to me to be screwed up.”
Although their style was established by the point they moved to the west coast for this album’s production, METALLICA were continuing to make noise further up the coast in San Francisco as the Bay Area thrash scene continued to develop. On the outskirts of Los Angeles, bands like KYUSS and YAWNING MAN were beginning to host their infamous “Generator Parties” that would eventually develop into the Palm Desert scene and give birth to the wave of desert-rock that continued to gain popularity in the 90’s. While Cornell and company felt that this move detracted from their Seattle-based sound, influence from contemporaries in the Bay Area and Palm Desert scenes can undoubtedly be heard in SOUNDGARDEN’s early sound. Their cover of HOWLIN’ WOLF’s Smokestack Lighting would easily have found a place at one of the aforementioned’s “generator parties”. It’s a track which conjures the imagery of the desert scene, blaring from the speakers on a rusted-out converted Dodge van driving across the rough desert terrain towards these infamous late-night gatherings.
METALLICA have been forthcoming in stating the influence that they gathered from SOUNDGARDEN, with guitarist Kirk Hammett coming up with the massive career-defining riff from Enter Sandman after staying up late one night listening to SOUNDGARDEN’s subsequent release Louder Than Love. The idea the influence went both ways can be heard on tracks from Ultramega OK like Head Injury, which shares the tempo and power that fuelled the thrash scene (a track that would later be covered by METALLICA at the Chris Cornell memorial show I Am The Highway in January 2019). The melancholic droll of Cornell’s vocals in the opening bars of Beyond The Wheel conjure Tom Araya’s haunting vocals on Dead Skin Mask before delving into the high-pitched shrieks that became a trademark of Cornell’s vocals.
Although exact chart positions and sales are not readily available for this album at the time of original release, Cornell and the rest of the band were ultimately unhappy with the result, believing that the production issues hampered their growth at the time. That being said, the album was nominated at the 32nd Grammy Awards for Best Metal Performance, alongside FAITH NO MORE’s The Real Thing, and eventually lost out to METALLICA’s One from And Justice For All. Ultramega OK provided a solid platform from which SOUNDGARDEN would launch themselves with subsequent releases as grunge began to peak in the early 90s.
In March 2017, a mere two months prior to the passing of Chris Cornell, the band returned to their roots with Sub Pop Records and remixed the album using the original tapes and enlisting famed grunge engineer Jack Endino (who had previously acted as the producer on their Screaming Life EP from 1987) to assist them in returning the album to their earlier sound for the 2017 reissue. Included in this re-release was the lost recordings of the Ultramega EP – a series of early versions of tracks from the album that provide a stiff injection of the raw power that SOUNDGARDEN would use as their model for their original career run throughout the late 80s and well into the 90s.
Ultramega OK was originally released on October 31st 1988 via SST Records.
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