The Rocket, Nov. 1991

Bass Instincts
by Jeff Gilbert

Ben Shepherd fills in Soundgarden’s bottom line


"I don’t like waking up in the city. When I wake up in the city, I wanna kill something." Seems Soundgarden made the right choice in Ben Shepherd. With an icy, stone-crushing glare and a hands-on education in hardcore, this quietly maniacal islander (he’s from Bainbridge) has given Soundgarden a whole new set of teeth- bared and clenched.

So where does a ceiling-scraping, six-foot-and-counting bass player with homicidal tendencies sleep? Anywhere he wants, apparently. Except when he’s on tour. Then he has to sleep in the city. Or on a bus. Or in an airport. Thank god for Bainbridge Island.

OK, so Ben Shepherd (his real first name is Hunter) isn’t quite the urban morning menace he’d have you believe. It’s not like he’s been a feature on "America’s Most Wanted" or anything. People who’ve met him on the street or have known him for years say he’s one of the friendliest and coolest guys around. Of course they probably haven’t had the dangerous pleasure of encountering the Hunt Man before he gets some defusing Folgers down his neck.

This was just the type of musician Soundgarden were looking for when they booted Jason Everman out of the band almost two years ago. "Jason used to flip me shit in high school for not playing guitar like Eddie Van Halen," recounts. Ben. "It might have helped him, though." Jason now works as a shipping and receiving clerk in a New York City warehouse.

Long before Eddie Van Halen, punk rock and Badmotorfinger came into his life, there was this sort of goofy looking tall guy with three dozen brothers and sisters (all right, five, not including Ben) who grew up on the Kingston Peninsula after moving from Texas when he was three.

The bulk of his adolescence- like a lot of kids who infest the blue collar suburbs- was spent listening to KISW, working sundry McJobs after school, hanging out and generally smelling to all the worlds like teen spirit. He dabbled with the guitar ("the first time I ever played guitar was for a play my sister was doing for my parents; I did the soundtrack"), and was heavily into AC/DC, compulsory at that tender age. Then one fateful day, his Valhalla was demolished.

"I was listening to KISW when I was abut 13 or 14," he says, "and they announced that Bon Scott from AC/DC had died. Then they played Pat Benatar. I said, ‘Fuck this,’ turned off the radio and put on a Circle Jerks record." Out of the rubble a star was born. Shuffling off his mortal rock coil, he began rebuilding his taste in music- and it wasn’t pretty. "Everybody’s got a point where rock ‘n’ roll betrays them and they just get sick of it," he continues. "They either do something their own way, or give up on it and become a computer programmer or something."

Ben joined a punk band called March of Crimes and Microsoft breathed easy. "March of Crimes was kinda like Bad Religion," he says. "Melodic punk rock, straight ahead. We had a demo tape that was reviewed in Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll- that was our shining moment."

There were other moments, of course, some more shiny than others, like the time Dead Kennedys singer and punk rock icon Jello Biafra wanted to meet the band. ("He wanted to find out where we got our name; he thought it was cool.") Then there was that other glistening moment when Ben met a hairy Chicagoan by the name of Kim Thayil, a friend of Ben’s brother, Henry.

"I’ve known Kim a long time," says Ben of Soundgarden’s spiritual center. "He would show me how to play things on the guitar. Kim tells everybody he taught me how to play; he tries to lay claim to that. When I was learning guitar, I’d watch every guitar player I ran into and make ‘em show me something. I was a soul catcher. [laughs] I made Kim show me some picking things. I had already made up about 60 songs before I met Kim."

Interestingly, Ben was Soundgardens’s first choice as a replacement for the band’s first departing bass player, Hiro Yamamoto. "I saw Kim at a Pere Ubu concert at the Moore Theater after Soundgarden found out Hiro was quitting," Ben recalls. "Kim came up to me and said, ‘So, how would you feel about playing bass?’ When I found out why, I got all pissed off, storming around the room later that night because I was mad. It was like, ‘Oh man, the Beatles are breaking up.’ I was all bummed out; I had known Hiro a long time."

Ben’s audition with Soundgarden turned out to be another bummer. "I didn’t know the songs for shit," he grins. "We just went in and jammed. And every time we played, we hardly even talked. We would just go in and jam for three hours. They dropped me off at the ferry boat afterward."

Ben sailed back to Bainbridge Island on he seas of discontent and Soundgarden eventually settled on ex-Nirvana guitarist and former high school chum, Jason Everman because, Ben says, "Jason knew all of their songs. I had no clue! [laughs] It was hard for me to learn the songs given the listening apparatus I had" (two empty creamed corn cans with strings attached to a Radio Shack turntable.)

Ironically, Ben had also been a member of Nirvana at one time. For about 30 seconds. "I was trying out for them at the time, and I knew all of their new songs, but they didn’t teach me any of their old songs when I jammed with them. It just didn’t work out. The whole time I was telling them, ‘No way; you don’t need an extra guy.’ It was more like I hung out with them."

A man without a band, Ben, nevertheless, was uncomfortable with the idea of Everman in Soundgarden. "As a fan, I felt weird when Jason joined the group," he says. "I knew what their music was- I’ve known Soundgarden from day one. And when they hired Jason, I thought, "Oh no, they’re going ‘fifi’!" [laughs] As history demonstrates, the musical grooming Soundgarden gave fifi, uh, Jason, failed to gel, and once again, Seattle’s coolest and hairiest band was in need of another bassist. By this time, there was no question who they would call.

"I was hanging out in my room with my guitar when Kim called," begins Ben. "He said, ‘Why don’t you come over; Chris and Matt [The Soundgarden Tribunal] are going to be here, too. Come over and drink beer and hang out with us. Chris has a new dog so let’s go to his house and hang out.’ So we went over there and drank beer and met Chris’ dog, Howdy."

Ben, with a mouth full of beer and a hand full of Howdy, wasn’t exactly prepared for what came next. "We were talking about bands and then everyone got quiet for a minute and Chris goes, ‘Well, we were thinking. . . how would you feel about playing in our band?’ I looked down at the ground and spit. Then I looked up and said, ‘Fuck yeah.’" Ben neglected to add whether or not they made him wipe up the spit before officially joining the group.

Ben’s first gig with Soundgarden was at the 300-seat Mormon-owned Lake City Concert Theatre two summers ago. The band was playing unannounced and a local glam group, the Witch Dokkters, were headlining. ‘The looked like Avon ladies on PCP," he sneers. "They were wearing too much lipstick and pantyhose. It was. . . a drag." [laughs] To everyone who caught the historic performance, Soundgarden, supported by Shepherd’s aggressive, weighty bass lines and punk rock spitting techniques, were nothing short of electrifying, something the band manages to do on a regular basis with Ben now in the group. "I wasn’t that nervous," he says, "but I made a whole bunch of mistakes. Kim teased me about it after the show."

A Sub Pop single (Ben co-wrote "H.I.V. Baby") and a European tour followed in quick succession, culminating with a Bumbershoot concert in front of 12,000 hometown fans. "That was the biggest show we ever played. I had a lot of fun playing the Coliseum; it didn’t freak me out like I thought it would."

Since Howdy was unavailable for comment, drumming god Matt Cameron puts Ben’s value to the band in perspective: "Basically Ben and Kim and I are pretty much improv players. And when we play live, we improvise all over the place; we don’t really play the stuff the way it is exactly on the record. We definitely wanted a musician who could stretch like that. And besides, his song-writing skills are really good and so are his instincts as a musician."

"Ben is a source of inspiration because he’s got cool ideas and he writes great songs," agrees bandmate Thayil of Ben’s contributions. "And he always knows when it’s beer o’clock!"

Besides Ben’s ability to tell time and improvise with the best of them, as a collaborative fourth in Soundgarden’s creative fountainhead (all the band members write), his hereditary street sense has ensured that the band will continue to stomp all over the fringes of corporate rock while giving everyone the badmotorfinger. And who, besides Howdy maybe, gives a fuck what the first single is going to be?

All in all, it should be very good year for Ben Shepherd and his band Soundgarden, of which he is a 545-day veteran. That is, if Soundgarden don’t find themselves slain at the hands of their new bass player who happened to wake up in a city he really didn’t much care for.



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