#51, “Slaves and Bulldozers,” Soundgarden (1991)

150 Favorite Songs: #51, “Slaves and Bulldozers,” Soundgarden (1991)

I had an old bootleg recording I found somewhere during the Audiogalaxy filesharing days of Soundgarden playing “Communication Breakdown.” I guess it was probably from sometime in the late eighties, since apparently the band only played it a few times. Introducing the song, Chris Cornell quotes a review the band had gotten that started, “Throw away your Led Zeppelin records, because Soundgarden is here.”

That’s an absurd thing to quote from the stage of your own show, and not knowing the full context, I have no idea of Cornell was referencing it to make some sort of self-deprecating joke or because he was feeling himself that night. Knowing what we know of Chris Cornell, the former is more likely, but I always liked the idea that it was the latter. How cool is that, to say “we are as good as your legends and icons, get ready for us”? Talk about rock and roll swagger.

Soundgarden was usually too nervy a band to swagger like that. There’s a dichotomy to them that I think better exemplifies the whole nineties alt-rock/“grunge” ethos than any of their contemporaries—they could fuckin’ rock, heavy as hell, but they were never cool about it. They threw that heaviness into songs about alienation and loneliness and suicide, not about, like, going down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. I like that stuff too—it’s cool to hear someone sleaze it up sometimes—but there’s something powerful in the way Chris Cornell worked through his guilt and depression through such bombastic music.

“Slaves and Bulldozers” is Soundgarden at its Soundgarden-est. It’s built around a sludgy, blues-based, drop-tuned groove that runs throughout the whole song like the inexorable march of death, only letting up briefly for the howling chorus, and even then only briefly—as Chris Cornell is still in the middle of singing “what’s in it for meeeeee” the groove resumes, pummeling us once again. You can briefly disrupt it, but ultimately the blues riff wins out. After the second chorus, when it’s time for the guitar solo, which is almost anti-melodic, just these spasms of guitar being thrown up against the steady doom of the groove, a free jazz improvisation that gets to go off into outer space because that bass riff keeps the whole thing grounded. Then the third verse rolls around, and the guitar keeps doing freakout shit until suddenly it gets swallowed up by the groove and starts playing along, the whole band on the same page as the song hurtles through its seventh and final minute.

So there’s all that, and then there’s also Chris Cornell, doing one of his three greatest vocal performances. Cornell is such an interesting singer to me, because he had the sort of voice that could do anything. I mean, here he is taking a spin through “Ave Maria” that sounds like what you’d get if Pavarotti smoked cigarettes. Here’s “Steel Rain,” where he doesn’t exactly do a Jeff Buckley impression so much as he takes what he learned from listening to Jeff Buckley and applies it to his own way of singing. His voice could soar, when he wanted it to soar, which makes the choices he made on “Slaves and Bulldozers” so interesting. The song itself isn’t really about much, probably just about how the music industry or the world or whatever is bullshit and he is the last honest man, something like that. And when he sings the verses, he is content to just be a great rock singer, singing the song and holding notes, until it gets into the pre-chorus (the “now i know why you’ve been taken” part) and he just keeps escalating and escalating until he jumps up an octave and his voice starts to strain, you can hear that happen, but he still has it under control and he brings it right back down for the chorus. Being one of the three greatest Chris Cornell vocal performances probably puts it in the top, I dunno, hundred or so rock and roll vocal performances, and it has an interesting legacy—according to rock legend, this is the song that Rick Rubin played for the three members of Rage Against the Machine who were looking for a new singer to put together Audioslave, so they could hear the range of what he was capable of. Cornell does sort of a doom-metal version of Johnny Hartman here, letting his voice play and interact alongside the drop-D riff in a way that really does feel a little bit like jazz to me.

I’ve listened to “Slaves and Bulldozers” a lot, for a few reasons, but I think that interplay is what really keeps me coming back. The blues groove is so steady and unyielding that I can put it on anytime my brain needs a soft reboot, and I can just sort of lose myself in the song—as soon as a thought appears, I can let it go and just focus on the riff again, like meditation. But if it didn’t have Cornell chasing highs and Kim Thayil’s guitar doing psychedelic freakouts, it would get boring. Soundgarden were a good band, but they were at their best when they were trying to be something more than just a successor to Led Zeppelin—when they let everyone in the band do what they did best, and trusted that what they all came together with would be worthwhile. That’s never more true than on “Slaves and Bulldozers.”