Dark Black and Blue: The Soundgarden Story

First off, this is a book for Soundgarden fans. Not just the casual fans that like their singles, but people that know and love all the music. For anyone else, the book doesn't have much to offer. But since Soundgarden is one of my favorite bands, I enjoyed it.

Greg Prato shares a chronological history of Soundgarden from when they first started jamming together to Chris Cornell's suicide. Prato spends too much time on inconsequential things – I don't care what songs they played during the fifth stop of their 1993 tour – but there are a lot of great details.

I wish the book explored the creative process more, but aside from some quotes about composition and lyrics for individual songs, all of that is left for the last chapter, which is the best chapter. Soundgarden is one of the most innovative and influential bands in rock history, so I wanted more details on the creation of those songs.

We do get some tidbits, such as: The odd time signatures for which the band was known? It wasn't on purpose. Apparently, when Chris and Kim wrote riffs, they had no idea what times they were in. The dropped-D tuning that they popularized? They got that from talking to the Melvins (but the book doesn't talk about how they developed their other strange tunings).

“Dark Black and Blue” is a book about a great underground alternative band that made it big, much to their dismay. The book makes it clear that while the band loved creating songs and playing them live, they hated being rock stars. It was that tension that led to their breakup in 1997.

But it's also a book about death and depression. The band's rise to fame was regularly marred by the death of a close friend, including Andrew Wood, Shannon Hoon, Jeff Buckley, and Kurt Cobain. And each loss seemed to weigh them down more and more. For Ben, it manifested in his angry tantrums. For Chris, who admitted he would be a recluse with no friends if he wasn't in a band, it manifested in emotional isolation.

So it's a book about one of rock's best bands, but also a tragedy about unresolved grief. Worth a read if you're a fan of the band, but there aren't a lot of scandalous details if you just want some wild stories of rock stars being crazy.