So the first heavy band that I got into...the first REAL ACTUALLY HEAVY band that I got into...the first band that actually made me feel like it was raining icepicks and that someone had jammed a meat-hook in my chest and was dragging me through a sea of iron sludge with a bulldozer? SOUNDGARDEN dude.

I think the first time I actually legitimately "pirated" music was with a SOUNDGARDEN song. I'm not talking about Napster or Soulseek or any of that other P2P garbage. I'm talking middle schooler, blitzed on caffeine and acne medicine and hormones, sitting by his radio, finger delicately poised over the play/record button in hopes of etching their newest single "Burden in my Hand" onto some magnetic tape for maximum headbanging on my sony walkman on the way to school. I still have the tape...I got to the button a little bit late and shaved off the first 3/10 of a second of Chris Cornell's bleating right there at the beginning...and I listened to that tape until the reels were melting and it squeaked.

Yeah...Down on the Upside was pretty wack, but there were still some ragers on there. "Blow up the Outside World?" Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

So yeah, sometime before that, when I was still in the single digits I was exposed to "Badmotorfinger" and "Superunknown" and after seeing the video for "Rusty Cage" I knew that I wanted to have a moustache just like Chris Cornell.

Still, my all time favorite song by the band is "Ugly Truth," the opener on 1990's Louder than Love. The album was so heavy..."Hands All Over" (some kind of environmentalist message? Some line about killing your mother?), "Loud Love" (Air Guitar), "Big Dumb Sex" (don't you don't you wanna touch it anyway?) and "Full on Kevin's Mom." Louder... is my favorite album by the band.

I could wax on and on and on about 'em, but I'll save that for issue #3 of Drug Dogs. The point is that when I was at This is Hardcore Fest, COLD WORLD had some shirts that struck my fancy. Check 'em out:

Direct LOUDER THAN LOVE rip-offs! Raddest shirts I saw all fest, minus the kid wearing the Ric Flair one moshing during THE KILLER.

P.S. Check out this pic, scanned from my TURNING POINT discography CD of an OG SOUNDGARDEN Louder... shirt!


Check out COLD WORLD on Myspace if you're still into them.