Music is a funny thing…  there are certain songs out there or types of music that may remind you of a specific time in your life, whether it be memories of youth or possibly tied to a specific event.  Maybe you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard your favorite song.  Happens to me all of the time and when I hear Soundgarden’s “Loud Love” and the release it came from I remember the cold, dark winter of 1989.

1989…  jeez, almost 30 years ago now.  Fresh out of college and fresh into my first “real” job as door to door salesman for the local cable company, pounding the pavement in various neighborhoods (both good and bad) in the Cincinnati area in an attempt to sell a product to people that I assumed already had.  Well, much to my amazement NOT everyone had cable- we were often given “leads” for people that maybe had just moved into the area (college kids!) or for newly built subdivisions.  Unfortunately, those leads dried up fast and we were given certain areas of town to go back and visit and try to sell people on something that they’d probably already turned down a gazillion times.  Me being the young greenhorn on the team and wanting to make a good impression, I beat the street, lost twenty pounds in the late summer/early fall heat, and did as best as I could.  That is…  until winter came along.

Up until then the job really wasn’t too bad-  I made some decent money with the leads I was given and got sent to some good territories that were fairly new, plus the weather was nice and I was getting great exercise.  But boy does that change when the weather and daylight savings time kicks in.  Sales expectations were always hitting X amount of homes Monday through Friday and those after dinner hours were always prime time, but when it’s dark outside and a stranger comes knocking on your door people are less likely to answer (not long after, the older guys would laugh and tell me that I should have just put a door hanger on the door with my phone number on it for customer to call ME).  And that winter was especially cold and we did have some serious snow that I recall.

So what’s this have to do with Soundgarden and “Loud Love”.  The album that that song was featured on (Louder Than Love) was frequently in my tape deck late that year as the album had just come out that fall.  As always, I was on the lookout for the next new heavy thing and I remember watching MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball and catching the video for “Loud Love”, which immediately caught my attention as being almost anti-glam in image and letting the music speak for itself.  This was new, this was fresh, and beat a lot of the hair crap that was really starting to water the heavier music down.  So I bought the cassette tape, played it to death, and just fell in love with the droning, feedback drenched guitar work and the banshee wail of Chris Cornell.  The darker vibes just fit perfectly with that time of the year and I played the tape incessantly, digging hard on the songs and the strong production from Terry Date that captured the band’s sound to a T.  The band made a strong impression with me at the time due to the album and I remain a big fan.

As we all know, within two short years the hair metal scene was being phased out in favor of this exciting new music that was eventually called grunge.  Soundgarden got lumped into the genre (likely due to most of the bands being from the Seattle area) and went on to even greater heights, but “Loud Love” will always stand high for me as my introduction to this great band, and also due to the strong memories of my first post-college job and the cold and dark winter of 1989.