Soundgarden Releasing 'Telephantasm' on Their Own Terms

To celebrate their reformation, Soundgarden are releasing 'Telephantasm,' a long overdue compilation of rarities and greatest hits. Before the single-disc version of the album hits stores, the album will be available in several expanded editions with different track listings, with the single-disc version being packaged with the 'Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock' game, due out Sept. 28 (the disc hits stores on Oct. 5). For Activision, the company that releases the 'Guitar Hero' series, being associated with the highly anticipated Soundgarden comeback was a no-brainer.

"There's a lot of natural crossover from what 'Guitar Hero' means, just being that destination for rock music and what Soundgarden embodies, that rock heritage," Activision's Scott McDaniel tells Spinner. "They're like today's Led Zeppelin, they're just dudes who rock on guitar and make metal crossover music."

The band also sees the partnership as an obvious choice, as it reaches potentially millions of listeners. "Putting the entire condensed version of 'Telephantasm' in 'Guitar Hero,' that, in one fell swoop, is getting our record out to a new generation of music fans and multiple fans of Soundgarden," frontman Chris Cornell says. "It's going to find its way into someone's living room that bought the game that didn't even necessarily know they were also buying a Soundgarden album. That's where the new business of music reinvents itself every day."

It's that new model that allows Soundgarden to escape the pressures that led to their initial break in 1998. "We just had a difficult time watching the band itself and the brand itself have a life of its own and the business of music starting to kind of weigh on what that is," Cornell says. "We'd have these meetings where scheduling would be looked at sort of two years in advance and deadlines would be placed on when a record should be finished being written and recorded. We only ever did whatever we really wanted to, but that pressure was always kind of there."

Cornell no longer sees that stuff as a problem. "What's pretty noticeable now is that environment's not really there anymore. The music business as anybody would know it is no longer there," he says. It's anybody's game and anybody's idea how to do it is as valid as anybody else's."

Now, Cornell sees Soundgarden as a band that does what it wants on its own terms. "Whatever live shows we might do or whatever touring, it's certainly not going to be the way it was that we used to do," he says. "It'll be sort of selected events or, if it's anything that even resembles a tour, it's not going to be scouring the earth doing tours like we used to do."