A Soundgarden fanboy reflects on his music journey at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony

Chris Cornell of Soundgarden at the Country Club in Reseda, CA, in 1990. Photo by Alison Braun

By Sanjaya Krishna

A month ago, I went to Los Angeles to attend what ended up being a joyful, educational and moving 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. I have been a huge fan of Soundgarden, who was being inducted, ever since hearing them in 1989. So I went, as a splurge for my 60th birthday, to see one of my all-time favorite bands go in.

When I got in Friday night, I went to my hotel bar for some food and a beer. Turns out the guy sitting next to me was doing the exact same thing as me. He flew in to see Soundgarden go in. He too, was flying home today. Unlike me, he had Soundgarden album art tattoos up and down his arms. We had a great time talking about not only Soundgarden but all the great PNW music of the '80s/'90s. He was also a huge Screaming Trees fan, and his favorite song was "Shadow of the Season," which I also really love, and l even recently played with one of the bands I’m in.

I was a music fanboy that weekend, and it was a beyond-belief great event at which to be one. But I also have a passionate hobby of playing music. Here’s the back story:

I started out in 2nd grade via piano lessons. My older sister, Gouri, also took lessons. Gouri (older by 8 years) was also the one to introduce me to my all-time favorite band, Led Zeppelin. My piano teacher, Mrs. Hartman, recognized I had a fondness for jazz and so a healthy portion of jazz was mixed in with the classical pieces I also learned during my 10 years of lessons.

From 4th grade to 12th grade, I had had the occasional opportunity to jam with a close school friend, Bennett Goldberg, who had the good fortune and the sharing spirit to be able to host jam sessions in his basement, well-equipped with musical instruments including a Yamaha electric piano and two early ARP synthesizers. But despite a few half-hearted attempts, I was never able to find a band to play with. I could say that my first-generation Indian immigrant parents were the ones who prevented this, but they were generally OK with my going off to jam with Bennett and friends on the occasions when it happened. And they did that “parent showing off their kid” thing by having me play jazz piano pieces for guests at their dinner parties. But I still didn’t have any immediate examples of Indian guys or gals playing rock and roll seriously.

Sanjaya Krishna drumming at a bar in Phnom Penh. Courtesy photo

I finally realized my dream of playing in a rock band starting my sophomore year at Oberlin College. I was a keyboardist and vocalist through three years at Oberlin playing in bands (including two with my dear friend and musician extraordinaire, Eric Thompson) that did covers and originals. Any time any of the bands had a break in practice, I asked the drummer if I could play on their kit. In 1988, a year after graduating, I bought a massive drum kit from fellow student Orestes Morfin, with whom I played in a band junior year that was dedicated to Washington DC’s homegrown and preternaturally funky Go-Go music. Orestes, who went on to play in Oberlin-born rock legends Bitch Magnet as well as Godrifle, Walt Mink and others, remains one of the best drummers you will ever hear. Trust me on this. He currently plays in We Contain Multitudes with his former Bitch Magnet band mate, Jon Fine.

Also, during my time at Oberlin, I got to know Chris Brokaw who went on to be the lead guitarist in one of the 1990s greatest rock bands, Come, hailing from Boston. At Oberlin, Chris had a punk band called Pay The Man and they were beloved on campus. Chris continues to make great and provocative music today, having played with so many different folks, it’s mind-boggling. For him, music is a calling, and I have enjoyed being a fan of his work over these last nearly 40 years.

I give my Oberlin band mates credit for not having any hangups about an Indian guy wanting to play rock and roll. And Sooyoung Park, leader of the above-mentioned Bitch Magnet, was Korean American so I was not the only man of color in a rock band. My first band also had a woman lead singer, Kelly Caulk, who was half-Japanese. But people of color were still pretty few and far between in Oberlin’s rock scene. Given the fertile musical environment at Oberlin, there were bands playing lots of other genres beyond rock and those certainly had more of a diverse makeup.

I first visited Seattle in August of 1989. At the time, I had only heard of Soundgarden and Sir Mix-A-Lot as far as Seattle acts go. During that first 4-day visit to Seattle, I went to a record store called Exotique Imports on Third Avenue in the Belltown neighborhood. I picked up Soundgarden’s "Flower" 12” EP because it looked like a decent way to get familiar with the band. I also bought Sir Mix-A-Lot’s "SWASS" (“Some Wild-Ass Seattle Shit”) full-length. I got back home to Maryland and immediately set to taping them so I could listen in my room and in the car. When I heard "Flower" start with what I later learned was the sound of breath and/or wind blowing over the guitar strings, and then lay into that main riff, I was gobsmacked. This was absolutely the kind of stuff I loved. And having come back from my first visit to Seattle, which I also absolutely loved, it cemented my decision to move there, which wouldn’t happen for another couple of years. One other element of that first visit that was noteworthy was hearing KCMU (now KEXP) playing tracks from the debut album, "Bleach," by a band called Nirvana. To a song, everything I heard I loved. I even went back to Exotique Imports my last day and bought "Bleach," which I also taped as soon as I got home. Little did I know where Nirvana was heading.

Between 1989 and 1991, despite being in DC’s Maryland suburbs, I was one of what was a growing legion of Seattle/Pacific Northwest music fans. My friend Anne McDuffie regularly used to send me copies of The Rocket, Backlash, Wire and other music newspapers. I made regular visits to Tower records near the George Washington University campus and bought tons of records including Soundgarden’s back catalog as well as their major label debut, "Louder than Love." I also bought records by TAD (still criminally underappreciated in my opinion), Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Green River and Mother Love Bone, as well as compilations like "Sub Pop 100" (which was partially funded by a friend I met in Seattle, Mike Peskura), "Sub Pop 200," "Deep Six" and "Another Pyrrhic Victory." I also bought two t-shirts, one a Green River t-shirt with a glammed-out picture of the band on it and a Sub Pop t-shirt that said, “World Domination Regime.” I gave the former away in 2024 to a fangirl friend in Idaho and I still wear the latter.

During this time, if any of these acts that came through Washington, DC, I was there. Perhaps the most memorable show was Nirvana in April of 1990 at DC’s legendary 9:30 Club (then still in its original location at 930 F Street NW), as an opening act for the British band Loop. And I finally saw Soundgarden in late 1990 when then were the middle band on tour with Faith No More and Voivod playing DC’s now long-gone Bayou Club.

In September of 1991, I moved to Seattle with my then girlfriend, Jesse (we’ve now been married for nearly 30 years). On the drive across country, we stayed one night at Jesse’s uncle’s house in Orinda, CA. While changing for dinner, we had the TV on. It was the night MTV debuted Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video. We were blown away that Nirvana was on MTV. Little did we know that three months later, they’d be the biggest band in the world, even dethroning the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, from the number one spot.

I’d sent my massive drum kit ahead with the intent of playing music in Seattle. Unlike a number of folks who had moved there at the same time, I had not entertained a notion of trying to make a living as a musician. Music was not my true calling as my Indian upbringing’s focus on getting a good job and making money still exerted the strongest pull. But music was a serious passion, and I was psyched when, in 1992, a Seattle friend Tate Wilson asked me if I wanted to drum with him on bass and his friend Jack Rainwater on guitar. We rehearsed a set of originals and eventually scored our first gig under the name Whatever, at Seattle’s Ballard Firehouse club, a place not on the most popular circuit of clubs but a place that allowed up-and-coming bands to have a chance to play. We played that show with a band called Sleep (not the heavy dudes) made up of friends from Oberlin College who had also moved out to Seattle. One of these was a violin player, Nicky Hasenberg, who had grown up one street over from me in Washington DC. It was wild to find myself playing a show in 1993 in Seattle on a bill alongside someone with whom I’d run around the block as little kids way back in 1970.

Courtesy of Sanjaya Krishna

Whatever eventually broke up and in 1994, Fiia McGann and John Sullivan from Miracle Baby brought me on board as their new drummer and we enjoyed a great run for about 6 years playing clubs like the Crocodile Café, Mo’s, the Colourbox, Sit ‘N Spin, the Showbox lounge and the old Redmond Firehouse (where we headlined an all-ages show with an up-and-coming band called Death Cab for Cutie). We also released our own CD, "There’s 1 in Every Crowd," which we recorded in the same space, John and Stu’s, in Seattle between the Ballard and Fremont neighborhoods, as all the early Sub Pop records back when it was called Reciprocal Recording. I still pinch myself to think I recorded in the same room as all those early Sub Pop bands.

Miracle Baby broke up in 2000 and the last band I played in was Infamous Lefty with Miracle Baby’s guitarist John Sullivan and John Nevins, who had played bass in Chagrin, a band I almost joined a couple of times and with whom I played a memorable show at Seattle’s Colourbox as a guest percussionist. John Nevins still plays in a bunch of bands in Seattle, including FALE.

Also in 2000, I had one music-playing experience that was unlike any other prior and which was particularly meaningful to me. I was on an extended work project away from Seattle, living in the Philippines. One weekend, the folks from the Manila office with whom I worked planned an outing to a park to go hiking and then to a small town which was the home of one of the younger local guys. When we got to the guy’s house, I found that his younger brother and a neighborhood friend were playing rock music, one on guitar and one on bass. And they had a drum kit set up. And they were huge fans of Seattle music. I spent about an hour jamming with these two young Filipino guys on Nirvana, Pearl Jam and other popular songs. It was the first time I appreciated, at a truly elemental level, the power of rock music to transcend cultures. And to this day, that remains the only time I played rock music without a single white guy in the lineup. 

It’s probably not surprising that of all those Seattle bands I got so into, Soundgarden being a mix of white guys and guys of color was way cool to me, not to mention against the grain when it came to most of the rock bands getting any exposure. 

Photo from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony taken from Sanjaya Krishna's seat on Nov. 8 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Courtesy photo 

I did not initially know Kim Thayil of Soundgarden was from a family that came over from India. Appearance-wise, he looked very likely to be, but I didn’t recognize his last name as Indian. This is due mostly to my own lack of knowledge as there are a TON of Indian names out there. Then, at one point, I read an article about Soundgarden where they mentioned that Kim was of Indian descent. Not long after that, I found myself in the lobby of RKCNDY, a now long gone, but at the time, mainstay rock club in Seattle, at 2:30 in the morning. George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars had been playing for 2 hours. We’d waited more than 4 hours for them to go on. I decided 2:30 a.m. was enough and started to head home. As I come out of the club room into the lobby, there in front of me is Kim Thayil. I went into a fanboy daze and just say out loud, “I was so psyched to learn you were Indian!” to which he replied, “Well where did you think I was from?” to which I replied, “I just wasn’t sure because I didn’t know the last name” to which he replied, “yeah my parents were born and raised in India.” I told him again how great I thought that was and how nice it was to meet him. Then I got self-conscious that I was overstaying my time. So, I parted with “I fucking love Soundgarden” and walked out and home up Denny way to my apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

That wasn’t my only time interacting with someone in Soundgarden. I say interacting because the other time was a year or two before when I was drumming with my band Miracle Baby at the OK Hotel down under Seattle’s now gone Alaskan Way viaduct. Three songs into our set, my bass drum started slowly sliding away from me. I was stretching my right leg out more and more and was almost at the point where I was going to have to bail out of the song, when a big, tall dude jumped up on stage and pushed my bass drum back in place. I made it through the song but just barely because right when he jumped up on stage, I recognized him as Ben Shepherd of Soundgarden, and I was once again, gobsmacked as I played out the song. One of the guys from my favorite Seattle band just helped me out as a fellow musician. Incredible! I later attempted to give Ben Shepherd a beer I bought as way to thank him. But he just stared at me from his seat in a booth among his friends like I was asking for a seat in the Soundgarden touring van or something. I moved on after one of his friends took the beer from my hand, this time feeling certain I had overstayed my time, despite nothing but a sincere attempt at expressing gratitude.

I continued to excitedly buy anything and everything by Soundgarden. Despite the advent of CDs, I bought their later records on vinyl as I wanted to have an all-vinyl collection of their catalog. I saw them in Seattle a few times, the most memorable of which was when I won tickets from the local hard rock radio station, KISW, to a show they did in Seattle’s intimate Showbox theater when they were at the peak of their success with "Superunknown." It was the only time I ever won something from calling into a radio station. I considered it a good omen. Thanks again to my buddy, Steve White, who told me that the giveaway was happening and who joined me at that incredible show.

In 2003, Jesse and I and our almost two-year old daughter, Anjali, moved back to the East Coast. Leaving Seattle was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Neither of us wanted to leave but our parents were getting old and having health issues. So, we committed to family and made the tough decision, leaving behind a lot of really good friends and for me, a life of playing music that I wouldn’t fully reclaim for another nearly 16 years due to my being a good Indian boy and focusing exclusively on my career and providing for my family from 2003 to 2018.

Sanjaya Krishna drums for Quick Machine. Jesse Cowan photo

After leaving the hamster-wheel of the corporate world in 2018 due to a combination of burn-out and a deep desire for something new, I prioritized reconnecting to playing music and discovered an awesome resource in Washington, DC, called 7DrumCity. They are an amazing resource for musicians of all types with a music community center housed in two connected townhouses in downtown DC. The rooms have all been reconfigured into backlined rehearsal and teaching spaces, rentable by the hour. They also have a small 75-person club that hosts shows and open mics every night of the week.

Very importantly for me, 7DrumCity also facilitates the unique-to-DC phenomenon known as Flashband. In a nutshell, Flashband is groups of musicians of all skill levels coming together, forming bands, learning 15-minute sets of songs according to a specific theme, and then playing an 8-band showcase at an actual DC club on a Saturday night. It was amazing to see the diversity of folks across ages, ethnicities, gender-orientation, etc. that participate in Flashband. The showcases always sell out, and the vibe is 100% love. I have done 8 Flashbands since 2019 and every one of them has been noteworthy, in large part to the diversity of folks with whom I’ve played. Miles Ryan and his 7DrumCity team are to be commended for the music community they actively foster.

I am now playing in multiple bands. In one called Quick Machine, we’re doing originals and a lot of hard rock covers including Soundgarden’s "Mailman," on which I not only drum but also sing. It’s been fantastic to come full circle back to my early Seattle music days. And it was a big reason that I decided to splurge and go to see Soundgarden finally get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Soundgarden accepting their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction on Nov. 8 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Sanjaya Krishna photo

At the induction ceremony, Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil made comments about being a kid of Indian immigrants playing rock and roll starting in the '80s. I give Kim (and his parents) huge credit for his sticking with music and achieving the kind of success he did as a member of Soundgarden. He and the whole band are musical heroes for me. I am looking forward to reading Kim’s book about his musical life due out in 2026. If I ever get a chance to meet him again (and hopefully not at 2:30 a.m.) I would tell him as much.

When leaving the Peacock Theater after the show, I saw one guy standing on his own looking melancholy. He was wearing what looked to be a Soundgarden "Badmotorfinger" t-shirt. I was wearing my Soundgarden "Louder Than Love" t-shirt. I gave him a silent fist bump and then we started chatting. His shirt was one he had made after Chris Cornell’s passing. It had a small image of Chris on the back along with the date of his passing. We both talked about how much we loved the band, how we cried when we learned Chris Cornell passed from suicide, how we were so happy to finally see Soundgarden go into the RRHoF and how we want Alice in Chains to go in next among Seattle bands.

The whole night was a testament to what I think is the most powerful of all of humankind’s creations:

**Music**

It is the universal language, the great uniter, the great healer.

It was not only a fantastic night to have been amongst my fellow music-loving human beings, but a great opportunity to look back on my own journey as a rock-loving brown guy and all the joy that playing music has brought me.

Alison Braun's photo displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Nov. 8 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Courtesy of Matt Crowley