Most side-project albums by major-label rock musicians come off as curios at best and vain indulgences unworthy of a second listen at worst. Then there’s Hater, the self-titled 1993 album by Soundgarden bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron, Monster Magnet guitarist John McBain, and Devilhead vocalist Brian Wood (brother of Mother Love Bone’s Andrew) and bassist John Waterman. It’s a concise ripper that revitalizes garage rock without descending into kitsch: see especially the superb, speed-freak jam “Circles,” the burly “Tot Finder,” and the nasty, sinister Kinks homage “Who Do I Kill?” Elsewhere, “Roadside” offers slow, grinding psych rock with one of those indelible riffs that makes your world seem incredibly momentous. “Down Undershoe” is sweeping, swerving, Led Zeppelin III-like folk for heavy-rock aficionados. The gorgeous, tremulous folk-rock instrumental “Lion and Lamb,” with its subtle Mellotron flourishes, sounds like a more subdued Moody Blues. It’s a shocking and welcome tangent. There’s also an exceptionally tough, vengeful cover of Cat Stevens’s “Mona Bone Jakon,” which the peace-train-riding British folkie has said is about his penis.

Never before released on vinyl, Hater is being reissued on that format by Universal on July 15. Hater catalyst Shepherd answered some questions over the phone about this lost classic, how it was inspired by the Jerky Boys, Cat Stevens’s song-publishing neurosis, making Alan Thicke cover his ears in terror, and other topics.

The Stranger: What prompted this reissue? Hater seems like a gem that has been unjustly overlooked by all but a few die-hard Soundgarden and Monster Magnet completists. I’ve been a fan of it since it was released, but sadly I hear few people talk or write about it.
Shepherd: It was just time to put it out on vinyl. It's never been given its just desserts as far as audiophile life goes, you know? I thought it would be fun to do that, and the second one [titled The 2nd, recorded around the time of Soundgarden's Superunknown, but not released till 2005] next. Unfortunately, we found out the maser tapes [of Hater] had been burned, so we had to remaster it from digital instead of the master tapes. Universal got involved and helped facilitate all of this. That was basically it: “Man, let's put that out on vinyl!” It's never been out on vinyl. It'll be cool to hold it, look at the album cover and actually see it instead of opening up the damn jewelbox and pulling it out and all that. It was designed to be flipped over after a certain point. We always thought of it as a record, not a CD. We just never got around to it.

Did you view Hater as a fun one-off project or did you have hopes it would go on to be a long-lived group?
My idea of it was to have an ongoing recording project. No one was supposed to know who was in it and it was supposed to come out only on cassette, passed from crew to crew on tours. Like the kind road crews and bands used to pass around all the time, like the Jerky Boys before they were called the Jerky Boys—we called them “tough guy” tapes. It was more along that line, like a connoisseurship of music. Like, who actually is that?! Then it got more and more legit as we were recording and people were hearing it. We all had our own aliases and our own totally incongruous pictures of what each guy in the band looked like. One guy was a pack of smokes, the diagram for Tareyton cigarettes where they show the filter. Mine was going to be this float of a ferryboat stuck in sticker bushes that had been left in this town for 20 years and was totally overgrown. It was a really articulate water sculpture/bathtub race thing from Kingston. We all had our own icons.

But then it became more legit and what it is now. It was this fun side project, do not compete with anything, just be your own thing. It was way more garage and a release to get away from the whole music industry and just do it ourselves. [The idea was that] all the musicians involved would be different people for each session. It would never be truly done.

Sometimes I write songs I don’t ever want to record because I want to play them different every goddamn time. I don’t want it set in stone.

Hater seemed like an escape valve from the pressures of being in Soundgarden—a more fun, freewheeling thing.
It wasn’t about Soundgarden, so to speak, it was more about the music industry, the whole juggernaut of Soundgarden and the music industry. No, let’s just do something for us and not try to make it a success or anything. Let’s just have fun and rock out. I was just glad people liked it at all. I didn’t expect anyone to ever hear it.

What inspired you to cover Cat Stevens’s “Mona Bone Jakon”?
I’ve just always loved that song. I was such a young idiot I didn’t even think about the ethics of adding verses to it. Man, what an idiotic, graffiti-is, bullshit thing to do. The story goes, he’s extremely protective of his songs. He’ll have a couple of different publishing companies protecting a song. It turns out he had four different publishing companies for [“Mona Bone Jakon”]. I didn’t know what kind of tangle I was getting into. I don’t know if this is true or not, but he personally had to okay the extra verses. I was like, “I love that song so much, let’s add some verses to it!” It’s more old folk style and blues tunes and anonymous folk songs in American history where you add verses as you go. I never thought anyone would ever hear it or care about it. I didn’t think about the legal ramifications whatsoever. That’s how free that whole process was. It was like, “Our version, we do two extra verses.” It’s not fair now when I think about it. I’d be so pissed if someone did that to me. But I was just a young, happy kid going, “Fuck yeah, let’s go!”

Over the years since that’s come out, I’ve thought about it a lot. God, what an asshole thing to do! Sorry! Should’ve just done the verses and done more psychedelic music to it and then ended it.

Yet he gave you permission.
Yeah, somehow he okayed it. Years later I found out the backstory about all the publishing companies for that one song. I don’t know if any of that is true on his end. I like how we did it. I like how the sound pops out. The feedback’s all cool and stuff.

I think it’s going to be a whole new experience listening to it on vinyl.
I hope so. Because I’m really distraught about that whole warehouse burning [referring to the 1997 Universal Studios fire in LA]. Tons of movies, tons of records, tons of recorded history basically ruined in one huge warehouse fire. All the I Love Lucy episodes and other TV shows. Our stuff happened to be there, too.

Who knows if it was actually destroyed? You know when the construction guys show up, “Oh, it’s totaled!” and the insurance companies show up, the record and movie companies just write it off. They probably didn’t even go through the carnage. You never know how that stuff turns out. It’s a huge catastrophe. That’s what bums me out. I know that we could’ve delved in and really made real versions of the recordings—for vinyl, especially. But the test pressings we got were pretty damn good, so… It still pops out the way it used to, even on CD. I always noticed that it popped out different from everything else.

Who is the subject of “Who Do I Kill?” This song seems especially vicious lyrically.
The whole world. I was driving past the Agate Pass Bridge going toward Bainbridge, going toward Kingston, where I grew up. I thought, all these people are getting away with murder and they’re supposedly the legit grownups who make decisions for everyone else. It was like, who the fuck do I kill? I was always treated as a criminal back then just because I play guitar in a band. I’m part of that age group where people don’t trust you. So it’s like, who the fuck do I kill? I was talking about trees and cultures, not individual people. Well, they’re wiping everything else out, so who do I kill? If anybody’s the subject, it’s me.

What’s your perspective on the Hater album when you listen to it 23 years after it came out?
That it was a blast to make. I guess we could’ve played more, but actually to me it was more about being Seattleites and if you wanted to see us, you had to come here. It was more of a street-level not mainstream-level of what was going on or what was about to go on, like with the garage-rock bands coming back full bore. We were kind of in a weird time at that point. We were doing that sound, making the guitars sound right. That’s pretty much as far as I think about it. That time of life was really fun; being around those guys was really creative.

I hadn’t listened to it since the test pressing showed up at my house. Of course, I’m way overcritical, so I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to. But it’s also made me instantly distrust my stereo, which I hadn’t dialed in correctly. I don’t like how I have my speakers where they’re at and what speakers they are. At first I didn’t know about this mix. Then I calmed down and sat in a good spot and said, okay, it’ll do. People can hear the tunes. I want it to be a real good stone-marker of time from that era.

When it came out, people said, “That’s really raw! It sounds like garage rock.” Exactly. That’s what we wanted it to be. We could’ve prettified everything and made radio-friendly songs. To me, Hater is what I wanted to hear on the radio. I like bands that sound like bands. I like it when people mean it. And when they don’t mean it, I don’t want to hear it. I can hear it a mile away that they don’t mean it, that somebody else’s meddling hands got in and glossified it.

Are there plans to reissue the early Wellwater Conspiracy stuff? [Wellwater Conspiracy were a garage-psych group featuring three members of Hater; their 1997 album Declaration of Conformity is fantastic.]
I have no idea. That Wellwater stuff was done and compiled after Hater was done. A bunch of those songs from the first Wellwater stuff were purposely brought in after we were done with Hater, it seems to me. They made Wellwater and that was pretty much the end of Hater.

Do you see Hater and Wellwater Conspiracy as complementary units?
No. Wellwater was Matt [Cameron] and John [McBain] all the way. Hater was more of everybody. I was the chief songwriter [of Hater] apparently, but every day, especially on the second Hater record, I would go, “Bring stuff in, let’s do it.” No one ever brought anything in on the second one, so we didn’t. The first one was just, “Let’s go!” and we did it. I remember recording it; it was totally on the fly and it was fun. That’s how it should be.

Of course, A&M was on board, because Matt and I were in Soundgarden. It seemed weird that A&M was [miffed] because we were doing it ourselves, instead of the usual organization where the bean-counters [are concerned], because they want to keep tabs on everything under their banner. [A&M] had first right of refusal over everything; it was easiest to just put it out through them.

How did the other guys in Soundgarden like the Hater album?
Kim [Thayil] and Chris [Cornell] really liked it. Kim was the one who said, “You guys should actually put this out.” He prompted the other guys into doing that. The way I looked at it was, no, I’m in Soundgarden, I don’t want this to compete in any way, I don’t want it to be little-brothered. I don’t want any attachment to any other band. It’s its own thing. My primary concern is being in Soundgarden; [Hater] is for the fun of it. Once you take the fun out of it, it’s not worth fucking doing. Once you make a legit thing, it’s measured up and barometered all the other ways everything else is. I didn’t want that.

Is there any chance for a Hater reunion?
Yeah. I’m sure there is.

Have you talked to the other guys about it?
Not yet. I haven’t talked about to them in a while. I talked to Matt last year. There have been offered shows in Melbourne, Australia, where we do fly-in/fly-off gigs. It would be more fun to actually set up a tour. But fun doesn’t equate to reality, because the reality is, we all have lives to live and other bands to play in and other responsibilities. Timing is everything. Which bogs it down into that whole “legitimate” world, which I don’t like to be a part of. [laughs]

What’s the status of Soundgarden now? [Their last album, King Animal, came out in 2012.]
We’re on a writing break now. We’re going to reconvene pretty soon and start writing again. We’ve had a couple of those sessions already. Then in a few weeks we get back together and write some more and pick studios and make the next record.

So it’s still pretty early in the process?
Well, in the process of coming up with songs, we’re kind of halfway into it. But with us, you never know how long that could take. Every time we’ve ever recorded a record, we have way more songs than we actually put on that record. The self-imposed deadline of, “okay, now let’s book studio time,” that’s when you’re far into it. I’m sure after the next session, probably before the next session, that’s when we’ll decide studio time.

This Hater record’s dropping at just the right time to be able to do something. The hard part is tracking down the guys and getting them all talking together about Hater at the same time. But it’s actually not that hard in the digital age, but we just have a lot going on.

It would be great to see Hater live. Did you play out much in the ’90s?
We played mostly at the OK Hotel. One time we played in Pullman and as we were cresting the hill to go down into Pullman, we asked, “Wow, who booked this gig?” No one actually knew who booked us to play there. That was a really crazy, weird night. We played King Cat Theatre for the firemen’s benefit. Later that night, we played the last night ever at the Smith Tower in the basement. There was an actual theater at the bottom of the Smith Tower.

We played live on the FX TV show. Alan Thicke was one of the hosts back in New York and they zoomed live to Seattle. We were way down in the depths of Georgetown somewhere by the Boeing plant, right on the river. This guy who used to make electric drums had a studio there. We went there and they had their TV crew there. We showed up at 5 in the morning or something and played a couple of songs that aren’t on the Hater album. They’re on the Hempilation record. We played this song called “Convicted.” If you see the video footage of it, it cuts from us and goes back to the studio in New York where there’s four of them sitting there. They’re all covering their ears. “That was so loud! I can’t believe it!” [laughs] Yeah, that’s what you get, grownups. You wanted a band called Hater on your goddamn show… What the hell do you expect? It was the perfect square reaction to a true, in-your-face rock band.