Steve Hall thinks Paul Allen would have gotten a kick out of his viral music sensation.
Hall, a longtime venture capitalist who has worked at the late Microsoft co-founder’s Vulcan Capital for more than 18 years, spent a lot of time talking about music and geeking out over guitars with his old boss. The two even jammed together.
And now Hall has stepped into his own Seattle music spotlight of sorts, releasing a one-man cover (below) of the 1991 grunge classic “Hunger Strike,” by Temple of the Dog, the supergroup made up of members of Soundgarden and what would become Pearl Jam.
“I think [Allen] was pretty surprised as it was, the first time I sat in his office and started playing on one of his guitars,” Hall said. “I would have shown this to him and he would have chuckled and had a laugh and hopefully he would have liked it as well. It would have been a fun moment.”
An accomplished guitarist for much of his life, playing in rock bands in high school and college, it wasn’t until a couple years ago that Hall’s wife suggested he get some voice lessons. During the pandemic, he has gotten more comfortable exercising that voice, singing songs during socially distanced backyard gatherings and in a few videos posted to his personal social channels.
He waded into some deep vocal waters with “Hunger Strike,” taking on the singing parts of frontmen Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder — as well as playing four instruments by himself. But the results are impressive, and the internet is responding.
The song and video he recorded in his Bainbridge Island, Wash., basement studio and mixed over Zoom with his producer/musician younger brother, has over 450,000 views and 20,000 likes in five days on Facebook. Now Hall has uploaded the video to YouTube to try his viral luck over there.
Jamming with his boss
Hall, who moved west in 2002, wasn’t even in Seattle during the grunge hype that changed the city’s musical trajectory.
“I would love to say I was here when it all happened, but it couldn’t be further from the truth,” he told GeekWire. “I grew up in South Carolina, so I was in college when Pearl Jam and Soundgarden broke out, and Temple of the Dog at that time.”
But Hall has a great understanding of the bands and personalities that defined the late 1980s and early 1990s era, including Green River, Mother Love Bone, Andrew Wood, Mookie Blaylock, Vedder, Cornell and more. And he knows how Temple of the Dog formed before Pearl Jam had even released its debut album, “Ten.”
PREVIOUSLY: Ever-changing Seattle mourns the loss of another touchstone in Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell
“It’s all fascinating. I just love the history of it all,” he said.
And he’s connected to a different part of Seattle’s musical history through the relationship he forged with Allen, the billionaire tech titan and philanthropist who had a love for Jimi Hendrix and rock music that defined a big part of his passions away from tech.
Hall, who was managing director of Vulcan Inc’s investment arm until stepping back to be a venture partner in 2017, worked closely with Allen up until Allen’s death in 2018, and he still serves on the boards of the Allen Institute and Allen Institute for AI (AI2). Hall and Allen talked about music all the time, and when they played together on occasion (below), Allen was clearly impressed by the VC’s guitar skills.
The two would often nerd out on gear and the technical side of things, and Hall joked that Allen’s guitar collection was a bit bigger and more legendary than his own.
“I would say before we ever got down to business on most meetings, we typically started by catching up on what was the latest song he was learning, who’s the latest band he’s into,” Hall said. “He was a lifelong learner across an incredibly wide range of domains, which was quite inspiring, but particularly in guitar, every time I talked to him, he was pushing himself to get better.”
The voice lessons paid off
Hall decided to take on “Hunger Strike” for a couple of reasons.
He was drawn to what he called the poetic and prophetic way the song’s lyrics paint a picture of some of society’s inequities — inequities that continue today and came into stark focus during protests this summer. He was inspired by the community and philanthropic leadership the musicians he was covering have always shown, and in the video’s YouTube description Hall lists several organizations he has donated to, encouraging listeners to do the same.
He also wanted to prove that the voice lessons were paying off — so why not dive into the high-octave range of Cornell and the classic baritone of Vedder in one song? The original version (below) has 72 million views on YouTube and was an MTV staple during the early ’90s.
“Singing is still fairly new to me,” Hall said. “I have been very self conscious about, ‘Do I have the chops to do it? Does this sound OK?'”
When he played a couple chords and sang the song around a fire in his backyard, friends told him it seemed liked a good fit, and he ran with that as validation to pursue a self recording.
Borrowing from the work ethic that he brought to his career as an investor — learning everything he could about something and obsessing about finding the right answers — Hall bought a new camera and spent hours on YouTube learning how to use it. He taught himself how to use Final Cut editing software the same way. And while he could manage the guitar and bass parts in his sleep, he calls himself a bit of a “hack drummer,” so he spent a good deal of time practicing and playing the song’s drum part.
He recorded the sessions about a month ago, using Logic Pro over the course of about four days, using his camera on a tripod and calling in his 13-year-old son for some close-up angles. Then he hopped on Zoom with his younger brother, Les Hall, an accomplished musician, producer and composer who owns a studio in Atlanta.
“Zoom can be a little wonky with the audio,” Hall said, so they used it for video and relied on a zero-latency live stream to work together on the geekier nuts and bolts of mixing and polishing the song.
Hall’s first time singing for anyone was when he shared an iPhone video of himself doing an Elton John song — a trend that seemed to be catching on as people were looking for ways to connect and share some comforting content during the pandemic. He planned to just post the finished “Hunger Strike” video to his own Facebook page, where he figured no more than 500 friends would see it.
“By the time we were done, we felt like … excuse my language, ‘This is pretty f—ing good,” Hall said, and they decided to try for more views.
They shared the video on his brother’s studio page and it took off, and now they’ll wait to see whether it does the same on YouTube. The reaction has been uplifting, and Hall — after taking on two iconic voices in one song — says he’ll have to see about whether he can pull off another one-man show.
“It might take a while for me to come up with something that’s worthy of putting back out there,” he said. “At a minimum, what I just enjoy is playing music. That’s the part that I get to do a little bit every night, even if it’s just with my kids sitting around or for myself. That’s the real fun of it.”
Update, Wednesday, Oct. 7:
Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready — who played with Temple of the Dog — saw Hall’s video and tweeted his approval:
Well done Steve Hall! Great version of Hunger Strike. @geekwire @kslosh https://t.co/qlsp4W5hYe
— Mike McCready (@MikeMcCreadyPJ) October 7, 2020
