Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  KELLY CANARY When Andy died, everybody was like, “I’m gonna get my shit together.” People had their come-to-Jesus moment, which lasted a good hour or so—and then went away.

  DANNY BLAND At the time I was like, “Man, what kind of idiot would overdose?” That was me in my cockiest, most delusional period, as an “indestructible” twentysomething-year-old guy in the grips of addiction. The fact is, we never know exactly what we’re shooting in our arm.

  TOM HANSEN By that time, selling drugs had completely taken over my life. I’d started in ’85, when I was done with the Fartz and the Refuzors. I sold to Andy a few times. I was a little bit surprised by his death, too. I didn’t know he was into it that much. But then again, it’s those part-timers that get nailed, because they don’t have any type of tolerance.

  EDDIE SPAGHETTI I was using then, but I never really did it that much. For me, it was a weekend-only sort of a thing, and then it became weekends and Wednesdays. When Andy died, mainly people wanted to know where he got it. People thought it must have been really good, and that he’d obviously just done too much. “Where did he score that good shit from?” People were sick and twisted with that drug. It really fucks you up.

  JEFF SMITH Andy Wood seemed like he wanted to die. My then-girlfriend Nancy and I saw him at QFC, the grocery store, a few days before he died, and he just seemed so bloaty and spacey. I said, “It seems like he’s already gone.” And then he died a few days later, and people were like, “How could you say that?” I guess because that’s in bad form, to acknowledge that people sometimes don’t want to live.

  REGAN HAGAR I do know who the guy who sold it to Andy is; he is still around the city. And then there’s the guy who supposedly was there with him doing it, panicked and ditched, who I got more upset with. I wrestled with that stuff in my mind, and then I realized that I couldn’t put blame on either of those people. Andy did what he did, which ended him, and no one forced anything on him.

  DAVE REES Andy’s memorial service was the strangest funeral I’ve ever been to. First of all, it was at the Paramount Theatre. Regan and I both laughed beforehand that Andy would have dug this, because there was his name up on the marquee of the Paramount: ANDREW WOOD, and then the years that he was born and died. All of Soundgarden was there, Alice in Chains. Andy’s nephews were there and they had Mother Love Bone T-shirts on that he had signed. It was this weird mix of rock and roll and extreme sorrow.

  TOMIE O’NEIL I did sound, and we played a bunch of Andy’s music. Andy had hours and hours and hours of music, him playing piano and guitar, that he recorded at home, with tons of reverb. His voice was big as a building.

  GREG GILMORE It was a weird thing—there were fucking druids there. People in hooded robes. It was like out of the movies. What is this? Why the costumes?

  TOMIE O’NEIL We did this candle thing where they lit one candle and everybody lit a candle off that candle and they blew the candle out. The preacher guy was my guy. I think he was like a Universal Life minister.

  REGAN HAGAR There was some religious group there that Xana had hired. All these people were holding candles and this guy was asking people to blow out their candles, which represented him being gone, and said that “Andy’s going down in the elevator.”

  I was like, “What do you mean he’s going down in the elevator?” I was shaking mad about it and so was another close friend of Andy’s, Mara West, who was Malfunkshun’s number-one fan. We were like, “We cannot allow this to happen.” So we went up to the podium in front of everyone and I said, “I don’t know what this guy is saying, but Andy spread his wings and flew. He went up, if anything; he didn’t go down. Raise your candle high for Andy.”

  BRUCE FAIRWEATHER What Regan said was great. Everyone was just like, Yes!

  REGAN HAGAR Also, what Andy’s dad said really bugged me: “My son was a junkie.” He was trying to encourage the crowd to not do drugs. I just didn’t agree with him. I saw Andy as someone who would take drugs but was fully a musician and a busy person. He wasn’t laying around being a junkie. It’s just semantics, but the term bothered me.

  XANA LA FUENTE Andy’s dad said, “Xana, thank you for keeping him alive all these years. We’re sorry we didn’t listen to you, we’re sorry we didn’t understand.” I kept trying to tell them and tell them and tell them, and all they wanted to hear about was the record deal.

  ROBERT SCOTT CRANE Regan was sitting behind me and Chad “Slam”—“Chadwick” is what Andy called him—who was a big supporter of the scene. At the service, Chad held up the Mother Love Bone EP Shine and a lighter. And he yelled, and he doesn’t have the greatest-sounding concert yell—it’s somewhat like a wounded animal. Right after a lot of serious speeches about drug addiction! We had just lost the angel of Seattle!

  CHAD BLAKE I was holding the Shine EP that Andy autographed for me before he went bye-bye. The lighter? I thought it was a good thing to do. It was spontaneous.

  ROBERT SCOTT CRANE It’s like, that’s where Andy is. Because this is fucked. This whole thing is so morose and dark, and the opposite of Andy. And Regan yelled out something like, “This is a memorial! Put that down!” Shunned him. This is serious. This is a memorial. To hear Regan tell him to stop—oh, I just wanted to leave. Social convention’s not Chad’s forte. That’s how he’s expressing his pain. Andy was alive in that one moment where Chad held up that lighter. It makes me cry thinking about it, because Andy would’ve fuckin’ loved that.

  KEVIN WOOD We had our own private ceremony afterwards, with just family, at the gravesite. Most of the people were at the Paramount because it was a big event. They didn’t even know Andy, although I’m sure everybody felt like they knew him. It seemed kind of tacky.

  SCOTT SUNDQUIST After a while, Chris and I just wanted to get out of there. We grabbed a handful of helium balloons from inside the venue and took them outside. We let them go, as if we were letting go of Andy. Chris and I had a lot of unspoken moments, a connection to each other as friends. That was one of those moments where it was just a glance, and we knew where the other was at. And then we went on to a house somewhere with other musicians for a bit of a wake.

  NANCY WILSON There was such an amazing community that only gelled further from Andy’s memorial. ’Cause everybody came to Kelly Curtis’s house that night. I had three springer spaniels and I decided to bring those dogs to the house, and everybody at the place took turns getting down on the ground and hugging the dogs because it was really comforting. There’s such a family aspect to the Seattle music scene. We just felt really completely honored to be included because we figured they’d written Heart off a long time ago as just some dinosaur.

  CAMERON CROWE I loved Mother Love Bone, so when I was writing the movie that would end up being Singles, I wanted to interview Jeff and Stone to explore the whole coffee-culture, “two or three jobs, one of which is your band” lifestyle. The terrible turn of events that took place was that Andy died. And everybody just instinctively showed up at Kelly’s house that night. For me it was the first real feeling of what it was like to have a hometown—everybody pulling together for some people they really loved. That was a pivotal moment, I think, for a lot of people there. It made me want to do Singles as a love letter to the community that I was really moved by.…

  CHRIS CORNELL We were crammed in a smallish living room with people sitting on every available surface.… I remember Andy’s girlfriend looking at everyone and saying, “This is just like La Bamba,” then suddenly I heard slapping footsteps growing louder and louder as they reached the front door and Layne flew in, completely breaking down and crying so deeply that he looked truly frightened and lost. Very childlike. He looked up at everyone at once, and I had this sudden urge to run over and grab him and give him a big hug and tell him everything was going to be okay.… I didn’t get up in front of the room and offer that and I still regret it. No one else did, either. I don’t know why.

  MIKE STARR I made an ass out of myself for a second there, because I was in my
thoughts and I walked into this room and I said, “Who wants to smoke a joint?” All of a sudden, I realized that Chris Cornell was sitting there looking at this photo album of Andy and crying. And I was like, Fuck. Why did I fuckin’ say that shit?

  XANA LA FUENTE I had all these Mexican prayer candles and put them on the headboard of the bed in this small room in Kelly’s house. Somebody came up with this idea that everybody leave something for Andy. Chris Cornell left a pin of a silhouette of a girl—like on the back of truckers’ mud flaps—that was on his hat. Ann Wilson left her hoop earrings. Some drunk guy left his cowboy boots. Poems and letters. Unfortunately that became the bedroom where I stayed, so I had to sleep with all that stuff. At one point, I laid down and when I woke up I couldn’t find Andy’s hair, and I was freaking out. I’m like, “Where’s his hair?! Where’s his hair?!”

  GREG GILMORE After Andy died, it was “What do we do now?” Despair, confusion, discussions, meetings. The bottom line was whether to go on, and to go on means finding another singer. I was in favor of that at the time, but I don’t remember if anybody else really was.

  MICHAEL GOLDSTONE Apple was supposed to be released in March, but was pushed back to July. The possibility of trying to find a new singer was brought up at PolyGram, in marketing meetings. It was in the context of “How do we want to promote this record?” I don’t remember who exactly said it. It was obvious that they didn’t really understand the personality and the aesthetic of the band to think that replacing Andy was even a remote possibility.

  ROBERT SCOTT CRANE Seattle absolutely lost its soul when Andy Wood died. But I feel like the soul started to get sucked out of Seattle with the signing of Mother Love Bone. Because although I was really excited for my friend getting signed to a major label, I knew that essentially Mother Love Bone was a sellout that just wanted to be Guns N’ Roses. Coming from Green River and Malfunkshun, they took a huge shift to be a major-label band. They just absolutely sold their souls.

  Andy still kept his soul as a person. He was the light, fun part of Seattle, as opposed to the other side, like the Jerry Cantrells—and I would even put Chris Cornell into this—the brooding, quiet, angry types.

  XANA LA FUENTE If people think bad stuff about me now, it’s because they knew I started using after that—although I’ve been clean for a long time now. So I lost respect there. After Andy died, I just didn’t care anymore. I wanted to try it right away, but I couldn’t find it. No one would give it to me. I wanted to know what the shit is that’s so great that he had to throw everything away for it.

  They knew that I remarried pretty quickly after that, so they felt like … You know, I don’t know how long I was supposed to mourn. Did you know sex is a part of grieving? You become really sexual? I didn’t know that. It’s like a psychological effect, I guess, of grieving. They saw me with some other guys.

  Andy dying feels like yesterday. I don’t think it’s ever going to not feel like yesterday. I’ve had my surgeon; I had the cute Spanish model; I had the millionaire in Hollywood, and he spoiled me. And I’ve had a couple other flings. I had Mickey Rourke for a while; he was so young and delicious back then.

  But every guy is just playing second fiddle to a dead guy.

  KEVIN WOOD For a long time after Andy died, I spent a lot of my time driving a taxi, and I would have conversations with him, in my mind, and I’d dream about him. Once when I was driving the cab, I picked up these Japanese tourists who wanted to go see Andy’s grave. They had no idea I was his brother. I picked them up in Winslow, at the ferry terminal in our hometown, and Andy was buried out in Bremerton, so it was kind of a weird trip. It was a decent fare, too, like $150. These two girls—they were probably in their teens, early twenties—could barely speak English, so they had a hard time telling me where they wanted to go and what they wanted to see. I did get across the fact that I knew where it was and that I was his brother, and they were freaking out.

  We took pictures by the grave—typical Japanese tourist kind of thing. I posed for a couple pictures; we all took turns taking pictures of each other. They were just nice girls who were fans and who happened to jump in the right cab in the wrong town. We were all freaking out because it was just such a strange experience. I was probably as blown away by it as they were.

  JOHN ROBINSON The Fluid were lumped into grunge. We were trying to do something that was a lot different than the bands in the Northwest that Jack Endino was working for were trying to do. What I always heard in the early days of Seattle was a Black Sabbath influence. There was a dirgelike sound that came creeping out of every band up there, with the exception of one or two. There wasn’t 10 ounces of that in what the Fluid were trying to do. We didn’t want a muddy guitar sound. We wanted a crisp, clean, chiming, super-loud Gibson guitar sound.

  We made Roadmouth in ’89 with Jack Endino, and a lot of people who were into the Fluid really loved that record. But everybody in the Fluid can hardly even listen to it. It had such a muddy sound. Jack had many recording successes in that time period with various acts. That was not one of them.

  BUTCH VIG (producer; drummer for Madison, Wisconsin’s Garbage) I had done a lot of local punk bands in the Midwest circuit, and I did a lot of records for Touch and Go. One of the bands was Killdozer; I did three or four records with them. I did their album Twelve Point Buck, which got a lot of press. After it had been out maybe a couple months, I got a call from Jonathan at Sub Pop.

  JOHN ROBINSON When it came time for us to make another record, the Sub Pop guys suggested this producer out in the Midwest named Butch Vig. We said, “Never heard of him. Can you get us some music that he’s done?” So they sent us a cassette, and it had a lot of noise bands from that region, like Killdozer. We were like, “Okay, we don’t like any of this music specifically, but the sounds are really good.”

  So we went to Madison, Wisconsin, and recorded with Butch, at his studio, Smart Studios. Came back to Seattle with the record, which had a bright, clear sound. Everybody heard it and said, “Holy shit, who is this guy?”

  BUTCH VIG The first Sub Pop band I did was the Fluid, then TAD. One of the things Jonathan told me on the phone was, “Tad is this big guy, but also there’s a sensitive side to him. He pretty much bellows. See if you can get him to sing.” Tad tried it, and there’s a handful of songs on that record where he sings, and I think his voice is really cool.

  They were super-cool guys. I remember Tad would get sort of withdrawn. It seemed like he was sort of depressed. An interesting thing is that, thinking about it now, it’s sort of a precursor to working with Kurt Cobain, because Kurt was like that times a hundred.

  That was one of those records that got a lot of press. One of the reasons why is because of the cover art.

  TAD DOYLE The first legal problem we had was with a release called 8-Way Santa. A friend found a photo of a couple in a photo album that they got at a thrift store or a garage sale. The photo was of a guy that looked like he was in Nazareth—with a big mustache and sideburns, long hair—and a woman. They both looked cooked, totally stoned and glassy-eyed and grinning ear to ear. Looked like they’d just had some good sex or something.

  KURT DANIELSON And then he’s holding the girl’s breast with his hand in sort of an irreverent, shocking way. She is wearing just a bandanna on her breasts, which is totally white trash. Bruce Pavitt had the photograph color-enhanced, so all the colors look really phosphorescent. So you have this sort of white-trash snapshot taken from a delirious LSD vision, and that’s in keeping with the title of the record: 8-Way Santa is a kind of blotter acid that Tad had taken in Boise when he was growing up. And at the time it seemed like, Who cares if anyone objects, including the couple in the photograph, because this is artistically right, symmetrical, beautiful, and who’d want to interfere with that?

  ART CHANTRY I remember when Kurt Danielson called me and said, “We want to use this photo on a record cover. We found it at a thrift store, and we bought the entire album of photos, therefore we own it and we
can do whatever we want.” I said, “No, don’t fuckin’ do that.” They went and did it anyway, and then the guy who was on the cover had a friend who worked in a record store and saw the photo and said, “Hey, Bob, your photo is on this record cover, isn’t that cool?” And he went and showed it to his ex-wife, the woman on the cover, who had become a Christian singer. And she got pretty pissed off.

  JEFF GILBERT I was working for KZOK, which is Seattle’s still-reigning classic-rock station. 8-Way Santa came in, and I had the album sitting there in the station. One of the station managers comes over and says, “Oh, my God! That’s my buddy!” So he brings in the guy who had his hand on the chick’s tit in the picture, and I said, “Dude, check it out, you’re famous!” And he goes, “Aw, where the hell did they get that?” I said, “I think somebody found it at a garage sale.”

  And here it goes, the fateful move: I said, “Man, can I get you to autograph this for me?” He loved it, and he goes, “Sure, man!” And he signed it. The woman in the picture had turned into some religious freak and wanted to sue, and I said, “Wait just a second there,” when I heard that. “The guy who’s in the picture, he liked it so much, he autographed it!” And there’s your evidence right there.

  KURT DANIELSON That really damaged their case. Between us and Sub Pop, we had to pay a certain amount of money, but I don’t think it was more than what they had to spend on legal fees. So if they got anything out of it it was more of a moral victory, in that they were able to get this thing yanked off the shelves. But it destroyed the momentum we’d built up the couple of years before. We never really recovered from that.