Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  XANA LA FUENTE: If you saw Mother Love Bone, you were rocking out and laughing your ass off at the same time.

  REGAN HAGAR: Stone and Jeff were determined businessmen — they were going to make it. Those guys were buckling down, practicing, making connections, and planning tours on their own. So those guys, mixed with Andy’s charisma and stage presence, it was like a match that sparked and took off.

  GRANT ALDEN: Love Bone wanted to be rock stars. Nobody else in that scene wanted to be a rock star — they wanted to make music.

  JEFF AMENT: [Playing with Andy Wood] was mostly Stone’s idea. I had known Andy pretty well — I had seen him around a bunch. I knew he partied pretty hard, and at that point, I was still pretty straight edge. I saw Andy and Stone play a show at Tug’s — this gay bar about two blocks down from the Vogue. I thought they were frickin’ amazing — total T. Rex. They had a drum machine, Stone was playing his acoustic through the pa — it had this kind of distorted sound. And Andy was just being Andy — he was doing his whole campy T. Rex/Freddie Mercury thing. At that point, it made total sense. We played a couple of shows with Regan — Regan and I had a little bit of a falling out, and Stone ran into Greg Gilmore, who was in Ten Minute Warning. We thought Greg was the best musician in the whole scene. The fact that he wanted to play with us — he was by far the best musician in the band, so it raised the stakes a little bit.

  Mother Love Bone (L-R: Stone Gossard, Greg Gilmore, Andy Wood, Bruce Fairweather, Jeff Ament)

  BRUCE FAIRWEATHER: Green River was starting to get pretty popular, so [Mother Love Bone] started out with pretty big crowds.

  JEFF AMENT: It was so different. Mark had such a heavy, cynical thing going on, and Andy’s thing was pure comedy. It probably took me like ten shows to make a transition, because before that, both bands I’d been in were kind of like gangs, and we were kinda all the same. I’d never been around anybody like Andy.

  DUFF McKAGAN: With Mother Love Bone, it was like, “OK, Andy’s not playing bass — he’s just singing. Well, that’s perfect.”

  CHRIS PUGH: Compared to Malfunkshun, they had real songs. They were a good band — once again, they were barking up the classic rock tree in a way.

  JEFF AMENT: Playing four-quarter notes over and over started to get old — we were starting to develop “groove.” We were aspiring to mutate beyond just the hardcore/super up-tempo thing.

  KIM THAYIL: I liked every damn person in Mother Love Bone — I’ve always felt uncomfortable about the union. I don’t know what it is. I think because I really liked Green River, and I was a huge fan of Malfunkshun. It eventually led to the demise of Malfunkshun, and that’s kind of how I saw Love Bone. I saw Love Bone as trying too hard. And one of my best friends on the planet played in Love Bone — Bruce Fairweather. We would always give each other’s band shit. I liked Love Bone — I liked the songs, I loved hearing Andy’s voice. I wanted to see them do well — but then at the same time, I didn’t like seeing the ultimate demise of Malfunkshun, or the disintegration of Green River. [Andy’s] stage presence with Malfunkshun seemed like a good dose of parody and homage. It was campy, witty. With Love Bone, the parody seemed to be missing. It seemed more serious, more professional — which would make record companies and management happy. It just didn’t seem right — it always seemed awkward. It seemed like it was forced — like they were trying.

  CHARLES PETERSON: Boy, not my cup of tea. We did a photo shoot at my place, and Stone had brought a tape of Guns N’ Roses. He was like, “Check this shit out!” I was just like, “This is just fucking garbage. I mean, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’? Give me a break!” At the time, I was listening to Public Enemy and Mudhoney. There was always this sort of rivalry — the scene broke down into two camps. There was the Mudhoney/Nirvana/Tad camp, and then on the other hand, there was the Mother Love Bone/Pearl Jam/Alice in Chains [camp] — a little more MOR/hard rock.

  STEVE MANNING: Much more reminiscent of what was going on in L.A. at the time. The music was new, but they still seemed like they were some crossover to both sides.

  JEFF GILBERT: Still a little on the glammy side, because of Andrew. He didn’t care about grunge — even though they were lumped into that, they weren’t really. He was a very soulful singer, very melodic. Probably one of the more melodic bands, outside of Alice in Chains, of that era. Andy wanted to be a rock star — he didn’t care how, he was just going to do it. Truly, nobody would have been able to touch him, in terms of being “the charismatic front man” he was back then. The potential he had was just sick. To see it in person would be to understand it better. You stood there, and you’re going, “Oh, he’s going to be one of the biggest rock stars in the world — no question.” The band wasn’t really even that good per se — they were all just like everybody else, trying to make some noise. Not him. He had his sights set on big, big things. No matter what stage they were on, it would be like the biggest gig they ever had. I remember Ann Wilson from Heart came to see them. He had a glass of beer — and I can even tell you what beer it was, it was Schmidt Animal beer. Because at the Central, they sold one dollar sixteen-ounce cans — “a pound of beer for a buck.” He was dancing around, grabbed the beer, sees Ann, and gets that weird look — very mischievous. He threw his beer at her — just drenched her. She looked really stunned. He looked over, smiled, and winked. And right there, you knew they were going to be best friends. She “got it” — instantly. It was one of the coolest rock moments I had ever seen down there.

  BRUCE FAIRWEATHER: The first show we played was at the OK Hotel. I remember a girl being high on ecstasy, knocking my amp off stage, going, “Where’s Stoney? Where’s Stoney?” I think we bummed out a lot of people — it was totally different than Green River. We ended up getting a new following.

  DAWN ANDERSON: I was thinking, “These guys are going to lose a lot of fans, and they’re going to get a lot of new ones. They’re going to probably be a lot bigger than Malfunkshun ever was.”

  STU HALLERMAN: I met Andrew through Chris years before. And I’d see him up at Susan’s office, just being this little smiley, helper, gnome guy. KISW used to do these rising star concert series shows, and one of those was Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden, and Jane’s Addiction. The band’s jamming, the singer is not onstage yet, and all of a sudden, here comes this guy with a cape and a mic stand with no base. He leaps up on the guitar cabinets and yells, “HELLO SEATTLE!” Like he’s some star from out of town. People either scowled or cracked up.

  LILLY MILIC: Everybody I knew wouldn’t go to a Mother Love Bone show — that was a completely different scene. That was the big hair and hairspray. You couldn’t go into the bathrooms because there was so much hair-spray everywhere.

  Andrew Wood: January 6, 1966 – March 19, 1990

  JEFF AMENT: Any contacts I made on the Green River trips, I sent tapes to, and said, “Can you help get us a show during these two weeks?” We were starting to line up shows, and Dayle Gloria, the woman who booked [Green River] at the Scream with Jane’s Addiction, was friends with Anna Statman. Anna called me back — she was working at Slash. Right in the middle of all that, she quit her job at Slash, and started working at Geffen. She called and said, “We want to sign you to a demo deal” — they give you a couple of grand to record a few songs. Kind of a test run. We did that — it was just on. People started calling me at work. Within a month, there were seven or eight labels that were trying to get up to Seattle to see us play or take us out to dinner. I think it’s what Andy termed “the Seattle Dinner Tour.”

  JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER: At the time, it blew my mind — I think it was Polydor [that] gave them a quarter of a million dollars to record a record. Only later did I think, “It’s going to take them a year, they’re going to spend it all on recording, and how much do five guys make a year?” So great — they got ten dollar an hour jobs [laughs].

  XANA LA FUENTE: I did Andrew’s wardrobe — I literally made every stitch of clothing he wore. Or I’d find stuff and sew stuff on it, or pain
t stuff on jeans. I made lots of hats and jackets that were worn by other bands — whether it’s Chris [Cornell] or the chicks from Heart.

  KEN STRINGFELLOW: I took some of his shtick at face value. So I was like, “What the fuck? This guy is stupid [laughs]. Just shut up.” But now I’ve come to appreciate it a lot more. I did have a “watershed,” when they played at the Vogue. They were definitely past the point of needing to play there, and man, the show was totally amazing. I was like, “ Oh… OK. This band’s great and he’s funny.” I got close enough to realize what his shtick was consisting of — it was with a wink.

  NILS BERNSTEIN: Sub Pop flew J Mascis to town, which resulted in the “The Wagon” single, and all he wanted to see was Mother Love Bone. Which technically, would have been uncool at the time — except we all wanted to go too.

  BRUCE FAIRWEATHER: We were playing in Montreal I think, and [Andy] had a wireless microphone. He went running into the crowd, and was singing and dancing around. He came running back to the stage, whispering in everyone’s ear, “Ian Astbury’s here!” He was totally excited — he almost wet his pants. Afterwards, we got to meet him, and every time Ian Astbury was looking away, he’d start dancing around.

  SCOTTY CRANE: I remember [Andy] calling up Slam. He used to call him Chadwick — he was literally at every single show. That guy put up posters for every single band in Seattle — he would plaster all of Seattle. Part of the deal was ten bucks and a guest pass. In the early days, he would jump off the pas and monitors. I remember a show at the Gorilla Gardens — it was either during the Accüsed or Malfunkshun — Chad jumped off the monitors, everybody moved, and [he] landed on his head! If you listen to Mother Love Bone bootlegs, you can hear Andy call out “Chadwick” at almost every show. But if you watch [the movie] Singles, at the very beginning — you see Chad putting up flyers around town. That’s how much of a staple he was, that they had to include him in that.

  JONATHAN EVISON: Slam Hate — now known as Chad — who I’ve long considered something of a mascot for the Seattle scene, used to have this big butch girlfriend named Wendy. On the back of Slam’s leather coat, in the handwriting of a dyslexic eight-year-old, said, “Slam + Wendy = Sex.” I always thought that was eloquent. It’s still my favorite math equation.

  DUFF McKAGAN: Greg Gilmore I’d played with before. I was pretty good buddies with [Andy]. They’d gotten a record deal just after we got our record deal. For me, it was only a matter of time before people on a national level started realizing Seattle talent. Mother Love Bone was great — they made a great record.

  JEFF AMENT: It took so fucking long. We never dealt with a major label at that point, and Michael Goldstone, who we signed with at PolyGram, was probably the most thorough and partly neurotic of all the people we could have signed with. That’s one of the reasons why we signed with him — we could tell that he really cared about what we were doing. He was so meticulous about every little aspect that it just took us forever. We recorded with a bunch of different people. We put out an EP [1989’s Shine] that we recorded with Mark Dearnley, who was an engineer with AC/DC — which seemed like a great idea at the time. And then we recorded a couple of songs with this guy Davitt Sigerson, who was a really super-bizarre choice — he did David & David, and the Bangles. We went through that whole process, and we were like, “We want to record with somebody that we know.” That’s when we started talking to Terry Date.

  TERRY DATE: We recorded the basic band tracks [for 1990’s Apple] down in Sausalito, at the Plant. We were down there for the big earthquake in ’89. Bruce Fairweather and I were doing guitars when it happened, or we were actually taking a break — we were in the lounge. Running out into the parking lot when that thing happened, and seeing Carlos [Santana] and some of his people out there, with a cooler.

  That was a lot of fun working on that record. We all lived in the same condo — we shared a couple of condos. Andy was a blast — he almost burned the studio down once. He always leaves candles burning on his keyboard. He came in to check the vocal parts, he was sitting next to me, and all of a sudden, he jumps up, and runs out of the studio. I look out there and there’s four-foot flames on the carpet below his keyboard — the candle had fallen off.

  JEFF AMENT: We went to Sausalito for, like, three months — recording at a studio that was a thousand bucks a day. In retrospect, it wasn’t the right way to make a record. What we should have done is practiced more and actually gotten to the point where we could have played the songs better, and then cut the record more live.

  TERRY DATE: Andy was like your little brother … or big brother. He was like a brother that you couldn’t quite get to know. He was the nicest guy I’d ever been around, but also the hardest to get close to. He was always open to trying things. We were doing the middle break [of “Holy Roller”] that he always ad-libbed live. It’s very difficult to do that in a studio, obviously. So I suggested that he take a huge poster board, and just randomly write as many words on there as he could, then when he went to do the part, just open his eyes and whatever word he saw, he’d ad-lib off of that. That’s what we ended up doing.

  SHAWN SMITH: There was a point where my two favorite acts in the world were Prince and Mother Love Bone. Both did something to me that few other acts had done — gave me chills. “Stardog Champion,” there’s a breakdown right before the big outro, and it just felt like electricity came down. It was a show at the Central, I think. The other moment was at a sound check, at that same venue — “Gentle Groove.” It was the first time I heard the band play it. That was just a huge leap in understanding what’s possible.

  PETE DROGE: They had the cool, slinky, guitar interweaving thing down really well. I wasn’t so used to, at that point, hearing friends’ records that sounded like real records.

  KEVIN WOOD: I knew that he always wanted to have “the Andy Wood Band.” He felt guilty and sad about breaking up Malfunkshun, but he was excited about the possibility of making some money playing rock ’n’ roll. In retrospect, I can’t see how that band could have been the vehicle for his ultimate success, because it was so … I don’t know, cliché-ish. The only way that he would be artistically happy was if he were calling the shots as far as the compositions — like he did in Malfunkshun. I think Malfunkshun would have been the better vehicle for his talents. He did get the nod to do [a solo album]. I was working with him on some of that material — we were doing preproduction at his apartment. He wanted me to be the guitar player on his solo thing, which was pretty goddamn cool, after all was said and done. I felt like, “The guy’s got a heart after all.” I mean, I knew he always had a heart — it broke his heart to break up Malfunkshun. He was going to redeem himself.

  SCOTTY CRANE: I don’t think Mother Love Bone was “it.” Stoney was working on [Andy’s solo songs] too. I have recordings — it was really rough four-track demos. I don’t think that was the solo album that would have made him famous. Really where you can hear a hint of what was to come is on “Crown of Thorns,” “Man of Golden Words,” or “Chloe Dancer” — the ballads. I think Andy had had his time with his obvious influences with KISS, but ultimately, it was his Elton John that was going to come out. And that’s what he was going to be — a ballad singer/songwriter. He didn’t have the voice Elton John does, but it was getting better and better all the time. He did possess the charm to do it.

  JEFF AMENT: We were getting ready to put the record out, and talking about touring — we were so anxious to get out and play. We were tired of being in Seattle, and tired of getting ready to do it. We just wanted to get out and do it. And then Andy died.

  KEVIN WOOD: He was a hundred days out of rehab. I had a premonition that he relapsed — I had been off alcohol for probably two years at that time, and I was tuned into that way of thinking. I called him on it and he denied it. Then the day after that, my dad called me from Harbor View, saying that he had overdosed and was in the hospital. It’s still hard to believe it actually happened — it’s one of the most horrible things I’v
e ever had to deal with. You just never get over that kind of thing.

  XANA LA FUENTE: I just came home. The band was supposed to tell me if there was anything fishy going on. He had called Kelly [Curtis], and said he wasn’t going to be able to make it to practice, and that Xana was going to think he did drugs. He said, “Did you?” [Andy] said, “No,” and he said, “You have nothing to worry about.” That would have been the time to call me, but they didn’t. I was at a meeting at work, and I couldn’t answer my phone. I don’t know if he tried to call. I took a couple of friends from work home, and that took about a half an hour out of my time. That always bothered me, because the nurses at the hospital kept saying, “If you had been there just ten minutes sooner.” Because he wasn’t dead, or blue, or anything — he was just asleep — unconscious. They pronounced him dead — they told me to go to Harbor View. And then he was alive again — in a coma for three days. Then they said his brain had swelled too much. It was weird, because another guy came in, in worse condition than him. His brain was swelled too, and he lived.

  JEFF AMENT: That night, Kelly Curtis, Greg, and I were talking to a guy that was going to be our tour manager. That was about as big of a punch in the gut as you could possibly have at that point. Andy was doing so good — he was working out every day, going to meetings, seemed really stoked to live out his rock dreams … fuck.

  STU HALLERMAN: Just prior to [Soundgarden’s] show, the crew was in the bus and the band was not. We got a phone call from Xana to our tour manager. I’m not sure how we got this message from her, but she said she had gotten back from the hospital. Our tour manager said, “Don’t tell the band, we’ll tell them after the show, I don’t want to ruin this last show.” So we held our tongues, did this last show [with Voivod and Faith No More at New York’s L’Amour]. We had a lot of fun onstage — in the back of our minds, knowing that we had to tell Chris that our friend was gone. So that was pretty bad. Susan Silver was there that night, which was good, because Chris was very attached to Andrew.