CHAPTER 3

MOTHER LOVE BONE

Big Songs, Big Boas, Big Tragedy

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in a tiny town in Mississippi called Tupelo. Love him or hate him, the King was a legend, infusing the blues with rockabilly and country and bringing it to Americans with a hipness and sexuality never seen before. On the day Elvis turned thirty-one, a boy named Andrew was born to David and Marin Wood in Columbus, Mississippi, a scant sixty-two miles south of Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo. Eleven years later, Presley passed away at his home in Memphis at forty-two. Autopsies revealed that he had no fewer than ten different narcotics in his system at the time of his death. Though his popularity was waning, he was still the top concert draw of 1977, an amazing feat considering he died that year and only toured for five months.

Andrew Wood, however, never got the chance to see his popularity wane, as he died of a heroin overdose in 1990 at age twenty-four. Wood probably would never have become as popular as Elvis, nor would his band Mother Love Bone. For posterity, all we have is one album, mountains of stories, and lots of promises and speculation. In life, Wood wanted to start a revolution that harkened back to the sixties; in death, he kick-started a phenomenon that defined the closing years of the millennium. Clearly, no matter what was going to happen to Andrew Wood, he was going to make an impact and leave a lasting impression.

When he was just eighteen years old, Wood formed Malfunkshun with his brother Kevin and drummer Regan Hagar. Often considered one of grunge’s forefathers (they were included on the Deep Six compilation—the Holy Grail of Seattle grunge), Malfunkshun immediately became a massive local hit. They were the sort of band that other bands came out to see, which is why they became close with so many of the other musicians in town and often collaborated with them.

Malfunkshun remains one of grunge’s dirty little secrets. For an entire genre built around not only avoiding the bloated theatricality of rock stardom but also regularly expressing hatred for those who trafficked in that sort of pomp, Malfunkshun seemed like the epitome of everything grunge rockers later grew to hate (at least publicly). Their songs certainly fell into the correct idiom, as they were chock-full of hard-driving riffs, but the twist was in the presentation. For one thing, each band member took on an alter ego. Kevin Wood became known as Kevinstein, and Regan Hagar was called Thundarr. Though they took the characters seriously, dressing appropriately for concerts and acting generally like larger versions of themselves, they could not hold a candle to the level of commitment Andrew Wood had to his character, L’Andrew the Love Child. Often clad in over-the-top outfits, complete with feather boas, L’Andrew was a glossy, glammy rock god who resembled Skid Row front man Sebastian Bach but most clearly channeled Freddie Mercury.

Wood’s bombast highlighted one of the heaviest influences of grunge that is rarely mentioned in conversation. While most people point to the punk influences or the metal influences, seventies stadium rock had as much to do with the grunge sound as anything, and Andrew Wood’s embracing of Steven Tyler’s rock-and-roll persona is the prime example of that. Many bands’ embracing of seventies riffs, hooks, and solos (most notably Pearl Jam’s and Soundgarden’s) was typically wrapped in other influences, but Wood brought the theatricality of those bands to the forefront.

Malfunkshun shows were as much about Wood’s appearance and stage banter as they were about music. This was convenient, because Malfunkshun was not a very good band. Wood was by far the most compelling force in the mix, and the songs are neither catchy for their hooks nor memorable for their bombast. In fact, Malfunkshun’s contributions are the weakest of all the Deep Six bands, but even on those recordings, you can tell Wood was an entirely different animal than anyone else involved.

His stage persona was sabotaged by his actual personality, however; in real life, Wood was terribly shy, and relied heavily on drugs to get over that. He did a stint in rehab as early as 1985, but by the time Malfunkshun broke up in 1988, his drug problems were escalating. Still, he managed to continue making music and formed what was one of the most short-lived but also most important bands of the grunge era.

Mother Love Bone was birthed in late 1988 by Wood, guitarist Stone Gossard, and bassist Jeff Ament. The latter two had come from Green River and would eventually form Pearl Jam, and they brought in second guitarist Bruce Fairweather (also formerly of Green River, later of Love Battery) and drummer Greg Gilmore (a cohort of superproducer Jack Endino) to round out the quintet. Though their time was short, the band managed to make quite an impression, as well as providing Ament and Gossard with an incubator that allowed their Pearl Jam concepts to gestate.

When people try to put the sound of grunge into words, they often try to think of a combination of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but the band they end up describing sounds a lot like Mother Love Bone. The punk influence was present, as the band’s simple structures and sped-up rhythms illustrated. The metal influence was also there, though not nearly as pronounced as Soundgarden’s metal leanings. But mostly they manage to take the sound of Zeppelin- and Aerosmith-esque arena rock and mutate it into something that doesn’t sound like anything else. It was certainly not mainstream, but it could sound at home on the radio. Mother Love Bone hit on a delicate musical chemistry that was damn near perfect.

The only music Mother Love Bone left behind was the proper album Apple (released after Wood’s death) and a self-titled compilation (sometimes referred to as Stardog Champion) that combines tracks from Apple with a handful of takes from their EP, Shine. Though Mother Love Bone was only a band for two years, their sound was tremendously evolved, as though they had been a functioning unit for much longer.

In all of Mother Love Bone’s music, you can hear Pearl Jam starting to develop. “This Is Shangrila” has the same kind of jangly, cascading guitar riff that made up the cornerstones of songs such as “State of Love and Trust,” while the epic ballad “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” not only is a nod to the theatricality of Meat Loaf–esque ballads of yesteryear but also hints at high-drama Pearl Jam tunes such as “Release” and “Yellow Leadbetter.”

Mother Love Bone was by far the biggest band in Seattle during their tenure, as they had a built-in following from both Green River and Malfunkshun fans. Their live shows are the stuff of legend, because they were showcases not only for the band’s excellent songs but also for Wood’s loose-cannon attitude and performance style. So great was the buzz that they were able to sign a major-label deal based on those shows and their self-released EP, Shine. The band was never able to enjoy the spoils of their success, however, as Wood died on March 19, 1990, (just a few weeks shy of the album’s release date) of a cereberal hemorrhage brought on by an overdose of heroin. As with many fallen rock idols before him, drugs contributed a great deal to who he was both personally and professionally and ultimately led to his undoing. He was only twenty-four years old but still managed to leave quite an impression on the rock community and inspired the best supergroup of the grunge era: Temple of the Dog.

Mother Love Bone broke ground in the Seattle scene, both sonically and philosophically, setting up a number of precedents that other bands followed closely once the scene exploded. Of course, Wood’s was the biggest death in the close-knit Seattle rock community until the one-two punch of Kurt Cobain’s and Hole’s Kristen Pfaff’s deaths in 1994. Considering that Wood died in 1990 and Cobain in ’94, their deaths essentially bookend the peak of the grunge era. When the scene is bookended by death, then death will no doubt color the music created within it. There’s a reason that so many of those grunge songs sound so depressing.

But while many of the musicians involved in the grunge scene felt that specter of death in real time, the fact that Pearl Jam was formed after an overdose and the scene began to implode because of a suicide will forever give people the perception that Seattle was ensconced in a culture of death. After Kurt’s suicide, a lot of his lyrics suddenly had new meanings. Kurt did not write: “And I swear that I don’t have a gun” (from “Come as You Are”) knowing that it would be ironic later, but fans and writers did become fixated on the fact that Cobain had made so many references to firearms in his lyrics and nobody had really noticed it before. Lyrically speaking, that irony is what Kurt is more known for now than any of his other imagery.

Courtney Love ran into a similar problem when her band Hole released Live Through This. Because that album came out only a week after her husband’s death, it was immediately processed and interpreted as an album directed at Cobain’s suicide, even though those songs were written and recorded well before Kurt died. The frustrating thing is that some of those songs do actually sound like they could have been written as a reaction to the suicide. Love’s line “They get what they want, and they never want it again” (from “Violet”) could easily function as a reaction to her husband’s untimely passing. Of course that makes no logical sense, but time lines tend to fall by the wayside when people are trying to put social histories together. Consequently, Love’s album will always bear the burden of Kurt’s death.

*   *   *

BESIDES CONTRIBUTING to the culture of death (or at least the perceived culture of death—and remember that historically speaking, perception is everything), Mother Love Bone also stood out from the pack because they were careerist. While Mark Arm formed Mudhoney as an all-encompassing expression of his musical vision, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament wanted to be rock stars, and Mother Love Bone was designed to take them there. They didn’t record an EP just to get it into indie record stores; they did it so they could court the attention of major labels. Despite the fact that grunge rockers, fans, and writers sought to maintain as much indie credibility and integrity as possible, nobody turned their noses up at Mother Love Bone. Indeed, whenever any of those bands broke out, they were never considered sellouts. Of course, the people from the scene knew the trials and tribulations of the band members, and since they had been playing music in Seattle for nearly a decade, the yearning for a little success was justified. But people on the outside were less aware of the background stories, so they were unfairly judging bands for which they had no context. Pearl Jam was often accused of being careerist, but rarely by people inside of Seattle. Unfortunately, Kurt Cobain was one of the people who lobbed that accusation at Vedder and company, so they will always be a considered a little ethically loose because Kurt declared them so (even though he recanted his anti–Pearl Jam statements later).

Ironically, Pearl Jam was careerist, as was Mother Love Bone. But both those bands earned their careerism, and therein lay the disconnect. Bands were not shunned for wanting to be famous, but new bands were. That’s why the bands that formed to jump on the bandwagon were so viciously attacked by the core community. But since they were attacking those bands when the rest of the world was paying attention, the perception was that grunge fans were fickle and expected their bands to play down their rock-star tendencies and remain small. Interestingly, Pearl Jam did actively get smaller after the release of Vs. when they decided to shun videos and public exposure, but even that seemed to some like a too-calculated beg for relevance through martyrdom. Eddie Vedder could never buy a break, and it would have been interesting to see whether or not Andrew Wood would have received the same amount of ire for his rock-star ambitions.

*   *   *

ANDREW WOOD’S death wasn’t just about the end of a band or the mourning of a city or the coming together of a new project. Rather, it was the final gasp for a dying breed. Wood lived a hard-rock lifestyle, and when he died he did it as a cautionary tale. He gave an outlet to a lot of musicians and inspired even more, but he also unknowingly started grunge down the path to destruction. Suddenly everything was more serious. In Seattle, it wasn’t just about music or business anymore—it was about life and death. The serious era was about to begin, and it was time to do something meaningful or disappear forever. The battle lines were clearly drawn, and a kid from suburban Washington took aim.