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Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [113]

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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.

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