Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [129]
We were basically living on Top Ramen and generic beer and pancake mix. I believed that it was gonna happen, but Mike and Chris were like, “We gotta move home.” I think Mike was getting frustrated with the life. He just started partying hard and getting wasted. It wasn’t our thing, so he was doing it on his own. I’d be tryin’ to write lyrics; my focus was completely on the band. We never discussed this with him, but it probably was a reaction to, What the hell’s happening to my body? ’Cause he didn’t know he had Crohn’s disease at the time—that’s when it kinda started.
CHRIS FRIEL I was working at a record store, and I remember hearing the first Soundgarden EP and thinking, There’s definitely some cool stuff going on in Seattle. People were saying things were starting to happen there, and I was thinking, Did we move at the wrong time?
RICK FRIEL I was very sad when we moved home. Once we did, that was the end of the band. Mike fell off the face of the earth, and then he came over and gave me his guitar and said, “That’s it, I quit. I’m never playing music again.”
Mike became a hardcore Republican. He got a weird haircut and started wearing Hush Puppies and corduroy and big sweaters and started raving about Barry Goldwater. We were like, “What the hell?” But that wasn’t gonna last, ’cause every time we’d get together at people’s houses, we’d have these jams and we’d always hand him the acoustic guitar ’cause we were really upset he wasn’t playing anymore. He was like, “No, I don’t wanna play. I’m done.” But we would say, “C’mon, just play one song!” And it would turn into three, four, six songs. Eventually he formed a really cool band called Love Chile. It was a Stevie Ray Vaughan/Double Trouble, Jimi Hendrix Experience–type band.
MIKE MCCREADY (Pearl Jam/Temple of the Dog/Mad Season/Shadow guitarist) I was sitting around at a party with Pete Droge, an old friend of mine. I had my guitar and I was just jamming to a Stevie Ray Vaughan record when Stone, whom I’d known for a few years, walked up and said, “Wow, you’re really good!” At the time Stone’s band, Mother Love Bone, was happening, so I was really pleased that he liked my playing. About three months later, Stone called asking if I wanted to jam. So we got together and everything clicked.
A short while after we played together, Stone called and asked whether I’d be interested in joining his new band.
JEFF AMENT I was going through a major identity crisis at that point; I’d put my heart and soul into Mother Love Bone, gave up school, and to have it be snuffed out so quickly. All summer, Stone and I would meet up, mountain bike, and just talk. We aired our grievances with one another. He told me that I needed to lighten up a bit and I told him that he needed to take it more seriously.
CHRIS FRIEL Matt Cameron did most of the playing on the demos, and I did the rest. They had Matt play the stuff that was a little bit more like Mother Love Bone and a little more complicated. And with me, they knew they would get a pretty straight, really nice feel, a lot of space. I know that they were very keen on not letting too many people know that this was like a band—I think there was some legal wrangling going on—so it was called Stone Gossard Demos.
MICHAEL GOLDSTONE I knew Jack Irons from his band What Is This. He was always around L.A., and I ran into him at a party. Stone and Jeff had sent demos specifically for me to get to him. When I ran into Jack, I handed him the CD with the instrumental tracks on it.
JACK IRONS (Red Hot Chili Peppers/Eleven/later Pearl Jam drummer) I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1983. We were the original guys that started the band, and that lasted about nine months or a year. I stayed with my band What Is This, and I rejoined the Chili Peppers in ’86. We went through a pretty laborious process to get the material together for The Uplift Mofo Party Plan. We did a lot of touring, and that,