Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [132]
SCOTT MCCULLUM I remember Chris being really pissed at Andy, shortly after he died. I was really surprised by that, actually. He’d be, “Fuckin’ idiot! Fuckin’ motherfucker!” Really just mad, and upset, that he had done what he did. He was really hurt. Of course, obviously he came to terms with it; the Temple of the Dog thing happened, and he wrote some amazing songs and got a great album out of the whole thing.
XANA LA FUENTE With Temple of the Dog, Chris handed me a cassette and said, “These are songs I wrote about Andrew for you. This is just for you.” Stoney and Jeff heard me playing that cassette at Kelly Curtis’s house, where I was living upstairs at the time. They flipped and were like, “What is that?” I said, “It’s Chris’s, songs that he made for me.” They rode his ass and they were like, “We gotta do that.”
CHRIS CORNELL I had written “Say Hello to Heaven” and “Reach Down,” and I had recorded them by myself at home. My initial thought was I could record them with the ex-members of Mother Love Bone as a tribute single to Andy. And I got a phone call from Jeff, saying he just thought the songs were amazing and let’s make a whole record. When we started rehearsing the songs, I had pulled out “Hunger Strike” and I had this feeling it was just kind of gonna be filler, it didn’t feel like a real song. Eddie was sitting there kind of waiting for a [Mookie Blaylock] rehearsal and I was singing parts, and he kind of humbly—but with some balls—walked up to the mic and started singing the low parts for me because he saw it was kind of hard. We got through a couple choruses of him doing that and suddenly the lightbulb came on in my head, this guy’s voice is amazing for these low parts. History wrote itself after that, that became the single.…
XANA LA FUENTE By the time Andy died, I was sick of crying. That’s why Chris wrote “poor stargazer/she’s got no tears in her eyes.” Everyone was just waiting for me to flip out because I never cried.
KIM THAYIL The initial purpose of Temple of the Dog, to be a tribute to Andy Wood, was not the concluding purpose. I think to be a tribute to Andy Wood, there were a lot of people who were close to Andy, like his brothers, who probably should’ve been involved. It became something else; it became a Chris solo record, with some of his friends, the survivors of Mother Love Bone, playing with him.
KEVIN WOOD I fully expected to be included in that project, although they never called me. I was pretty pissed off at the time that I didn’t get to play on that, or wasn’t even considered to be asked.
GRANT ALDEN I happened to be in L.A., on the A&M lot. I was friends with a publicist at A&M named Rick Gershon. Rick came back to his office and the publicity photos for Temple of the Dog were sitting by his desk, and I remember Rick looking up, looking at me, and looking down at the photo and saying, “Who the fuck is Eddie Vedder, and why is he in my picture?”
SCOTT VANDERPOOL (KXRX/KCMU DJ; Room Nine drummer) I did an on-air interview with Eddie Vedder at KXRX when he was pretty new to the area. The one thing that I remember about it was that when we were listening to songs and talking in between, he said he didn’t want me mentioning on the air that he’d been hanging out with Chris Cornell. He didn’t want to be seen as some kind of rock star.
NANCY WILSON The next time I saw those guys, probably just a few months later at the Moore Theatre, Eddie was climbing off the P.A. speakers up the side of the wall and jumping headlong into the audience off the balcony. He had acquired his wings. The next show I saw him at, I waded through the people and found him and said, “Hey, Eddie, I hear you can fly!” He just got this big sunshine grin.
KELLY CURTIS PolyGram had let everybody go from Mother Love Bone except for Jeff and Stone and said, “We retain the rights to you guys.” In the meantime, both Michael Goldstone and Michele