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SCOTT MERCADO (Candlebox/Sky Cries Mary drummer) I’m a little bit older than the other guys in Candlebox. I was born in San Francisco and at the age of one I moved to Kirkland, which is a suburb about five miles outside Seattle. Even thought I was ingrained a bit in the Seattle scene, I never thought it would be anything. My thoughts, having studied jazz and having gone to school for music in L.A., were, This is cool, it’s interesting, but it will never go anywhere.

Susan Silver managed a band I was in, First Thought, which was a Simple Minds wannabe kind of band. I was also in Sky Cries Mary, who were kind of a grunge band—very alternative, some electronica involved, too. I knew Stone, and I was also jamming here and there with Shawn Smith. I met Tad. In fact, I auditioned for his band, but I just wasn’t really into it at that time.

I was also friends with Jonathan Poneman. I never met anybody so enthusiastic about the music scene here. Like, “Scott, you’d like this drummer. His name is Matt Cameron, he plays for a band called Soundgarden.” “Oh, come on, Jonathan, you talked about that band last week.” So I did go and see them, and sure enough, that was probably the first band that I saw and I said to myself, This band’s gonna go somewhere. There were only a couple other bands that I thought were equal to Candlebox, if not better, music-wise, and one of those was Soundgarden.

BARDI MARTIN (Candlebox bassist) I was born in Olympia, Washington, and moved to Seattle when I was a few weeks old. I went to Mercer Island High School with Kevin. He had a different haircut every week. I can vaguely remember him having one-inch-long bleached dreads. He was trying pretty hard at it. He was always kind of a fast talker, but a good guy.

PETER KLETT (Candlebox guitarist) I grew up outside of Seattle, in what they call Bellevue. People considered it Bellevue, which was very rich and yuppie, but it was actually more the Eastgate area, which was a little less pretentious.

I got out of high school and joined some goofy band called Toxxl’rae. The singer was real into fucking Def Leppard and Aerosmith. The poser-type shit. I did some shows around town, and the ’90s thing hit. I saw Mookie Blaylock. I saw Soundgarden at the Off Ramp and Alice in Chains at the Central. Just before it really exploded. Me and the drummer of Toxxl’rae really liked that kind of music, so the group basically disbanded.

SCOTT MERCADO I knew Kevin because I crashed his 16th birthday party with the lead singer of First Thought, Joshua Pierce. His 16th birthday party—how funny is that? I was probably 20. Yeah, it was a little weird—it was my friend Joshua’s idea. I think he was 19. Even though I was a little older, you hear about these huge parties that you need to go to. We all got drinking and there were lots of girls there, lots of people hanging out. But it wasn’t like a high school party.

I hung out with one of Kevin’s future girlfriends, Angie, who came up to me after I left Sky Cries Mary and said, “Remember Kevin Martin? He wants to start a band; he’s thinking about calling you.”

I’m like, “He plays drums. We’re not going to have two drummers in the band.”

She said, “No, he’s singing now.” He wasn’t a great drummer, but he had a lot of charisma and was very outgoing, so being a singer is definitely more his personality.

KELLY GRAY (producer; Queensrÿche/Myth guitarist) I’ve known Scott Mercado, geez, since I was 16. He was in a band called Realms, who had played with Myth and Shadow. Then the guitar player, Peter, I knew from a band he was in with another buddy of mine, which was called Toxxl’rae—it was the ’80s, you know. And the way that Candlebox came together is that Kevin Martin and Scott Mercado had a project called Uncle Duke. And I’m at the Vogue, I’m hanging out with Pete, and Scott Mercado came over and told me they didn’t have a guitar player.

PETER KLETT Kelly introduced me to Scott, and I was like, “Cool. Let’s do it.” As I was walking out of the Vogue, I met Kevin. So that was my introduction