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BARDI MARTIN I had been in a string of shitty bands, and I was over at a friend of mine’s, Adam, who was the singer for Sweet Water, and Sarah his girlfriend, venting about just how frustrated I was. I hadn’t seen Kevin since high school, and they mentioned that Kevin is looking for a bass player.

I was the last person to join. What ended up being “You,” which was one of the songs that did really well, happened when we were improvising, the first hour we were together. I had a rough song idea that became “Far Behind,” and I think we worked on that that night, too. It felt pretty magical early on.

At one point, I left town for a few days, and when I came back the band was called Candlebox. I always thought it was a shitty name.

KELLY GRAY I get a call about needing to get some demos for these guys, so we go in to Robert Lang and record basically a full-length demo. When Kevin was singing “Far Behind” at the studio, I looked at their then-manager and I said, “These guys are gonna make us rich.” It was obvious.

And then things started really changing. They were playing the Weathered Wall, which was basically the next club down from the Crocodile Café. It probably held about 600 people stuffed. They want me to run sound on this show, and I walk into this club—and it’s literally like their fourth gig—and there are so many people in this thing, and outside the door people can’t get in. I’m just like, “What the fuck is this?”

KEVIN MARTIN Spring of ’92 is when we did our demo tape and changed the name to Candlebox. We hadn’t been thinking, We’re gonna get rich doing this, until Nevermind went through the fuckin’ roof.

Candlebox took the most heat as a young band. Because nobody knew who we were, and we had kind of come out of obscurity.

BARDI MARTIN Things happened really fast for us. There were a lot of people that were really happy for things going well, but at the same time, musicians are some of the shittiest, most insecure people on the planet. There were people that were trying to make it that thought of us as unworthy. It seemed a lot like high school.

JEFF GILBERT Seattle never liked them—let me back up … Seattle fans loved them. But they were sneered at by the local rock journalists, and even the established grunge bands. They came on the tail end of grunge, and it looked like they were just trying to copy everything else before it. But, you know, they could knock out a good set of songs.

KELLY GRAY People just loved the band so much. They weren’t as crazy-serious as those “integrity-driven” bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Nirvana. Candlebox was doing a more normal, middle-of-the-road type of rock.

KEVIN MARTIN We got thrown on a BMI [Broadcast Music Inc.] showcase at the Off Ramp at the last minute. They said, “We need one more band. We’ll give you the 7 o’clock slot.” It was us, Sweet Water, Green Apple Quick Step, the Fire Ants—which was Kevin Wood’s band—and Blood Circus. Maybe one other band.

BARDI MARTIN It was like a “find the next Nirvana” sort of thing. The industry people descended on Seattle like flies on shit, and so there were just a ton of people from L.A. and New York there.

KEVIN MARTIN EMI saw us there, and they flew us down to Los Angeles in October of ’92. We played a show at Club Lingerie. We were supposed to meet with Fred Davis, who was the president of EMI at the time, but he never showed up.

Guy Oseary, who did A&R for Maverick, was there, and Guy saw us and called Freddy DeMann and said, “I want to meet this band.” Guy was 19 at the time; he went to school with Freddy’s daughter. Freddy was the president and owner of Maverick and Madonna’s manager at the time. Madonna was the money.

GUY OSEARY (Maverick Records A&R scout–turned–partner) It’s by luck, really, how it all came together. I had heard about Candlebox a few nights earlier—there’s this band from Seattle and they’re playing at Club Lingerie. I actually attended a party a few blocks away the same night, and luckily for me, it was a terrible party. I said, “You know what, why don’t