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We saw Madonna again that July, after we had sold a million records, and they gave us our plaques. She was like, “Hi, how are you? What’s going on? Congratulations,” and then left. It seemed as though that person we had met was turned off and gone. It was like nothing had ever happened.

KEVIN MARTIN The grunge label was a fuckin’ major hindrance to us. We were labeled “grunge lite.” They would say, “Grunge-lite band Candlebox.” We were lumped in with Bush, Live, Collective Soul. People confused us with Collective Soul all the time. I got divorced in ’02 and was dating Zoe, Jason Bonham’s sister, briefly. I went over to see her in London and hang out with her, and her brother is like, “I love your band.”

I’m like, “Wow, cool. I can’t believe you know us.”

“Yeah, man: Duh nuh nuh Nah nuh nuh Nah nuh Nah nuh NAH. ‘Yeah!’ ”

I’m like, “That’s Collective Soul.”

RUSTY WILLOUGHBY Flop played a show with Candlebox in Boise. We showed up at the club, and we’re in our little crap-ass van, and they had a bus. They were trying to be real nice to us, but we just thought they were jerks because they were in a bus. Who knows, they could’ve been nice people. But you’d see the lead singer of that band driving around town in his new red Porsche.

KEVIN MARTIN I was so embarrassed to drive my fiancée’s Mercedes 190E in Seattle. That’s like a toy car. Anybody could afford it, but I was embarrassed to drive it. I thought that I wasn’t supposed to have a nice car in Seattle. Your mentality turns into that because you’re dealing with what people are writing about you in the press.

Rolling Stone did an article on us, but they didn’t want to, so they fuckin’ bashed us. It was ’94, when we were touring with the Flaming Lips. The guy came out with us for two weeks. Then he just talked shit. During a show, Pete went to kick over his amps, and his guitar tech was tired of fuckin’ rebuilding them, so he put some pillows down behind them. The writer is like, “They’re so concerned about their gear they put pillows behind it.” That’s not us.

BARDI MARTIN The drum tech had a cushion that he used to sit on waiting for Scotty; rather than sitting on the hard ground, he sat on a fuckin’ pillow or something. The writer had to have known it. He couldn’t have been that blind. Can’t you find enough shit to throw at this band without actually lying about it?

He basically painted a picture of four undeserving dipshits on the road.

GUY OSEARY Did I ever have discussions with the band about their reputation? Absolutely never. It didn’t matter. We were doing great! We did great, we made good fans, we had a good album, we had a good ride. First album sold three and a half million, which is great! That was done week by week by week by week, man.

WAYNE COYNE (singer for Oklahoma City’s the Flaming Lips) Candlebox wasn’t just the nail in the coffin of grunge. To me, they arrived as the coffin of grunge music.

We toured with them for three months at the end of 1994. At the beginning of that phase, they were playing to 4,000 or 5,000 people a night, and by the end, they were playing these giant arenas—hockey rinks, for the most part, that hold 10,000 people—and they’re selling them out a couple of nights in a row.

I think we were invited because they thought we made the tour seem more authentic or more cool. And I’m not saying we were cool, or authentic. I think there’s an element of, Look, we’re Candlebox. You may think we’re shit, but we like the Flaming Lips, and doesn’t that make us seem cooler?

We all were against it on sort of a practical principle level. We don’t like the group, so why would you want to spend three months playing with them? And then you think, Well, we could make some money, and we would be able to play to an audience that would never come to see us otherwise. And I think it worked out great for us. By the end of that tour, our song “She Don’t Use Jelly” was being played on the radio everywhere we went. Part of it probably was because we were playing with Candlebox. We would play “She