Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [230]
KEVIN MARTIN Touring with the Flaming Lips was inspirational. This is a band that blew us off the stage every fucking night. And look at ’em now. If you look at the story of the Flaming Lips, these were four buddies that just started writing really fucking eclectic, weird music with no real agenda. There’s no argument, there’s no fight, they just keep producing these brilliant fucking records. Candlebox, unfortunately, as good as the songs that we’ve written are, we’re just this fucking disjointed band.
Pete and I argue so much, it’s ridiculous. And that’s because we weren’t friends when we started the band, so we didn’t have an understanding of each other’s characteristics. We’ve learned them over the years, but neither of us is really happy with the other person’s idiosyncracies. We’re like coworkers, exactly. That’s a great way to define what Candlebox is. Fortunately, we’re coworkers that can produce some really fucking great products.
WAYNE COYNE We saw the clumsiness of their shows and their songs and their identity, and everything about it just seemed like, damn, this is too much, too soon. Candlebox really had nothing. They’re just like, We like grunge! We’re a big grunge band! I’m not putting it down simply because it’s popular; it just wasn’t our trip.
The band would offer you cocaine virtually every time you would run into them backstage, like, We’re big rock stars, and we’re going to do some cocaine backstage. We were by no means straight edge, but we’re making $500 a night, they’re making $5 million. We’re not really rubbing noses with the same people here. And their road crew were guys who six months ago were touring with Mötley Crüe, and it was a very arena-rock mentality.
KEVIN MARTIN When we asked Flaming Lips to open for us, people maybe started to pay attention to what we were doing. That we weren’t having bands tour with us to sell tickets. We wanted bands to play with us that we appreciated.
We were always very into being from Seattle, and because we were fortunate enough to have some success, we always wanted to take bands from Seattle on the road with us. We took Sweet Water; we took Green Apple for a few weeks; we took Seaweed for fuckin’ six weeks.
SCOTT MERCADO The big three or four bands in Seattle were like, This is our club, you’re not invited. Like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam. I was still friends with some of them, but they would never take us on tour or anything like that. But at that point, it didn’t matter. We were getting offers from Metallica, Living Colour, Rush, so we didn’t need to go on tour with them or feel a need to share a stage with them.
I was friends with Sean Kinney, and he told me, “I like your style, you’re a great drummer. I just don’t like your singer” or “I don’t like your music.” I admired Sean for saying that, as opposed to talking about us behind our backs. This was actually after we got the gig with Metallica, because Alice in Chains dropped out.
SEAN KINNEY We were rehearsing at the Moore Theatre to get ready for Metallica. Layne was in a treatment place, and we’d been rehearsing ourselves. Nobody had talked to him—he’d been gone all that time. He just showed up, and there were bad circumstances. It just wasn’t happening. Lost a lot of trust in him. Lost some trust in each other for a while.
MIKE INEZ I personally have never tried heroin. Everybody points at Layne, but I gotta tell ya, it was all of us. We were doing all kinds of different shit. Just the fuckin’ drugs, man. All of us were out of control. It was a really hard time, and that’s how we dealt with the pressure and the touring schedule. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for the world, but certainly now, 20 years later, I’m looking back at it going, Okay, maybe my behavior was a little over the top at that time. But, hey, we were four young single guys, just banging chicks on first-class flights. At least we could say we did it.
We had a meeting, and it was really, really, really