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PETER KLETT By Lucy, I’d be high on coke and all jittery and just wanting to get my tracks done so I could go. I was definitely guilty of calling in sick because I’m fucking hungover and not showing up to the studio, things like that. But sometimes we didn’t deserve to be ridiculed and yelled at. Kevin tends to think he was Mr. Perfect all the time.

SCOTT MERCADO The thing is that Kevin won’t sing until he feels that everything is right, and if your singer won’t sing until everything is right, what are you gonna do? He’s very, very, very anal about the drums. I think that’s why Candlebox goes through so many drummers. I just felt like, Okay, I’ll do it this way, just for the sake of getting it done.

KEVIN MARTIN I think they’d be foolish not to complain about me. The problem was, they don’t see me as the bandleader. In the studio, I would be like, “We have a record we’re trying to make here. Where the fuck are you guys?” They probably would call me a control freak, but the bottom line is if we decide to get started on something as a band, then that means if you’re not showing up you’re gonna get your fucking ass handed to you.

BARDI MARTIN I remember being there every day. In my mind, it wasn’t about people showing up or not showing up, it wasn’t about drugs, it was about not taking the time and the space to write the album that we probably could have written.

KEVIN MARTIN Courtney used to talk shit about us all the time. We saw her on MTV, talking about “stupid bands like Candlebox who ride the coattails of my husband.” That started in ’93, and after Kurt committed suicide, it was even worse.

COURTNEY LOVE Nobody cared for Candlebox. It seemed fake.

Guy Oseary signed two bands that made money out of the 48 bands that he signed to Maverick. The other was Alanis Morissette, and Alanis was the thing that really, really, really infuriated me. I was still filming Larry Flynt at the time that Alanis was selling fucking truckloads, and I forbade Woody Harrelson from mentioning Alanis to me. Candlebox was just sort of gay, but Alanis was a safe version of what I had been doing, and it really, really, really infuriated me.

Maverick tried to sign me. I walked into Maverick, and I felt like, Why are these people looking at me like I’m the Vegas dead Marilyn version of Madonna? I play rock music. This is a ghettoized bunch of shit. It was a joke meeting. I took it because it seemed funny and because Guy Oseary seemed very passionate.

I don’t want Madonna being my patron. It’s retarded. Do you know anything about the relationship between me and Madonna? No. What do you know about my relationship with Madonna beyond me throwing a MAC [compact] at Kurt Loder’s head?

PETER KLETT She just hated us for the same reason all the other assholes did. They could not handle the fact that we were successful. Fucking Courtney Love didn’t deserve squat, man! The reason she ever became anything was because of her husband. Period. End of story.

COURTNEY LOVE It’s not like the film industry, where everyone has to say they love each other when they hate each other. So I might say, “Oh, God, George was wonderful to work with, and Renée is the best actress in the history of the world, and Richard is a fantastic director.” But music is an industry where slagging each other becomes sort of a sport, particularly in the British press.

KEVIN MARTIN We did a magazine cover for The Rocket in ’95 and all dressed up like Courtney—in slips and blond wigs and tiaras and makeup—and the headline was CANDLEBOX: THE BOYS WITH THE MOST CAKE. It was a stab at her. But I had a lot of respect for her and I loved her records, and I still do. Charles Cross wrote the article, which helped to explain a lot of our history and where we came from, but it was a little bit too late for people in the Seattle scene to respect or understand it.

CHARLES R. CROSS We do this funny story with Candlebox, and I didn’t know that Courtney Love was going to be pissed off enough about it that she was going to threaten to come blow my toilet