Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [252]
We went to L.A. and recorded Happy Pills, and once we were on the road nonstop for months, it got to where everybody was in a screaming match every day and somebody was gonna quit the band every day. It just felt like the whole thing’s gonna friggin’ implode anyway, so why am I gonna wait till the last second? So I jumped ship, and then Bardi left right after I did.
KEVIN MARTIN After the first tour on Happy Pills, which would’ve been the fall of ’98, I went to Maverick and talked to Freddy and Guy. I said, “You know, you guys got to fucking show us some sort of commitment here, because we are losing faith in you as a label.” They said, “Everything’s fine. We’re working the record.” I’m like, “You’re not.”
Maverick dropped the ball. They fired the whole promotion staff right before we released the record. I have no idea why. We never got a straight answer from them about it. I think it was egos—Guy and Madonna were trying to buy Freddy out of the company. I told them, “You’re gonna cause this band to break up.” And by ’99, the band was so imploded because of all of the shit we’d dealt with that we were like, “Look, we gotta fuckin’ walk away before we kill one another.”
Until March 2011, I didn’t get royalties from the first three Candlebox records. Before then, I was still paying for a fourth Candlebox record that was never delivered to Maverick. The label didn’t exist anymore, but they were still collecting the money. In order to get out of the contract, I had to agree to pay back my quarter of the fourth-record advance. Unfortunately, it’s usually the singer who gets stuck signing that agreement. I’m sure that Scott, Pete, and Bardi are fine with it, because they’ve been getting royalties all along.
My now-ex-wife Renee told me I should’ve slept with Madonna. It was one of the fights that we had: “If you had slept with her, your career wouldn’t be this way! You wouldn’t have to sign this agreement!” At the time, she was incredibly frustrated with the position that we were in. Yeah, that tension helped me out the door.
JACK ENDINO Gruntruck continued to play throughout the ’90s. Got a song on MTV and everything. They’d got it into their heads that if they could just get off Roadrunner somehow, they could get a major-label deal. What commenced was years of legal nonsense, of them trying to get out of their seven-album deal with Roadrunner. But by the time they did, nobody cared about them anymore. They continued playing, halfheartedly recording, but it fell apart. By the time the thing happened with Ben, which was the early 2000s, Gruntruck was not really active.
Ben had a history of increasingly heavy hard-drug use and seriously hard drinking. But, oddly enough, that was a red herring. What took him out was a blood-clotting disease that ran in his family. He had an internal blood clot that actually took out a good chunk of his internal organs—his liver, part of his spleen, a huge chunk of his intestines. Basically, blood flow cut off, and he had to have this incredibly invasive surgery. He was literally in a coma for weeks. Full, complete life support. This guy’s going to die. He is done. I remember going to see him at one point, and his body was so swelled up with fluids, he looked like a whale. You couldn’t even recognize his face.
CAM GARRETT He died there, really. They brought him back. The blood clot had killed most of his colon, and they took most of his colon and part of his pancreas out. They gave him less than a five percent chance to live, but he lived another seven years. He was always in pretty fragile health after that. A lot of people thought it was his lifestyle. He had been to rehab a couple times.
JACK ENDINO Ben was never the same. He lost a good third of his body weight, it aged him tremendously, and he literally was missing part of his diaphragm as part