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DAVE REES I was at a Mother Love Bone show at the Central Tavern before they recorded Apple, and Andy had a little ladder that he used to get his piano that was stashed up in the rafters. He sat down at the piano and started singing “Crown of Thorns.” And I actually called him after the gig and asked him about some of the lyrics, like “He who rides the pony must someday fall.” He said the lyrics were plain as day if you listened to the song. I tried going deeper, but he wasn’t really willing to go there with me. He had told me that he’d gone to rehab and how hard it was to stop. But he said he was doin’ good.

KEVIN WOOD I did rat Andy out once, just because I was concerned. Actually, my mother was giving me a hard time about drinking, and she always worshipped Andy as this perfect golden boy. So I blurted it out: “Why don’t you quit ragging on me about my drinking? Andy is shooting fuckin’ heroin!” And then I realized, Oh, shit. But it felt good, because somebody had to know.

XANA LA FUENTE Andrew and Kevin took acid one night, and Andrew cried in the bathroom on the floor in a fetal position for about eight hours. His eyes were swollen like he had been beaten. And that’s the night that Kevin quit drinking. It was one of their birthdays. Kevin didn’t freak out, but Andrew was like, “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die. I saw my future. I know I’m gonna die.”

Every time he used he would come and tell me. He would cry. I never saw tracks on his arm, I never saw him dope sick. He never took money from me to use.

BRUCE FAIRWEATHER I didn’t realize how involved he was in it until he went into treatment. He was definitely doing some bonehead things. He was sleeping in parks when he and his girlfriend were fighting. But when we were recording Apple down in San Francisco—that was when that huge earthquake hit—he was super-present. In the downtime between recording and getting ready to do the tour, I think he may have got more heavily into doing drugs.

XANA LA FUENTE The rehab place was an hour or two away. I used to drive out there every night and sneak him food. I’d be outside the window handing him pizza through the window, bringing him salads with feta cheese and sun-dried tomatoes.

BRUCE FAIRWEATHER When he was going through treatment, the band went and visited him, and that’s when I started realizing that this is serious. We had meetings with him and his counselor. Andy would go, “I can’t be around you guys if you’re drinking or smoking or doing anything.” We were planning on going on a tour, and we were like, “… Okay.” It was hard. Not what you want to hear when you’re 26 or 27.

REGAN HAGAR He was really trying to be good, and I was a dumbshit about it. He’d come out of rehab, and I’d ask him if he wanted to smoke pot. Talk about insensitive and stupid. I feel like an asshole because I didn’t get it.

XANA LA FUENTE After a while, he said the pink cloud that he felt when he got out was gone. He was what you call “dry drunk,” when you’re still acting out these behaviors even though you’re not drinking. He refused to go to meetings. He was kind of being a little asshole. He was just different about it—he wasn’t all kind and apologetic anymore. He was like, “This is what I am.” Just being kind of mean about it. I was crying a lot.

KIM THAYIL Mark Arm, myself, and Buzz Osborne were hanging out at Mark Arm’s apartment in the U District, listening to records and BS’ing about bands, around late ’86. Buzz mentioned that on a number of Black Sabbath songs, Tony Iommi used a tuning called drop D, where the low-E string was tuned down a whole step. It makes things a little bit lower, a little bit heavier. After that, I went ahead and wrote a number of songs in drop D tuning—the first song I wrote with it was “Nothing to Say”—and then we experimented with other drop tunings. People started comparing us to Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, but we weren’t listening to those bands then—we were listening to Bauhaus and Killing Joke.

DAN PETERS I always thought it was ballsy and