(Credits: TIDAL)
It would have been impossible to explain the rise of grunge music to someone who had never heard of it in 1989. The entire rock and roll scene was about being as excessive as possible, and all of the biggest names in music were dressed to the nines, hoping that they could play up their looks for the camera whenever their video was on MTV. So when bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam came to the mainstream, Chris Cornell already knew that something was shifting in Seattle.
Then again, no one in the Seattle scene necessarily wanted to be famous. There was an opportunity to work as a musician in town, but anyone thinking that someone from the Pacific Northwest would become one of the biggest stars in the world before Kurt Cobain was practically a pipe dream. That didn’t mean there wasn’t some way for the stars to align in the right order.
From the moment ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out, everything had changed at MTV overnight. Everything that had once been considered cool and fashionable was now being looked at as a joke, and Cobain was thrust into being one of the voices of the new generation of rock and rollers. It was a lot of fun watching them rise to prominence from Cornell’s perspective, but he couldn’t help but feel like someone was missing.
It was great that someone had pushed their way through the door of the mainstream, but the mainstream would always forget Andy Wood after he passed away. His rise in Mother Love Bone really came a few years too early, but looking at his stage presence when his group was first playing the Seattle squats everyone else was, he clearly had the charisma to take his band to the next level and maybe even stomp out a few of the hair metal artists before Nirvana crossed over.
But once he passed away from a drug overdose, Cornell knew that the entire rock world would never be the same, saying, “What really happened with him dying affects the entire country as far as music goes because what was happening then with commercial rock was it was eating itself. No one cared about the songs, and Mother Love Bone fit into this genre but they were real. It was like a band stepping out of 1976.”
While the more punk-leaning acts in Seattle like Mudhoney would have typically turned a blind eye to anything remotely connected to mainstream rock, Wood was never afraid to play to the crowd like a typical frontman. He was the alternative answer to someone like Freddie Mercury in many respects, but the minute he passed away, there was a certain innocence lost that would cast the first dark shadow over Seattle.
Eddie Vedder definitely helped take the reins and help Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament create Pearl Jam out of the ashes of Mother Love Bone, but it was always going to be different. Vedder may have been diplomatic enough to play a version of ‘Crown of Thorns’ now and again, but no matter how many times they tried to do justice to Wood, there was always going to be a subtle regret that he never got to play the arenas he wanted to be in.
But unlike Cobain getting crushed under the weight of being a rockstar, Wood will always serve as the ghost of Seattle’s past more often than not. Cobain’s death proved to everyone that the problems they were singing about were frighteningly real, but Wood’s music reminded everyone of those times when there wasn’t a care in the world.
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