Those of us born into Generation X are fortunate, in that our lives have been shaped and reinforced by a continual soundtrack of rather exceptional music. If you grew up in the late 1960s and 70s and experienced the power of Punk and New Wave in the 80s, and then the roar of Alternative Rock in the 90s, then you are a truly blessed individual. We’re all getting older now, a little grayer around the temples, and as we approach our middle age we see our own children growing up into their youth. This causes us to reflect back on a time when we too were young and full of creative ideas, when everything was possible, and age and wisdom had not yet tempered our fiery spirits. Music defined the sound and character of our generation, and it empowered us in a very special way that only music can do. Now, in the noonday sun of life, we especially remember our gifted friends who left us much too early, those talented bright stars who shined with so much power, beauty, and grace. That’s how we like to remember them anyway, because unlike us, they never age in the time capsule of memory, they never make mistakes, and as time passes, we only remember their greatest qualities. The historical revisionism in our own memory-threads seems to work favorably for them in that regard, although it’s rather unreasonable for the rest of us who are still forging ahead in the hurricane of life. But perhaps that is how it should be; we remember only the best in our departed friends, and what we remember most poignantly is the music we all shared together.
Words of Barrett Martin-Above Deluxe Edition
During the late 1980s and early 1990s a powerful musical landscape began to unfold, and many great bands and visionary artists emerged under the umbrella of Alternative Music around the world. Seattle in particular seemed to put a corner on the market, inventing its own unique style of music called Grunge, and if you own this box set, you probably know many of the bands from that era. Lets recite their names again in honor of their work: The Fastbacks, Skin Yard, The Melvins, Malfunkshun, The U-Men, Green River, Mudhoney, Tad, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and a lengthy list of other bands that would easily fill the words in this essay. Some of those bands are still working today, others knew intuitively when their time had expired, and a few ended under more tragic circumstances. One thing is certain however; all of these bands left behind great bodies of work, some of them classic albums that still reverberate today, almost 25 years later.
There were also a few side projects that came out along the way, one of them being Temple Of The Dog, a tribute to the late Andrew Wood, the singer for Mother Love Bone. Another came from a band that wasn’t so much built around the memory of someone, as it was built around the desire to make a different kind of music altogether.
Thus was born the band Mad Season, a side-project that ended up being quite a bit more than we expected, and almost 20 years later our only studio album, Above, has become a cult classic that continues to reverberate well into the 21st century. And that’s because it was all about playing the Blues.Back in 1994, near the end of the classic Seattle period, four musicians came together from a wide cross section of Seattle’s heaviest bands. They included Pearl Jam’s lead guitarist Mike McCready, Alice In Chains lead vocalist Layne Staley, the not-from-Seattle-but-he-fit-right-in bassist John “Baker” Saunders, and I came from the bands Skin Yard and Screaming Trees. Mike and Baker had met in a rehab clinic in Minneapolis, and they immediately hit it off with their love of the Delta Blues and the bright clarity that comes from a newly sober mind. Layne and I had just done a world tour together with Screaming Trees and Alice In Chains playing dates all over the world, but we were exhausted from the grind of the road and we were looking for a different kind of musical expression. The four of us convened in Seattle during the fall and winter of 1994-5 to jam together, write a few songs, and to see where it all might lead. During those first kinetic rehearsals, we talked as friends about our previous job skills before Rock and Roll had altered our lives so dramatically.Layne and I had both been carpenters in Seattle, pouring foundations, framing houses, and generally working as laborers until the touring life had taken over. Mike had worked at a Seattle pizzeria before he found his overnight success with Pearl Jam, and like they say, success takes years of hard work before it magically happens “overnight.” Baker, although a working bassist in the Chicago and Minneapolis blues scenes, had frequently worked odd jobs to earn a living, because economic times were tough for any musician in the 1980s and 90s; it meant that you had to do a little of this and a little of that to get by. It’s really not much different today.
Whatever our past jobs and bands might have been, Mad Season was now focused on making our own album, and after several highly productive rehearsals, we played a series of secret shows at Seattle’s now legendary Crocodile Café. The intent was to tighten up the songs and try out the new material on a live audience, and during these shows we realized a singular vision that would manifest in the studio a few weeks later. The recording sessions were booked at Seattle’s Bad Animals Studio, at the time owned by Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart, a truly heroic band for those of us who grew up in the Northwest. The recordings were overseen by engineer/producer Brett Eliason, who had previously worked for Heart, as well as running the front of house sound for Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees during our band’s early tours. Under his watchful repose, the first 10 songs were recorded, two of them featuring additional vocals from Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan, as well as some exceptional saxophone work from the Seattle Jazz musician known as Skerik. In just over two weeks time, with an additional week of mixing, the album was finished and ready to be presented to the world.Above was released internationally on March 14th 1995 on Columbia Records and it immediately struck a resonate chord with the public that sent the album into gold status within a few weeks. It peaked at #24 on the Billboard top 200, and the album’s first single, River Of Deceit, was a bona fide radio hit in the United States, reaching the #2 spot on the American modern rock charts. All of this happened, I might add, without the band playing a proper, advertised show or any touring.In hindsight, I think Mad Season was one of the heaviest Blues bands to ever come out of Seattle, and the Blues speaks a musical language that every person can understand. Anchored by the deep swinging rhythm section Baker’s bass and my drums, overlaid by Mike’s alternately blistering/ambient guitar work and Layne’s haunting words and melodies, Mad Season essentially played a grungier version of the Blues. This unusual chemistry made us sound totally unique for our time, in an era of post Grunge, formula Rock that was beginning to dominate popular music then, as it still does to this day. Above was the only complete album of Layne Staley’s introspective, mystical lyrics and in the almost 20 years since its release, a new generation of musicians and music lovers have come to discover the dark beauty of Mad Season.
What few people know is that in 1996 a second Mad Season album was started. Again, Brett Eliason was at the helm, and Mike, Baker, and I started recording the basic tracks for 15 new songs, this time at Seattle’s Avast Studios. Peter Buck from REM came down and helped us write a beautiful song, and Skerik returned to bang on some percussion and add his wonderful avante garde approach to our expanding sound. Unfortunately, because of his declining health, Layne was not able to make any of the recording sessions, and after a very creative but ultimately frustrating month in the studio, we all took divergent paths that sent each of us in a different direction. Mike went back to Pearl Jam, I went back to the Screaming Trees, Layne went back to Alice In Chains, and Baker, on a happier note, joined the superb Seattle Folk-Rock outfit, The Walkabouts.
A few years passed with the lingering thought that maybe, eventually, that second Mad Season album would get finished. We all hoped it would happen, but communication between the band members had become fractured and disjointed. We missed what we once had together, but we couldn’t find a way to get back to that place. It was very much like the end of a great love affair; lost connections, misinterpreted messages, sadness, and eventually isolation. And then a very dark day came, when the one true god, Death, made a fateful appearance. We lost Baker to an overdose in the early winter of 1999, and then just three years later, in the spring of 2002, we lost Layne in the same way. Many of us were spiritually and musically crushed for a considerable amount of time.My memories of Baker are rich and full of great humor. He was, you see, about 12 years older than the rest of us, which made Baker closer to 40 when we recorded Above. We thought we had lived hard lives in our own self-suffering, myopic way, but Baker truly had lived it. Born into a working class family in Montgomery, Alabama, Baker found his musical calling in the electric Blues of the Chicago and Minneapolis music scenes where he played with several respected bands, making the “chicken scratch” that Bluesmen earn. When I played with Baker for the first time, I could immediately hear his deep and ancient soul coming through his resounding bass lines, and when the Mad Season rhythm section played, we swung like a battleship in war, physically moving everyone in room.
And remember, the first notes you hear when the Above album begins is Baker’s lonely bass line starting the song Wake Up, one of the first songs he introduced to the band. Baker set the mood of the album, and we dutifully followed.The other thing about Baker, something that anyone who knew him would attest to, was that he was a very gentle and kind person with a deep and caring soul. He really loved people, especially the older folks, and I think it was because he knew how tough they must have been to have survived the Great Depression, WWII, and to make our country as great as it was. Baker and I bought houses close to each other after the success of our album, and he would often come over to my house in the morning for coffee, driving his “deliberately 1970s” sedan, which was classic Baker style. We’d start with black coffee, and then I would make us some breakfast and he’d tell me some hilarious story about the “old guys” he used to play with in Chicago and we’d start the day off with a good laugh.
Always he made people laugh, with a story or anecdote to go with everything, but he tempered that humor with a deep respect for human beings, and a linguistical wit that was a cross between the mean streets of Chicago and his upbringing in the Great American South. Baker and I were supposed to meet for breakfast the morning he passed (I insisted we meet at a restaurant this time, rather than me doing the cooking), but sadly, he never showed up. I really wish he was still around, because he would have been the greatest “old guy” to get older with. In many ways Baker was the wisest of us all, and I only understand that now, almost 20 years later.
When Layne passed, so many people around the world were devastated. He and I had wandered through the great cities of the Western World when we toured together and that was just a memory now. As I said at the beginning of this essay, we only remember the greatest qualities in our departed friends, and what I say here are some of his best. Layne was an extremely intelligent, humorous, and gracious human being, and he cared about things like politeness and kindness to strangers, qualities that seems to be forgotten in today’s narcisstic, nihilistic culture. He laughed easily and talked openly with his fans, and his guest list at shows was always reserved for the young, marginalized people who couldn’t afford to buy a ticket. Those were Layne’s people, the ones without a voice, and through the power of poetic language, Layne gave them a voice. He once told me a story about his first tour in South America, where, after a show in Rio de Janeiro, some of these new friends had taken him to a beautiful, jungle-like park on the outskirts of the city. As they sat on the Earth talking under a canopy of trees, a tiny marmoset only a few inches tall leapt onto Layne’s shoulder and resided there for quite some time, much to the amazement and delight of everyone. Layne said it was one of the greatest experiences he ever had on tour, and years later I saw many of these tiny creatures when I toured Brazil, but they always seemed rather terrified of humans. Apparently however, they loved Layne.
Apparently however, they loved Layne.My best personal memory of Layne came when we were making the Above album and he was in the studio lounge reading Kahlil Gibran’s iconic book, The Prophet, a book I highly recommend everyone read at some point in your lives. I told him I had read it as a teenager, and I liked the part about the arrows you fire into the world to keep the darkness at bay. Layne said that as musicians we were like burning arrows, arcing across the sky. We started talking about what it meant to be an artist with a spiritual message and I can tell you that Layne deeply felt that he had a spiritual message to convey in his music, even if his lyrics were dark. And that is because darkness must exist first in order for light to emerge in contrast to it, the two are inseparable parts of the same continuum. This theme is evident in all of Layne’s songs, both with Mad Season and Alice In Chains, and that is because he existed in a realm between darkness and light, a place where he could see both.
So please remember this: Layne was very young when he wrote and sang those lyrics, he was only in his mid twenties, yet he said a huge amount with that incredible voice. Listen to his words, because he was singing a particular kind of truth that anyone who has lived under difficult circumstances can understand.Several years after Layne’s passing I got a call from an old friend in Massachusetts who had a couple of young children. While on a family drive through the countryside, he was playing the Above album when the last song on the album, All Alone, came on. One of the little ones in the back seat asked if there were angels singing on the song, a question that he relayed to me over the phone. “Yeah, he was a certain kind of angel” I said, “a dark one perhaps, but an angel all the same.”
We lost Baker and Layne, and several other great Northwest musicians in those dark Seattle years, but one of the truths I have learned since then is that a person’s character and talent are not reduced by their personal obstacles; those are merely the outer challenges that serve to temper and forge the spirit within. A person in darkness is very often closest to the light, and that is why I choose to remember Layne and Baker as exceptional human beings first and foremost.
They also happened to be tremendous musical artists who loved the Earth and loved its people, even if the world was a bit hard on them. I spoke at Baker’s funeral and I wrote the eulogy for Layne’s, and at both times I quoted another great Seattleite, the historical Chief Sealth of the Duwamish people, after whom the city of Seattle is named. The Great Chief famously stated, “There is no death, only a change of worlds.” I would add that I believe we live in many different worlds, some of them dark, some of them light.It’s now the summer of 2012, and Mike McCready, Brett Eliason, and I have recently convened to sift through the original magnetic tapes from that second unfinished album. We are revisiting three of the best songs from those sessions, including the one that Peter Buck co-wrote, as well as two other songs that we feel best exemplify the direction the band was going before Baker’s and Layne’s untimely deaths.
This time around, Mark Lanegan has returned to honor his friends with his own words and magnificent voice on those three songs. We’ve created this box set for you, with a remastered version of Above that contains these three new songs, as well as a guitar interlude Mike recorded during the Above sessions that we totally forgot about until we unearthed the tapes. The remaster closes with our version of John Lennon’s “I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier”, taken from his classic album “Imagine.” In addition to the remaster, you’ll also find our one theatrical concert, “Live At The Moore Theatre”, remixed in 5.1 surround sound and reformatted as a DVD, as well as a never before seen club show from New Year’s Eve 1994-95. Finally, there is a third CD that contains all the live recordings, along with this booklet and some never before seen photos.
Once again, Brett Eliason has recorded and mixed everything to the highest quality standards that our band would expect and I know you’re going to love these new songs. More importantly, I think Layne and Baker will love them too. It’s in their memory after all.So we thank you for honoring the legacy of our departed friends, those burning arrows who still arc across the darkened skies. We love them, we miss them, and we remember them through the power of the music we made together.
We also thank you for continuing to support Northwest music over the years, and the many bands that continue to emerge from this great region of the country. There is something truly special up here, between the mountains, the lakes, and all the glorious rain. Up here, magic resides.
Barrett Martin
Fall 2012