Hello and welcome, babies! Let me plug you into this feeling known as Mother Love Bone, whose mission it is to let their love rock energy shine down on the waiting populace. As many of you are well aware Mother Love Bone is one of Seattle’s prize exports of late and on the eve of the release of their PolyGram LP, Apple, City Heat had the opportunity to speak with the Bone about their feelings on recording albums, the record itself and anticipation. So without further ado, who loves you?
Mother Love Bone came about thru the friendship and collaberation between Andrew Wood (then in Malfunkshun with Regan Hagar and Kevin Wood) and Stone Gossard with Jeff Ament (both in Green River with Bruce Fairweather, Mark Arm and Alex Shumway) a year before the conception of MLB.
Jeff Ament uncovers the beginnings, “Andy and [Malfunkshun’s] drummer, Regan, and me and Stone all knew each other kind of as friends, so a year before Green River even broke up, we got together and learned about six covers. Zeppelin and Aerosmith stuff, just us four. At that point we were called Lords Of The Wasteland. We totally just did it to have fun and do things we’d never do inside our respective bands. Then when me and Stone were trying to get something going after Green River… I don’t know, things just kind of fell into place. Within a month we were jamming with Greg [Gilmore] and Bruce. At that point we already had six or seven new songs. Then by late January, early February [1988], we went in and just live…cut five songs in four or five hours for our demo, purely for us to get shows.”
The sticky part was that Green River was officially past tense, whereas Malfunkshun had yet to be discussed. When Wood parted ways with his best friend and his brother he made a very tough decision.
Hagar tells me, “Andy felt really terrible about replacing me and that’s kind of too bad because I understood that it was a business decision, and the very best one he could make then.”
The group enlisted the considerable percussive talents of Greg Gilmore, best known for his work with The Living and Ten-Minute Warning. Returning from Asia in late 1987, Gilmore says, “The very day I came back to Seattle, I rn into Stone up on Broadway after being in town just a few hours. He asked me if I wanted to come play sometime. I did a couple, three weeks later and that was it.”
He adds, “At the time I didn’t really know what was going on. The first or second time I was there and Regan showed up was when I learned that Regan had been playing with them. Because all of a sudden everybody was very uncomfortable and silently started to put their guitars away. We were still just in the ‘come down and jam with us’ phase and see what we all think. It was only the second time and even then it was kinda happening already.”
It was that magic in the combination of members that began to manifest itself in some fantastically creative songs that would soon capture the attention of everyone who heard them. When recording their first demo that Ament mentioned earlier, he adds, “…even when we were recording, I think we all knew it was something pretty special. It was just totally spine tingling in the studio most of the time. We just knew what was happening…it was just…it’s cool. Definitely something special.”
Now, with minimum of tribulation, they had cemented their line up and were getting shows. The next year was spent being courted by labels, looking at signing with Geffen, only to end up with PolyGram in one of the biggest contracts ever for a band with no released material.
I asked Wood about the reputed seven record, quarter million deal. “I don’t really know the whole logistics of it. I know we got signed for $250,000 and seven albums, and I know now that we’re broke and that we could also get dropped at any point.”
He added that depending on the success of this release they could renegotiate everything anyway. So the original deal could still be pointless, but speaking of the record, let’s.
Tracked last fall [1989] at The Plant in Sausalito and completed in January at London Bridge, Apple is a huge album in sound, style and content. Wood paint poignant lyrical pictures within Love Bone’s distinctive instrumental fabric. Produced in connection with local session star Terry Date and mixed by a Brit, Wood tells us about the finished product.
“It’s a really weird album because when we finished it with Terry it sounded completely different than what it sounds like now because a guy by the name of
Tim Palmer got to mix it. He’s a guy from England, I’ve never met, who worked with Robert Plant’s Now and Zen record and Tin Machine’s album and he did an amazing mixing job on it. It sounds completely different.”
“I don’t know if Terry was very pleased – it was Terry’s baby and he was like ‘what did he do to my project?’ – but he made it really spacey. It sounds like I would have mixed it.”
Others were so glad to just have it completed finally after spending so much time and money that their opinions reflect… almost relief. Gilmore opines on the final mix, “I don’t know if I’m really happy with it. I’m satisfied. At first I thought, ‘that’s fine’, I didn’t care. Then I started listening to it, first time, I was ‘whatever’. Second time, I’m like, ‘I really don’t dig it’, now I’m thinkin’ it’s alright. It’s not what…”
I interject, “not the way you envisioned it?”
“Ideally, no. But Tim Palmer was the one guy that we all agreed on without hesitation on anyone’s part. He happened to be available, fine give it to him, let’s do it. If we don’t just go with this, we’re gonna end up monkeyfucking the thing until the fall of 1992.”
They’ve spent a lot of time over this past year waiting, waiting, waiting for things to happen. As soon as this does, then that will. Before their January show at Legends – just after Gilmore had cut his hair – I asked about how waiting and the anticipation was affecting them.
Gilmore: “It’s been pretty tedious lately. It’s been a lot of waiting.”
Wood: “A lot of hurry up and wait.”
Browning: “Is that what caused you to shave your head, Greg?”
Gilmore: “Actually it might have had an effect on my hairdo!”
Wood: Some of us are more anxious than others. Myself, I’m kind of really happy about this time we have right now before the tour starts, because I’ve got things to do as far as getting myself together. When we got back from Sausalito I went into rehab for thirty days, so I’m pleased to have time to feel a little more stable in the real world before we go out and assault. Then others of us are really chomping at the bit because it is a lot of sitting around.”
Browning: “But that’s really nothing new to you guys is it?”
Gilmore: “No, signing, finding a producer, recording can all take more time than you could possibly think. The one thing, I can say in our whole career so far, that happened on schedule was recording the EP, which pretty much went down on time like we had talked about it. I think we even started on it before we were signed. But then we waited for the EP to come out, we waited to go on tour, we started to look for a producer for the LP before the tour of the EP, before the release of the EP.”
Wood: “We did that real cheaply and real fast, in like, five days. Now it sounds like we recorded it in five days.”
Browning: So is the fact that you recorded Shine in five days and then spent over three months on Apple going to be pretty noticeable?”
Wood: “I think you will find that, yes, definitely.”
Browning: “Okay!”
Wood: “Without question!”
Apple has 13 songs totaling about an hour of music, including new mixes of two songs from Shine, Capricorn Sister (originally titled Mother Love Bone) and Crown of Thorns (minus Chloe Dancer). The other guitar ballad, Stargazer, and two piano ballads (Man of Golden Words and Gentle Groove) are prime examples of Wood’s haunting lyrics and immense talent as a songwriter. While the whole album is compelling, these close glimpses are captivating.
Stardog Champion and Captain Hi-Top provide rich, over-the-top anthems to sing along with as Heartshine and This Is Shangrila are good tunes to just groove to. April 17 and April 30 have both come up as release dates, love rock awaits you people. Don’t hesitate. Pick up Apple and give it a listen, always remembering that… love reigns supreme.
