I’m listening to “This Is Shangri-La” [sic], the first song — and currently my favorite — on Apple, the debut and only album from the flicker of a shooting star that was the late-80’s Seattle glam-grunge band Mother Love Bone.

I’m writing this post in less than optimal conditions: an awesome song is blasting on repeat through my cheap but good purple earbuds.  It’s not easy to think when nodding your head energetically to a rock rhythm, bouncing your feet in time, and occasionally pulling your hands from the keyboard to join the seated dance party. It’s easier, though, than turning the song off.

If you’ve heard of Mother Love Bone, it’s usually for one of two reasons.* 8 times out of 10, it’s for the untimely death (understatement) of their cherubic, charismatic frontman Andrew Wood from a heroin overdose days before Apple was released, on March 19th, 1990.

Wood’s death permanently transformed the Seattle music scene. Two members of Mother Love Bone, Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, became founding members of Pearl Jam (the second reason people usually have heard of Mother Love Bone). Chris Cornell, Wood’s roommate and lead singer for Soundgarden, penned and recorded a series of tribute songs with Ament, Gossard, and others as Temple of the Dog. The result was a one-off eponymous album so successful that the members will tour this year for the 25th anniversary of its release. During the recording of “Hunger Strike,” the band’s most popular song, a guy visiting from California to audition for Ament and Gossard chimed in the perfect vocal counterpart to Cornell’s higher-pitched lines. His name? Eddie Vedder. Even when dead, Andrew Wood created amazing music.

Most people accurately describe Mother Love Bone as a bridge between glam rock and grunge. The former genre had declined from its peak in the mid-70’s into a factory belt of eyelined, poofy-haired, lipsticked feral boys bashing chords, jumping around with mics, and focusing more on looking good than writing good songs. Lyrics typically bulged with bad sex metaphors. Grunge was in its infancy, but it differed from glam in two main ways. First, its lyricists — Wood, Cornell, Vedder, Kurt Cobain, et al. — unapologetically chronicled their disaffection and alienation with life, broaching topics from suicide (“Jeremy”) to mental illness (“Lithium”) and drug addiction (Alice in Chains’s Dirt). Second, the music channeled punk, metal, and glam, resulting in thicker chords and fewer noodling guitar solos that go to eleven.

Mother Love Bone, however, combined the best of both, in every way a trendsetter. The band was a marriage of complimentary contrasts. You had grunge wallflowers like Ament and Gossard: weedy bodies with noncommittal medium-long hair hidden by a bandana. Then, you had Wood’s Freddie Mercury-like alter ego, Landrew the Love God. A name partly inspired by a Star Trek episode, Landrew preached “Love Rock” in his powerful, Southern-inflected voice. In the serviceable 2005 documentary Malfunkshun: the Andrew Wood Story, Cornell described Wood as “the only real rock star I think I’ve ever met.” See photo at left for Exhibits A-Z.

He’s beautiful, of course: chest-length blond hair, creamy skin, sumptuous lips a plastic surgeon would frame in her office if she sculpted them. He also had a fashion sense that you need a love of the absurd and a superhuman ability not to give a fuck to pull off. It’s impossible to look at Wood and not want to know more.

As angelic as Wood looked, however, he had demons. He had started abusing drugs and alcohol at 12. Notes from one of his stints in rehab and quoted in Malfunkshun indicate that he was abusive to girlfriends. His mother explains in the documentary that violence and love were inextricable in their home, and friends recall seeing both Andrew and his fiancée Xana La Tene bruised after fights. Why he abused substances and why he hid pain and self-loathing with his gorgeous, seductive stage persona is clear. He didn’t hide it:

Get me to the stage
It brings me home again
This is Shangrila

I’m trippin’ on it now
It brings me home again
This is Shangrila

Had “Landrew” been able to stay on stage every minute of his life, preaching Love Rock and receiving it in mega-doses from a Seattle audience that had made Mother Love Bone the biggest homegrown draw in the city, he might have made it. Heroin was a mere placeholder for the hours until he could get back on stage.

It’s worth noting, too, that two unfortunate circumstances colluded to turn what might have been just another relapse into a fatal overdose. Four people, including Wood, ended up in the hospital that weekend having overdosed on heroin, leading to speculation that a bad batch had hit the streets. More importantly, he had been steadily improving over the first two days in the hospital. As Malfunkshun reveals, 10 hours of hospital notes are missing from Wood’s chart. Within those 10 hours, Wood, whose “condition [was] hopeful” enough that he was taken off paralysis medications became “unresponsive,” with “no reflex, no signs of brain function.” I have no doubt at least one mistake was made. Without more information, it’s impossible to know whether Andrew would have survived even if medical malpractice hadn’t happened. The whole scenario reeks of a near-miss in so many ways.

Laments abound about “What Might Have Been” with Wood. It’s especially distressing to hear “Landrew” sing “I don’t believe in smack / So don’t you die on me / Don’t you die on me, babe,” knowing that his lack of faith didn’t protect him. Here is where we might conclude that we were lucky to have as much as we did of Wood and his music. That’s fair. It’s also too generic for someone like Wood. I’d rather not conclude at all, except to acknowledge how magical he continues to be a quarter-century after he left us.

*A fan of sports, I find it far too disconcerting to write “MLB” without thinking of division races, wild cards, and those dumb champagne goggles.

Originally posted on October 2nd, 2016.

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