Mad Season

The golden age of grunge is traditionally considered to be the four-year span from 1991 to 1995, the years when a string of records made by bands from Seattle's legendary scene, with their unstoppable mix of youthful rage and explosive riffs, won over teenagers' hearts and topped charts around the world. Even before, and even more than, a shared idea of sound, the musicians grouped under the critical umbrella of the Seattle Sound were bound together by a strong sense of community, of shared tragedy, and by feelings of friendship and loyalty. It's no coincidence that grunge is one of the genres richest in side projects, joint tours and collaborations.

Stretching the point slightly, one could point to two one-off albums by two supergroups from the scene as the works that opened and closed that golden age. The first is clearly the self-titled album by Temple Of The Dog, dated 1991; the second is "Above" by Mad Season, released on March 14, 1995.

Of necessity, Temple Of The Dog were a supergroup without knowing it, their members not yet having attained star status, since the bands they came from (Soundgarden and Pearl Jam) had yet to record their most important work. Mad Season, by contrast, with members drawn from Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees and Alice In Chains - who by 1994 had already made global headlines with the bestseller "Dirt" (Columbia, 1992) - were a supergroup in every sense.

What links these two brief but significant sagas, though, is precisely that sense of community and closeness typical of the Seattle scene. Temple Of The Dog had gathered around Chris Cornell to give sound to his heartfelt farewell to his close friend Andy Wood, one of grunge's founding fathers, while Mad Season chose their own vocalist, Layne Staley, in an attempt to save him from substance abuse.

Mad Season came together in 1994 when Mike McCready and John Baker Saunders met within the walls of the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota. The Pearl Jam guitarist had checked into the clinic to get clean from the alcohol and drugs he had heavily abused during the making of "Vitalogy" (Epic, 1994), his main band's third album. McCready thus shared his stay at the facility with the future Walkabouts bassist, who was there for pretty much the same reasons.

Their conversations about music and life proved so fruitful that, once back in Seattle, the two musicians wasted no time forming a band to bring to life two songs they already had in mind, "Wake Up" and "River Of Deceit". To fill the drum stool, McCready and Baker Saunders turned to Barrett Martin, drummer of Screaming Trees, who gladly joined the lineup, then known as The Gacy Bunch.

At that point, all that was missing was a voice. Once again, the choice was dictated not so much by stylistic or compositional needs as by the sense of community binding together the musicians of 1990s Seattle. McCready brought Staley on board because he believed that taking part in a project made up entirely of sober musicians would help him deal with his heroin addiction. But the demons haunting Staley and Baker Saunders - who, alongside the Alice In Chains singer, also shared the tragic fate that awaited them - proved too powerful, and a few years later would overwhelm them regardless. But that's another story.

After a few well-received shows under the name The Gacy Bunch - a name drawn from the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the sitcom "The Brady Bunch" - including the celebrated one on October 12, 1994 at Seattle's Crocodile Cafe, the band decided to rename itself Mad Season. The name chosen by McCready refers to the time of year when hallucinogenic mushrooms bloom most abundantly, but it's also a clear nod to grunge's golden era, marked as it was by excess in its protagonists' lifestyles and by the near-universal abuse of drugs of every kind.

With their brand-new name, Mad Season went into Seattle's Bad Animal Studio and, by the end of the year, had brought to life their first and only album, "Above", released in early 1995 by Columbia. Assisting them as producer and sound engineer was Brett Eliason, a longtime McCready associate who had already worked with Pearl Jam, giving sonic shape to an album essentially made in a week - a true shooting star, and one that would remain exactly that.

Making the record even more precious is the contribution of Mark Lanegan, Barrett Martin's bandmate in Screaming Trees and one of the scene's guiding spirits, who not only sang alongside Layne on "I'm Above" and "Long Gone Day" but also helped him write some of the album's most anguished lyrics. Lanegan was one of his closest friends - as he would put it years later: "Kurt was like a little brother, Layne was like a twin" - the two shared a deep bond forged by living with the same addictions.

While not lacking in tough guitar moments and driving rhythms, "Above" is an introspective record, blending blues and hard rock with the ability to drift into psychedelia. What dominates overall is a kind of sonic decompression, in which sparser, more spread-out instrumental parts leave room for the voice and the words to breathe - especially compared to most of the work of Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees and Alice In Chains, the latter at a stage in their career when the metal tendencies of "Dirt" had been tempered by the acoustic blues of "Jar Of Flies" (Columbia, 1994).

Thanks to the stripped-down nature of Mad Season's sound, Staley's metallic, vibrant voice takes on darker, deeper shades than it did in Alice In Chains, where such tones only surfaced in ballads and more intimate moments like "Nutshell". Furthermore, unlike his main band's productions, Staley's voice is rarely double-tracked in unison with itself - it happens on "Lifeless Dead" and "I Don't Know Anything", which, tellingly, are the tracks closest to that sound - shedding, more often than not, its darkest and most dramatic edges. His performance on "Above" could thus be called bare, even allowing a glimmer of hope to surface ("River Of Deceit"). It's telling that the album's opening track, "Wake Up", is the song that would become Mad Season's best-known, an essential masterpiece in any history, anthology or compilation of the 1990s Seattle sound:

Wake up, young man, it's time to wake up

Your love affair has got to go

For ten long years

For ten long years, the leaves to rake up

Slow suicide's no way to go

Uh

On tiptoe, the bass dictates the harmonic and melodic lines alongside the marimba, propped up by a scattering of cymbals, the rim of the snare and the phaser-tinted guitar strumming that scatters metallic vibrations through the air during the verses. Just when everything seems turned on its head – the rhythm section riding above the guitars, clean tones sitting over distortion, dilation stretching against frenzy – Staley's voice electrifies the track, whipping it suddenly into a muscular chorus where the words vanish to make room for aching electric accents and McCready's bluesy solos, before dissolving once again, as if in a spiral, back into the song's opening texture. Layne talks about his heroin addiction as though it were a clandestine love affair ("Wake Up... Wake Up..."), but buried in the metaphor is a full awareness of exactly where he was headed. The band's support for the fragility of Staley's confessions reveals its full grandeur right from this opener, whose magic equation would prove impossible to repeat.

The following "X-Ray Mind" is far more violent: stormy from the off, built on tribal drumming and guitar riffs that slice through the air, it delivers a scorched-earth grunge assault very much in the vein of Alice In Chains, with Staley seeming to cry out for help against the media's encroachment on his private life. "Lifeless Death" and "I Don't Know Anything" are every bit as hard-hitting and just as close in spirit to the broadsides fired off on "Facelift" (Columbia, 1990) and "Dirt". The former is seasoned with full-throated "yeah"s and jagged guitar interjections, while the latter advances as inexorable and incendiary as a lava flow, the voice repeating the title in an obsessive, darkening mantra that mirrors man's maddening inability to control his own life.

One of the record's great strengths is indeed the dynamic built between the different tracks on the sequencing, which together form a genuine journey in tone and emotion. Amid the electric, percussive lashings mentioned above there are livelier solutions too, first and foremost the bittersweet blues of "River Of Deceit", the only single lifted from "Above", but also the bluesy jam session of "Artificial Red", a pause that seethes with thought ("Is this the way I spend my days/ In recovery of a fatal disease?"). "River Of Deceit" amounts to a genuine therapy session, an attempt at analysis that nonetheless reveals, in the words of the Alice in Chains frontman, the impossibility of changing the course of things:

My pain is self-chosen

At least, so the prophet says

I could either burn

Or cut off my pride and buy some time

A head full of lies is the weight, tied to my waist

The river of deceit pulls down, oh oh

The only direction we flow is down

What follows is another of the most significant moments on "Above", the song that gives the record its title, "I'm Above". Genuinely enigmatic, the track is said to recount the turbulent relationship between Staley and his ex Demri Parrott, pictured sharing a passionate kiss with the singer on the album's iconic cover, which he himself designed. "I'm Above" opens sharp and hard, with a granite guitar riff and a solid rhythm, before shifting into the clean strumming of the verses that carries Staley and Lanegan's unison vocals – with the latter lending his baritone tones as support for his friend's anguish – then back to the opening intro reworked as a pre-chorus, and finally into the bold melodic-harmonic progression of a chorus that recalls Stone Temple Pilots. Softening the transition between sections is an acoustic guitar passage from McCready halfway through, which makes an already deeply emotional song resonate even more:

How is it you're feeling so uneasy?

How is it that I feel fine?

Life reveals what is dealt through seasons

Circle comes around each time

 

I'm above

Over you I'm standing above

Claiming unconditional love

Above

On the other track featuring Mark Lanegan, "Long Gone Day", we witness a role swap between the two vocalists, with the Screaming Trees frontman taking the lead, at least initially, not unlike what happens between Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder on Temple Of The Dog's "Hunger Strike". Quite unlike the rest of "Above", "Long Gone Day" forgoes grunge's typical electricity, dressing itself in loping percussion worthy of Tom Waits and trading guitar solos for sax, and ends up sounding like one of the tracks that would echo most strongly through Lanegan's solo work. It's the first part of the triptych that closes out "Above", followed by the shamanic "November Hotel", an instrumental session built on drum groove and psychedelic surges of electric guitar, and the introverted "All Alone", where the musicians' newfound stillness-in-repetition – the guitar seems to circle around what would later become the main phrase of "Given To Fly" – seems fatally at odds with the voice hidden behind reverb, in what, in hindsight, we might read as Staley's admission of surrender: "We're All Alone".

"Above" stands as a unique moment in rock history, not merely within the grunge and alternative rock lineage it's always been filed under. It is one of the happiest outcomes of that cultural season, born from a special meeting of musicians in a state of grace, bound by both electric and emotional affinity. Proof of this survives in one of the few documents of Mad Season's sparse live activity, "Live At The Moore", recorded at Seattle downtown's historic Moore Theater, footage that circulated online for years before finally finding its place in the deluxe reissue of "Above", alongside the album itself, outtakes and recordings from the show.

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16/07/2023