Andrew Wood was born to a close-knit family in Columbus, Mississippi in 1966. In his youth, Wood found solace in Elton John, Kiss, and T-Rex, a sign of what was to come in his musical career. By the time he was in elementary school, Andrew already started dabbling in drugs, something which led to his downfall.
Andy Wood Dreams of Being a Radio DJ
Known for his charismatic style, Andy Wood originally wanted to be a radio DJ, even winning a contest in the sixth grade to host a show on a local Seattle radio station KZOK on a program called Your Mother Won’t Like It.
During this show, Andy hosted a 3-hour program where he told stories, made jokes and did comedy bits, in addition to playing music. Dave Rees, who would be Andy’s bandmate in the band Malfunkshun recalled in the book, Everybody Loves Our Town, “I remember talking to Andy after that and he seemed a little disappointed because he wanted to be a DJ but he realized that there was no immediate feedback. There was no audience. And that really bummed him out. He actually told me. Well, now I’m gonna have to be a rockstar.”
Andy formed the band Malfunkshun with his older brother Kevin when he was just 14. They recorded their first demo tape in 1980.
Originally Malfunkshun was a 4-piece but was scaled down to a 3-piece band with Andy playing bass and doing vocals while his brother Kevin played guitar. They enlisted a punk drummer Regan Hagar. Dave Rees was the original bassist for a short period of time
“It’s kind of what started the whole evolution of punk turns into rock.” – Kevin Wood
Kevin would recall in the book, Grunge is Dead, “Everyone had a good time at a Malfunkshun show. It was an open-minded sort of feeling. I was afraid first of offending the sensibilities of the punk rockers. But they welcomed us with open arms. I think we opened up doors for bands to just come out, be themselves and play. It’s kind of what started the whole evolution of punk turns into rock.”
Andy’s on-stage persona would become the stuff of legends in Seattle, telling jokes in between songs. Despite his, on-stage persona, Andy also had a very dark side. He would go to rehab in 1985.
“He was a total showman.” – Krisha Augerot
Krisha Augerot, the assistant to Pearl Jam’s Manager, Kelly Curtis, recalled in the book Grunge is Dead, “He reminded me of John Belushi, constantly made everyone laugh. He was a total showman. He wanted to be as over the top as he possibly could and I think in real life he was insecure. Unfortunately, like most of these kinds of artists like that, they have a dark side and he was an addict.”
Andy had been only 12 when he started drinking and smoking pot. By age 15, he had graduated to psychedelics. By his early twenties, he was dabbling in heroin.
By the mid 80’s, Andy started living with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. To his bandmates, it brought them relief as they knew Andy was struggling with drugs and Chris Cornell, at that time, was on the straight and narrow. Soon, Andy met the love of his life, Xana La Fuente who moved in with Andy and Chris.
Malfunkshun’s Frustrations within the Music Industry
By 1987, the band grew frustrated. Despite influencing so many bands in Seattle’s music scene, the local press largely ignored them. Record labels showed no interest and other bands including Green River and Soundgarden drew larger crowds. Kevin Wood cited 2 factors working against the band. they should have done a better job shopping around their demos and that the band should have held on a bit longer.
While Malfunkshun never officially broke up, Andy and Regan soon started jamming with former members of Green River, whose band had just broken up at the same time.
While Green River had a sizeable following in Seattle, frontman Mark Arm was at odds with guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament over their aspirations to sign with a major label describing them as “careerists”.
Green River’s drummer Alex Shumway revealed in the book Everybody Loves Our Town that Arm wanted to keep the band down to the earth and the other guys wanted it to become something bigger.
I was the only guy in the band who didn’t have a trust fund.” – Jeff Ament
Bassist Jeff Ament fired back in the same book, “There was some shit talking afterwards about how me and Stone being careerists… I was the only guy in the band who didn’t have a trust fund. I guess if not wanting to work at a restaurant for the rest of my life made me a careerist then that was probably true.”
The former members of Malfunkshun and Green River including Andrew Wood, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament and Regan Hagar formed a short-lived cover band called Lords of Wasteland.
By the following year in 1988, the group added guitarist Bruce Fairweather, formerly of Green River. At the same time, Hagar left the band after he had a falling out with Ament. He was replaced by drummer Greg Gilmore from Ten Minute Warning.
The members of Malfunkshun initially thought that when Andy joined up with the members of Green River that he would split his time between both groups and Mother Love Bone would possibly open up doors for Malfunkshin, but almost immediately, Mother Love Bone started attracting a lot of attention. It probably helped that Green River, by the time they had broken up, was attracting some pretty big crowds which seemed to spill over to Mother Love Bones’ shows.
For the former members of Green River, teaming up with Andy Wood was a huge change. Their previous singer Mark Arm was cynical, serious and an anti-rockstar type while Andy wanted to be a rockstar and didn’t take himself too seriously.
“We were aspiring to mutate beyond just the hardcore/super-up tempo things.” – Jeff Ament
Mother Love Bone’s style of music shared more with LA’s sunset strip than the bands who dominated Seattle’s so-called grunge scene. Ament compared Green River and Mother Love Bone in Everybody Loves Our Town, “It was so different. Mark had such a heavy, cynical thing going on and Andy’s thing was pure comedy. I’d never been around anybody like Andy. Playing four-quarter notes over and over started to get old. We were starting to develop groove. We were aspiring to mutate beyond just the hardcore/super-up tempo things.”
Regan Hagar, Mother Love Bone’s original drummer revealed in the book Grunge is Dead how Andy, Stone and Jeff were a match made in heaven. “Stone and Jeff were determined businessmen – they were going to make it. Those guys were buckling down, practicing, making connections and planning tours of their own. So those guys, mixed with Andy’s charisma and stage presence. It was like a match that sparked and took off.”
Chris Cornell looked back at the importance of Mother Love Bone in the 2005 documentary Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story, “What was happening with commercial hard rock was it was eating itself. Nobody cared about songs. You had to look a certain way, sound a certain way. Mother Love Bone – they fit into this genre but they were real. It was like a band stepping out of 1976. It was that genuine.”
“I liked every damn person in Mother Love Bone – I’ve always felt uncomfortable about the union.” – Kim Thayil
Not everybody counted themselves fans of Mother Love Bone in Seattle’s music scene. Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil revealed in the same book, “I liked every damn person in Mother Love Bone – I’ve always felt uncomfortable about the union. I think because I really liked Green River and I was a huge fan of Malfunkshun.
I saw Love Bone as trying too hard. Andy’s stage presence with Malfunkshun seemed like a good dose of parody and homage. It was campy and witty. With Love Bone, the parody seemed to be missing. It seemed more serious, more professional, which would make record companies and management happy. It just didn’t seem right – it always seemed awkward. It seemed like it was forced like they were trying.”
During his time in Green River, Jeff Ament developed a lot of contacts in the music business. When Mother Love Bone started up, Ament reached out to those contacts to lineup shows and one woman that Ament knew was Anna Statman who used to work at Slash Records before leaving for Geffen Records. She initially offered to sign the band to a demo deal – basically giving them a few thousand dollars to record a few songs and see whether the band was worth signing.
Soon several other labels were chomping to sign the band. Ament recalled in the book Grunge Is Dead, what happened after the demo deal, “We did that. it was just on. People started calling me at work. Within a month there were 7 or 8 labels that were trying to get up to Seattle to see us play or take us out to dinner. I think it’s what Andy termed, The Seattle Dinner Tour.”
Mother Love Bone Finally Signs Record Deal
In November of 1988, the band signed a deal with PolyGram subsidiary Polydor/Stardog. The Stardog Records imprint was created exclusively for the band’s future releases. It was Michael Goldstone who signed the band, recalling to Rolling Stone, “Some of my warmest memories were watching Andy Wood play club shows because Andy was a rock star, even if there were only 6 people there. He would talk to the balcony even if there wasn’t a balcony in the club.”
By the later part of 1989, the band headed down to California to record at the Record Plant, the same studio where Guns N’ Roses recorded their landmark record Appetite for Destruction. It was at the Record Plant that Mother Love Bone spent several months recording their debut LP Apple with producer Terry Date.
Bassist Jeff Ament had some regret over how the recording of Apple was done, claiming the studio costs were upwards of $1,000 a day and the band should have first spent more time rehearsing the songs before going into the studio.
“There were times that we didn’t take his problem as seriously as we should have.” – Stone Gossard
When Mother Love Bone got together, Andy’s new bandmates were aware of his addictions. Stone Gossard told the Independent, “We knew about Andy’s drug problem when he joined the band. He had just gotten out of treatment for the first time. There were times when we were not as responsible as we should have been. There were times that we didn’t take his problem as seriously as we should have.”
Chris Cornell recalled in the 2005 Andrew Wood documentary how Andy was intimidated by his bandmates’ hyper-focus. “He looked at Stone and Jeff as being really organized and knowing what they were doing. That intimidated and scared him.”
On Thanksgiving of 1989, Andy checked into rehab just northeast of Seattle at Valley General Hospital in Monroe. While his bandmates lent support to him, they were focused on touring and releasing their debut record.
“All they wanted to hear about was the record deal.” – Andy Wood’s girlfriend
By early 1990, Wood relapsed again and when his girlfriend notified his bandmates of the news, she claimed they didn’t pay that much attention. His girlfriend revealed in the same 2005 documentary, “He was coming home, crying, crying… ‘Please help me stop, I’m going to die.’ I’d tell them, we need to talk about this. All they wanted to hear about was the record deal. It was like the twilight zone. They didn’t want to hear about it.”
Andy Wood Overdoses on Heroin
With over a hundred days of sobriety under his belt, on March 16, 1990, several days before the band’s debut album was supposed to come out, Andy Wood overdosed on heroin. The same day, Wood was supposed to go to the gym with Jeff Ament, but the bassist cancelled, not feeling well. Wood went back to his apartment. He called up manager Kelly Curtis telling him he couldn’t make it to rehearsals that night.
In the book, Grunge is Dead, Regan Hagar pointed to a man that Wood was hanging out with from Bainbridge who supplied him with the drugs. While Curtis or the band may have thought something was up, it wasn’t clear whether they notified Wood’s girlfriend, who was at work at the time, to check on Andy.
Andy’s girlfriend found him unresponsive at 10 pm that night. Andy was taken to the Harbour View Hospital where he was in a coma for 3 days. By March 19, 1990, he was declared dead.
Jeff Ament recalled how much of a shock the news was, “That night Kelly Curtis, Greg and I were talking to a guy who was going to be our tour manager. That was as big of a punch in the gut as you could possibly have at that point. Andy was doing so good…”
In the same book, Kevin Wood revealed that Andy was working on a solo album with his brother around the time of his death.
Polygram posthumously released Apple several months after Wood’s death in July of 1990. Reviewing the album, the New York Times stated the record was “the first of the big league Seattle rock stars”.
“He was the image of the Mother Love Bone–to us what Jagger is to the Stones.” – Stone Gossard
The band did a limited amount of press to promote the album. Speaking to the LA Times, Stone Gossard revealed, “Mother Love Bone died with him. I’m just stumbling around in the dark, trying to do something nobody ever did… For this to go to some album graveyard would have been a crime. People should hear Andy. We could have hired another lead singer and gone on without him, but Andy was such a big part of the band’s identity that it didn’t make sense. He was the vocalist, he wrote all the lyrics and some of the music. He was the image of the Mother Love Bone–to us what Jagger is to the Stones.”
The album peaked at No. 77 on the Billboard charts but who knows what could have been had Andy lived.
The surviving members of Mother Love Bone was in over $100k debt to Polygram. The news sent ripples throughout Seattle. The innocence of Seattle’s music scene seemed to have been lost with Andy’s death.
Tributes poured in. Alice in Chains penned the track “Would” while Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell teamed up with Ament and Gossard to record a tribute album.
Ament and Gossard went on to form Pearl Jam with Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready. Andy’s girlfriend would tell Another Man magazine, “I remember hearing Ten and feeling cheated because I know Andy had written at least 25% of the melodies and the songs with Stone on there. It was weird watching them become the biggest band in the world.”
Polygram released a Mother Love Bone compilation in September 1992 and the same year the band appeared on the singles soundtrack.
Like this story? Check out Nirvana’s Fued with Guns N’ Roses
Check out our YouTube channel