Pearl Jam had become one of the world’s biggest bands by the mid-90s but huge success did nothing to dampen the creativity of the Seattle giants. The group themselves had managed to release three classic albums in three years – 1991’s Ten, 1993’s Vs. and 1994’s Vitalogy – but the work of Pearl Jam’s members away from the band over that first half decade was even more staggering. Before they’d even recorded a note as Pearl Jam, there was Temple Of The Dog, the tribute to ex-Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood that saw the fledgling band hook up with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron for an album. As well as Vs., 1993 saw Stone Gossard’s offshoot Brad release their debut Shame, Eddie Vedder add guest vocals to the Bad Religion album Recipe For Hate, a collaboration with Cypress Hill for the Judgment Night soundtrack, another Pearl Jam/Soundgarden (under the handle M.A.C.C. team-up on the Jimi Hendrix tribute record Stone Free.
They were on the crest of an artistic wave, one that continued into 1995, the peak of Pearl Jam’s extra-curricular excellence. That was the year that the band went into the studio to work as Neil Young’s backing band on what became the rock icon’s 23rd album Mirror Ball, with a pair of Vedder-fronted tracks released on the accompanying Merkin Ball EP under Pearl Jam’s name, as well as an appearance from Vedder on the solo debut from highly-respected Minutemen bassist Mike Watt and a track with punk-poet Jim Carroll for inclusion in the film about his life, the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring Basketball Diaries.
None of those projects, though, could reach the heights of the other Pearl Jam-affiliated release that year. In March, Mike McCready’s Mad Season released their one and only record, a cross-pollination not just of some of grunge’s best bands but its most striking songwriters and singers. Titled Above, the album that turns 30 in March was a coming together of guitarist McCready, Alice In Chains vocalist Layne Staley, future Walkabouts bassist John Baker Saunders, Screaming Trees pair Mark Lanegan (a guest vocalist on the album) and Barrett Martin.
From the off, there was more to the union than making music, McCready viewing the band as a way for its members to try and shake off their troubled personal problems. That goes right back to its roots, when McCready and Saunders met in rehab in Minnesota. Reconvening in Seattle after the stint, they brought in Martin on drums with an idea to start a band, with the guitarist having the idea of bringing in Staley, by this point in the throes of drug addiction, on vocals in the hope that being surrounded by sober musicians might encourage the frontman to get clean.
“I told him, ‘You do what you want, you write all the songs and the lyrics, you’re the singer’,” McCready told Rolling Stone’s Charles R. Cross after Staley’s death in 2002. “He’d come in and he’d do these beautiful songs. I was under the mistaken theory I could help him out. I wanted to lead by example.”
Tragically, McCready’s intentions didn’t work out, with both Saunders and Staley dying from heroin overdoses a few years later. But the sole record they made captured a band with a rare, mesmeric alchemy, an album that gracefully glides from soulful, yearning rock and aching, airy ballads. There’s a restraint and airiness to Mad Season’s music that you just didn’t usually get with grunge bands that makes these songs – River Of Deceit and the title track, for example – sound even more beautifully minimalist.
The coming-together prompted a creative purple patch, as remembered by McCready in the Pearl Jam book Twenty. “We did all the Mad Season music in about seven days,” he said. “It took Layne just a few more days to finish his vocals, which was intense, since we only rehearsed twice and did four shows. So, this has been the most spontaneous thing I’ve ever been involved in. This was done even quicker than Temple Of The Dog, which took about four weeks.”
The success of Above, which had hits in River Of Deceit and I Don’t Know Anything and was certified gold to commemorate 500,000 sales in the US, prompted McCready to try and get the gang back together for a follow-up, but it never happened. Perhaps that’s for the best, cementing Above as an astonishing trick not to be repeated. For a moment at least, it was an album that helped to pull its members out of the mire and offer respite from the turmoil. It might not have had the profile of some of the 90s other big records, but it remains an under-appreciated classic.
