Garbage Days Revisited #62: Mother Love Bone - "Apple" (1990)

 

"I used to treat you like a lady, now you're my substitute teacher/This bottle's not a pretty, not a pretty sight/I owe the man some money/So I'm turnin' over, honey/Looks like Mr Faded Glory is once again doin' time..." - Mother Love Bone - Crown Of Thorns

It's all too easy when writing columns on great under-rated albums to pose the question "what if?" but in the case of Mother Love Bone and their starcrossed lead singer Andrew Wood, it's kind of unavoidable. Essentially MLB were the bridge between glam rock and grunge. They'd come up through the same proto-grunge primordial musical swamp based mainly around Seattle and Minneapolis that had birthed Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Soul Asylum et al but while their alternative credentials were pretty solid, these guys very much weren't afraid of wanting to be proper rock stars and in Wood they had a singer who, similar to Axl Rose, had grown up with his '70s glam records and you suspect had spent a lot of his time practising his best Freddie Mercury/Elton John/Steven Tyler stage moves in the mirror. The fact that his death from a drug overdose a mere matter of days before their debut album came out pretty much robbed the world of this band who could potentially have been world-changers if the cards had fallen right for them really is one of '90s music's great tragedies.

Mother Love Bone were formed when '80s proto-grunge Seattle types Green River split in two. One faction, led by singer Mark Arm and guitarist Steve Turner, went on to form Mudhoney while the other, led by guitarists Stone Gossard and Bruce Fairweather and bassist Jeff Ament, would hook up with ex-Malfunkshun singer Andrew Wood to form Mother Love Bone. The group would put out a five track EP in 1989 in the form of Shine which was a brilliant opening statement from the righteous opener Thru Fade Away through the rock solid rave-ups Mindshaker Meltdown, Half-Ass Monkey Boy and Capricorn Sister to the epic heart-stopping ballad Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns, the band's finest moment and a song that you really need to listen to if you're unaware of it.

The thing with Mother Love Bone is that while they've definitely got the same air of slacker cool about them that early Nirvana and Soundgarden both had, they take those templates, stick some unashamedly flashy guitar solos and proper rockstar attitude to them and the result is something which definitely stands out from nearly anything else you could mention at the time. It's alt rock that you can groove to basically and Apple has it in abundance right from the cocksure swagger of opener This Is Shangri-La through the storming Stardog Champion and Holy Roller to the more tender likes of Stargazer, Bone China and Man Of Golden Words. The latter are shameless power ballads but the sheer energy invested in them by Wood means you're never in any doubt that he means it, man (indeed, given his death from a heroin overdose, lyrics like Come Bite The Apple's "How did I get here?/What song did I sing?/And tell me what have I done to deserve such a fate?" and Crown of Thorns' "He who rides the pony must some day fall/Been talkin' to my altar/Says life is what you make it/And if you make it death will rest your soul away" certainly seem morbidly prescient).

As I said at the start of this article, you do wonder what might have happened had Wood maybe managed to navigate through his drugs problems and Mother Love Bone had kept it together to tour Apple, soak up the acclaim that it would surely have brought them (I mean, one listen will make it clear - they were simply too good not to break through) and become a lasting proposition. My theory is that when the grunge nuclear winter hit (I mean, let's be honest, Smells Like Teen Spirit etc would definitely still have happened) that the movement would still have taken off but with MLB there as a kind of counterbalance to Kurt et al's year zero orthodoxy, it would have probably seen the cull of what had come before be a lot less vicious. I'd like to think it would have created a loophole for some of the more worthy and less cartoony bands of the genre like the Dogs D'Amour (who MLB toured with back in the day), the Quireboys, the Four Horsemen etc to navigate their way through these waters and keep their heads afloat while the likes of Poison, Winger, Danger Danger et al sank. But I guess sadly we'll never know.

Wood's death would spell the end for Mother Love Bone - the group would team up with Soundgarden's Chris Cornell (an old friend of Wood's) to release the Temple Of The Dog album, named after a line in MLB's Man Of Golden Words, which included the touching tribute Say Hello 2 Heaven. Thereafter, Gossard and Ament would link up with a new singer Eddie Vedder, pretty much the diametric opposite of Andrew Wood, and form Pearl Jam and...well, the rest you probably know. Suffice to say I was never a big Pearl Jam fan I'm afraid - I liked about half of their debut album but my view is that they properly lost it after that, plunging headlong into a sea of sludged up mediocrity. They still cover Crown Of Thorns as part of their live set to this day though. For me though, Mother Love Bone really are one of the great lost bands of this era and I really can't recommend both Apple and the Shine EP enough. Sure it definitely shares a kinship with grunge but it's also some of the most uplifting and heartbreaking all at once music you will ever hear. Go take a listen and get yourself educated.