Tragedy Makes Album a Labor of Love

“He was probably the most charming and most self-destructive guy I’ve ever met,” said Mother Love Bone’s guitarist Stone Gossard about Andy Wood, the hard-rock band’s lead singer, who died of a heroin overdose on March 19 at the age of 24.

“Mother Love Bone died with him,” Gossard said. He and the other members--drummer Greg Gilmore, bassist Jeff Ament, guitarist Bruce Fairweather--have decided not to continue with the band, which was based in Seattle.

Gossard has what he described as “the delicate, sometimes uncomfortable task” of promoting the now-defunct group’s album, “Apple,” which just came out on PolyGram. A previous mini-album, “Shine,” is the band’s only other recording. “We don’t want it to look like we’re exploiting Andy’s death,” he explained.

So what is the best way to promote a new band that ceased to exist before its first album was released because its lead singer died of a drug overdose?

“Who knows?” mused Gossard. “I’m just stumbling around in the dark, trying to do something nobody ever did before. . . . 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 that 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.”

In late 1987, fresh out of a band called Malfunkshun, Wood hooked up with the trio of Gossard, Fairweather and Ament, who’d left the noted Northwest underground band Green River. Mother Love Bone quickly gained a regional reputation with its post-Led Zeppelin sound.

“We knew about Andy’s drug problem when he joined the band,” Gossard recalled. “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.

“But it looked like he had finally kicked it. He’d been clean and sober for four months, and then he slipped one night and wound up an OD case. What a waste.”

Gossard, stone-faced throughout the interview, turned emotional only once--very briefly, near the end. He tried to talk, but words wouldn’t come out. Eventually, he said simply: “I just wish he hadn’t died.”