Andrew Wood

they sing at the same time they do yeah that's hilarious Yeah, Temple of the

Dog was a Soundgarden, Pearl Jam sort of super group after Andrew Wood died.

Matt truly is not Gen X.

I'm literally not Gen X. It's

It's just nice to be able to traverse between things that are extremely busy and extremely sparse.

It seems like as guitar players, it's easy for us to want to be, as I guess Andy Wood coined the phrase, the arms race, you know, where you're trying to, but in the end, It is just music, and as long as—not that it's just music, but in the sense of it's a very personal thing.

The way that you create music is very personal to you, and if you want to play, you know, extremely fast, slow, or whatever— Exactly.

It's very personal.

It came together because of a Earthworm gig specifically in April of 1990.

God, this was like a month after Andy Wood died.

Basically, Jack had an Earthworm gig.

And keep in mind, this is during that break between Scott and Barrett.

Absolutely,

Andrew Wood.

Yeah, so straight up.

So when I rolled up, Niche is playing upstairs at Elko.

The music scene was on fire, but it was also grieving.

Andrew Wood, the singer of Mother Love Bone, died of a heroin overdose in March of 1990, just as his band was about to break through.

His bandmates, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, were left shattered and without a band.

They started writing again slowly and brought in guitarist Mike McCready, a friend of Gossard's from high school.

Okay.

Andrew Wood, Mother Love Bone.

Mark Lanigan, Screaming Trees.

Bongo, I know your comments there.

So obviously, yeah, they talk about Mother Love Bone in this.

Basically, the band came to be when Stone and Jeff started working again immediately after the death of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood from a heroin overdose and the breakup of that band.

It was probably only three months after Andy's death that we made some demos.

It was a really quick process.

Plus we were working on Temple of the Dog.

So a tribute to Andrew Wood's memory, the Temple of the Dog album was a one-off collaboration between Stone Jeff, Mike, Eddie and Chris Cornell on that camera and a sound garden.

So I probably put some Temple of the Dog on that CD as well for you because I was like well into them.

What would that have

I got a one-off '90s supergroup here that rose out of the ashes of a Seattle grunge band whose front man was poised to outshine every other Emerald City lead singer.

I don't care if you're talking about Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, Eddie Vedder, and Chris Cornell, Andrew Wood, I think he might have been the greatest.

Chris Cornell actually spearheaded this project.

The group is, of course, Temple of the Dog, and it's a tribute band that came together around the memory of local Seattle star Andrew Wood Andrew, the charismatic singer of Mother Love Bone, who was just such a great frontman and singer, died of a heroin overdose at just 24 years of age, and his friend and former roommate, Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, was absolutely devastated.

To process his grief, he wrote two songs, Say Hello to Heaven and Reach Down.

Say hello to heaven.

He said, "I was wanting to express the gratitude for my life, but also the disdain for people where that's not enough, where they want more." In his words, it's about taking advantage of people who really don't have anything.

The rest of the album was just as dynamic.