30 Years Ago, Mad Season’s Above Offered Seattle a Needed Season of Hope

“All these dying days / I walk the ghost town / Used to be my city.”

The late Mark Lanegan sang the above words on “Dying Days,” the spiritual centerpiece of Screaming Trees’ 1996 swan song, Dust. On the song, a freshly sober Lanegan laments a string of tragic losses to the Seattle music scene, including his good friend Kurt Cobain, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and the Gits’ Mia Zapata. Decades later, the song has morphed from a painful reflection on recent loss into a sadly prophetic tune as the list of Seattle musicians who’ve seen their lives cut short, including Lanegan in 2022, has continued to grow. So much of the generation-defining music that came out of Seattle in the early and mid-‘90s now spins with a pall of loss hanging over it—the albums, band photos and liner notes feeling more like memorial tributes than celebrations of a distinct era of musical expression. On “Dying Days,” Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, Lanegan’s friend and Mad Season bandmate, lays down a guitar solo that manages to capture all the anguish of the moment while cracking the sky just enough for slivers of light to pierce the lingering gloom. In that solo, the song feels like a continuation of the spirit McCready and friends infused into Mad Season, the short-lived supergroup that gave Seattle a much needed season of hope during its darkest days.

Mad Season, as far as Seattle supergroups go, often gets overshadowed by Chris Cornell’s earlier Temple of the Dog, a project central to the mythos of “grunge” and the perception of the town’s communal music scene. Still, the legacy of Mad Season, as conceived by McCready, casts a remarkably long shadow for a group whose tenure spanned a handful of formative sets and a short, if fruitful, stint in the studio. The band’s lone album, 1995’s gold-selling Above, and subsequent concert film, Live at the Moore, both have had an enduring impact beyond anything the group could’ve imagined as they squeezed in time for Mad Season between commitments with their regular acts. It’s also worth considering just how different the driving forces behind the Temple of the Dog and Mad Season supergroups were, even if they shared a certain kindred spirit. In Temple, Cornell and Soundgarden bandmate Matt Cameron came together with future Pearl Jam members, including McCready, to pay tribute to and cope with the loss of Andrew Wood, the late Mother Love Bone singer. Mad Season, however, blossomed out of McCready’s desire to embrace his hardwon sobriety and help his friends find their own salvation, or at least some encouragement, through music. The guitarist described his time playing with Mad Season as “the fruit after years of destroying myself.”

The humble beginnings of Mad Season took place not in Seattle but inside a rehab facility in Minneapolis, where McCready, on break from Pearl Jam, met older blues bassist John Baker Saunders. Upon returning to the Pacific Northwest, the two recruited Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin and began working on the music that would become Above’s “Wake Up” and hit single “River of Deceit.” McCready then asked longtime friend and Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley to join the band as the lead singer and lyricist. It was no secret that Staley had struggled for several years with a heroin addiction, and McCready hoped the chance to unload the baggage of fronting Alice and work with a clean outfit might nudge the troubled singer towards sobriety. The four began tinkering with material both in rehearsals and at unannounced sets at Seattle’s Crocodile Cafe while billed as the Gacy Bunch, a serial killer-meets-classic television joke that soon wore thin. By the time the band entered Seattle’s famed Bad Animals Studio in the winter of 1994 for the Above sessions, they had dubbed themselves Mad Season, a reference to the time of year that hallucinogenic mushrooms sprout in England.

In interviews at the time, McCready often glowed about the spontaneity of the Above sessions and the freedom he and the others felt being able to create music outside of the pressures and constraints of their regular bands. The entire album took only about a week to record, with Staley spending a few more days on the vocals. The results are a batch of songs that might borrow elements from Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and the Trees but never would have landed on those bands’ studio albums. The explosive, seven-minute slow burn “Wake Up” wafts in to open the record on a sobering note, and we ride out on a wave just shy of an hour later with the cleansing “All Alone,” an ethereal meditation on loneliness. McCready credits the latter as an accident born out of messing around with the pickups on his new double-neck guitar, just the type of mistake that a band with zero expectations could run with. Instrumental “November Hotel,” the cathartic purge before the tranquil “All Alone,” finds its footing in Martin’s rhythmic drumming before McCready goes on a run of guitar heroics that would’ve made fellow-Seattleite Jimi Hendrix nod in approval. And the band, no doubt influenced by Baker Saunders, doff their hat to the blues on “Artificial Red,” a smoky crawl through the long, dragged-out days spent in the trenches of recovery, Staley’s voice altering between grating pleas and smoldering coos.

Much of the initial attention around Mad Season focused on Staley’s involvement. He was easily the most recognizable member of the group, and McCready urged him to pour himself into the project. Staley stepped up by not only handling lead vocal duties but also by designing the album’s artwork, contributing rhythm guitar and penning nearly all of the record’s lyrics. “Everyone has a personal investment in the record,” Baker Saunders said at the time. “The words are Layne’s, but they speak for all of us.” Most of the frontman’s themes on Above dissect life through the lens of addiction: the industry’s exploitation of sickness (“X-Ray Mind”), broken relationships (“Lifeless Dead”) and the forfeiture of self (“I Don’t Know Anything”). However, if Alice in Chains’ bleak 1992 opus, Dirt, depicts the grim realities of tortured souls in the throes of addiction, Staley’s most memorable moments on Above find that manic confusion supplanted by stillness, clarity and brutal honesty. “Wake Up” makes no bones about the path Staley continues down (“Slow suicide’s no way to go”), and the serene, lovely “River of Deceit” finds the singer at his most accountable (“My pain is self-chosen”). The latter aches with such portending self-awareness as Staley lays out the choices before him—to drown or swim—knowing damn well which direction this river tends to flow. It’s one of the most emotionally vulnerable performances of his career.

Lanegan, Martin’s Screaming Trees bandmate, gets initiated into the band for two songs to become Mad Season’s de facto fifth member. On “I’m Above,” he lays down his deep blues baritone like a stage for Staley’s higher, nasally slur to dance atop. The chill, soothing harmonies make it all the more intense when Staley, still possessing a powerful voice at this time, goes rogue on the biting, raw pre-chorus that gets right into the listener’s face. Lanegan also co-penned the eclectic “Long Gone Day” with Staley. The pair swap verses and share choruses over bongo drumming and marimba, punctuated by guest player Eric “Skerik” Walton’s saxophone. Amid Lanegan’s dark imagery and addiction references, Staley comes in with a nostalgic verse that might sum up the spirit of Mad Season as well as anything else. “Does anyone else remember that summer?” asks Staley. “Every day, each time, the place was saved / The music that we made / The wind has carried all of that away.” The song concludes with Staley fearing that he may be making the same mistakes that once stole away his sunshine on that “long gone day.”

If we only had Above to document Mad Season’s time together, we’d possess enough evidence to know that the band were a unique confluence of talents with a dark and moving record to show for it. However, enough filmed footage of this short-lived partnership exists to show just how much joy this sad music created. An endearing, home video-quality recording survives from Pearl Jam’s Self Pollution Radio of the band wading nervously into the bright, flashing-red “I Don’t Know Anything.” From Martin’s simian faces behind the kit to Baker Saunders’ total vibing out to Staley playfully nodding in McCready’s direction before leaning into a verse, the aura quickly changes from supergroup to friends hanging out in a basement. Live at the Moore captures the culmination of the band as a live act, filming the set in front of a hometown audience who swing from the small theater’s balcony and treat the show like it’s Nirvana at Reading. McCready and Martin recall an intense energy exchange between the band and audience, elevating the night to something that’s become legendary in Seattle circles. Martin particularly remembers Staley being thrilled about the reception as the band took the stage for an encore. In many ways, it was Mad Season’s first proper show, with zero indicator that it might also be their last.

Eager to capitalize on Above’s out-of-nowhere success, Columbia urged the band to record a second album. Sadly, it became clear that Staley’s worsened condition would make it impossible for him to return. The trio would rename themselves Disinformation with Lanegan now on lead vocals and began recording a follow-up. That incarnation ended, however, when Baker Saunders died of a heroin overdose in January 1999. Three completed songs—“Locomotive,” “Book of Black Fear,” and “Slip Away”—from those final sessions with Lanegan and Baker Saunders eventually saw release on a 2013 Above box set. In April 2002, Staley was found dead in his Seattle apartment from an overdose. The heartbreaking circumstances around his lonely passing shook the local community in a way not felt since Cobain’s death eight years earlier. Perhaps the final chapter of the Mad Season story wrapped in 2015 when Chris Cornell, Duff McKagan and others joined the band to play the songs from Above one last time. Backed by the Seattle Symphony orchestra, it felt like a fitting send-off for a project that had always defied simple definition.

Given the tragic losses of Baker Saunders, Staley and, even years later, Lanegan, it can be difficult to look upon Mad Season and Above as a hopeful project—a brief, joyful moment full of brotherhood and innovation in the midst of grave personal turmoil. McCready has admitted that revisiting the music has been tough at times, due to half the band not having survived their demons. Still, he’s spoken of the solace that comes when a fan shows him a Mad Season tattoo or he thinks about that life-changing night at the Moore. Perhaps Martin has most eloquently expressed the connection people have to Mad Season’s music: “Even though the themes are dark, it’s a dark beauty. And people connect with that because everyone has walked through darkness at some point.” While Mad Season may not have been able to fully heal the pain of their own members, it’s quite the legacy to think that the band’s music has helped others to find peace and rise above.