Mike McCready discusses about Layne Staley and John Baker Saunders

Here are a couple of excerpts from PremierGuitar.com‘s new interview with former Mad Season guitarist Mike McCready:

On the difficulty he felt when listening back to the Mad Season album featuring his fallen bandmates Layne Staley and John Baker Saunders: “Tons. I hadn’t listened to that record for 10 or 12 years. I’d listen to it if it was on the radio and I’d feel happy but sad, I don’t know if that makes sense. I’d feel like, I’m proud of this song but I’m also very sad that my friends are not around anymore. So getting over that and listening to the record again and listening to some of the live stuff, is kind of bittersweet. It makes me sad that Layne and Baker are not around to experience life now as an older guy. My values now are different than what they were when I was 26 and I think about what those guys would have been like if they were still around. It’s hard.”

On Mad Season’s formation: “When we got together in 1994 the initial idea of it from my point of view…I was in rehab for booze and I met this guy Baker [John Baker Saunders] in there who played bass and I liked a lot. He was just this funny, crusty old blues player who had some pretty cool stories and was cranking Bob Dylan in his room; I just immediately liked him. So I said, ‘Do you wanna play some blues sometime or come back to Seattle and jam?’ My thought process back then was to help people who were suffering from addictions or alcohol to maybe do a project. That was where my heart was at the time, however naïve it was. That’s kind of where the initial idea for Mad Season came from.”

Mike McCready & Barret Martin reveal the original plans for Mad Season’s second Album ‘Disinformation’

In a new interview with Billboard, Mike McCready and Barrett Martin discussed the original plan for Mad Season’s second album Disinformation. They said that they began work on the album in 1996 but Layne Staley and John Baker Saunders became increasingly difficult to get ahold of.

McCready discussed one of the new songs on the reissue, “‘Slip Away,’ which I wrote, was kind of my feeling at the time how [Mad Season] was slipping away,” McCready says. “The guitar solo at the end of that, you can hear the pain that’s in that. That’s my pain of how this whole thing was all falling apart when Baker and Layne were dying… Mark put lyrics to that and they mean something different now… but I’m getting a little deep in to what the lead is. You’ll listen to it and you’ll hear pain.”

McCready also discussed getting Mark Lanegan involved with the process, “The original plan when we were working on that second record was that Mark was going to be much more involved in co-writing songs and this is what Layne wanted,” Martin says. When the reissue idea surfaced, “we sent him all 17 basic tracks… I said, ‘here’s what we have, is there anything on there you felt compelled to write some lyrics and sing on. And he picked three! More than we expected.”

Barrett Martin said, “I don’t want to speak for Mark, because they’re his words, but it’s his tribute to Layne and Baker. He knew those guys very well. He was one of Layne’s best friends.”

Spin spoke to Mike McCready and Barrett Martin

http://vimeo.com/60586756


In preparation for the deluxe, expanded re-release of the grunge supergroup's landmark debut

"I remember that we laughed a lot," says Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, of writing Above, the lone (and beloved) 1995 release from Seattle supergroup Mad Season. "We laughed about being sober for the first time, and the newsness of that. We laughed at ourselves and a lot of the stupid things we'd done as young men."

It's a memory that stands in moving contrast to the soon-to-be-reissued full-length's relatively somber origin story: Having just left a rehab facility in Minnesota after the completion of 1994's Vitalogy, Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready approached Martin and Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley about the prospect of writing together, in hopes of helping the latter gain some distance from a battle with addiction that would haunt him until his death in 2002. Joining them on bass was late Chicago native John "Baker" Saunders, a friend and fellow rehab alum. "It was kind of a failed attempt at trying to get everybody to not be drinking or doing drugs," says McCready. "Not that you can really control that. You have to figure that out for yourself. It's been really hard to go back and listen. I miss Baker. I miss Layne. I wonder how Layne would be met these days, what kind of music he'd be making or if he'd be a father. And his lyrics [on Above] in particular still sound fresh to me. They still make me feel, and that's good."

Above, Martin adds, is the only album comprised entirely of Staley-penned lyrics, many of which were inspired by a spiritually minded, Kahlil Gibran-enriched stack of books the late vocalist carried with him from place to place in a backpack. Coupled with compositions that remain outliers for their time, the result was a delicate, blues-driven set whose recording the foursome financed themselves, just weeks after they performed for the first time at a sold-out performance at Seattle's legendary Crocodile Cafe. "It has a certain mood and a certain quality to it that no other records of that time really have," says Martin. "There's a real atmosphere to it. And when I listen to it, it just makes me happy. I'm sad about my friends being gone, but I also feel proud that we all left behind a beautiful piece of music. You can't always say that."

On April 2, the album will get a deluxe re-release in expanded form, including three songs originally meant to appear on Disinformation, a second Mad Season full-length that never came to be. And because Staley never recorded vocal takes, Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan stepped in to complete them with fresh vocals and lyrics of his own. Hear the genesis of both the reissue (which also includes a disc dedicated to the group's show at Seattle's Moore Theater on April 29, 1995) and that collaboration in the exclusive mini-doc above. You can pre-order it now on iTunes, Amazon and Pearl Jam's Ten Club store. Additionally, there will be double 12" LP of the re-issue made available for Record Store Day on April 20.