When UMe announced the recent reissues of Mother Love Bone’s Shine EP and 1990 debut Apple, it felt like the perfect time to revisit one of rock’s most misunderstood bands. Sure, MLB hailed from Seattle, and yes, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament would go on to co-found Pearl Jam. But let’s be clear: Mother Love Bone was about as “grunge” as Poison was “punk.” And maybe that’s exactly why they deserve another look.
The problem with Mother Love Bone has always been one of geography and timing. The band emerged from Seattle just as the city was becoming synonymous with flannel shirts, thrift-store aesthetics, and a certain calculated anti-rock-star posturing. But MLB’s late frontman and Queen fanatic, Andrew Wood, was the antithesis of that ethos. Wood wore his influences and his crushed velvet on his sleeve. He was equal parts Freddie Mercury, Steven Tyler, and Sly Stone, a larger-than-life showman who seemed more interested in channeling Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic than Black Flag’s Damaged.
The Shine EP, originally released in 1989, showcased a band more interested in riff-heavy swagger than in the brooding, disaffected aura that would come to define the so-called Seattle sound. Listen to “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” and try to find common ground with Nirvana’s Bleach, which dropped the same year. You won’t. One band was stripping rock down to its most primal elements; the other was building monuments to rock excess, complete with Wood’s theatrical vocal delivery, the dual guitar interplay of Gossard and Bruce Fairweather, and the driving backbeat of Greg Gilmore. By the time the full-length Apple arrived in 1990 (tragically, just months after Wood’s death from a heroin overdose), the album felt like a relic from another era, even though it had just been recorded.
While Soundgarden was perfecting their supreme brand of sludge and Nirvana wallowing in self-loathing, Apple sounded like it could’ve been cut in 1987 by an opener for Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite tour. Tracks like “Stardog Champion” and “This Is Shangrila” had more in common with the seamy, raunchy hard rock of bands like Sea Hags and Life Sex & Death than with anything happening at Sub Pop. And here’s where things get interesting: MLB has been granted a kind of critical amnesty that their sonic peers never received.
Since Gossard and Ament would go on to massive success with Pearl Jam, and because the band was tangentially connected to the “right” scene at the “right” time, Mother Love Bone gets filed under “proto-grunge” in the history books. Meanwhile, bands like Junkyard (who shared MLB’s love for Aerosmith riffs, arena-rock swagger, and gutter-level imagery) were dismissed as hair-metal also-rans.
The truth is, MLB existed in a peculiar gray area. They were too animated for the emerging grunge purists, too grimy for the pop metal set, and too sincere to be written off as mere poseurs. Wood’s lyrics mixed street-level poetry with cosmic mysticism, his vocals soaring one moment and sneering the next. The band could bring both the funk and the Zeppelin-esque riffs, as in numbers like “Captain Hi-Top,” and “Holy Roller.” It was a glorious, messy collision of influences that didn’t fit neatly into any category.
These newly remastered reissues (available on CD and in various limited-edition color vinyl variants) offer a chance to hear Shine and Apple with fresh ears, detached from the grunge mythology that has calcified around them. The CD version of Shine includes the album version of “Capricorn Sister” as a bonus track, while Apple features “Gentle Groove” and “Mr. Danny Boy” as bonus cuts.
What becomes clear upon revisiting this material 35 years later is that Mother Love Bone was doing something genuinely unique, even if they didn’t survive long enough to see it through. They weren’t grunge. They weren’t pop metal. They were a glam-tinged, blues-soaked, funk-inflected hard rock band that just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time (or maybe the wrong place at the right time, depending on how you look at it). As Rolling Stone once noted, MLB’s “combination of Northwest grunge and runny-mascara glam sounded like a prediction of where hair metal, just beginning its decline in 1990, could go.”
That’s a generous read. The reality is probably simpler: Mother Love Bone was always going to be too offbeat for the mainstream and too mainstream for the underground. And perhaps that’s exactly what makes them worth rediscovering.
Pick up these reissues and experience a band that refused to play by anyone’s rules, even if they paid the price for it.
For questions, comments, or something you’d like to see, drop me a note.
