There are bands that form because of ambition. There are bands that form because of boredom, or ego, or a record label's phone call. And then there are bands that form because someone is trying to save lives — including their own.
Mad Season was the last kind.
During the recording of Pearl Jam's Vitalogy in 1994, guitarist Mike McCready checked himself into drug and alcohol rehab at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota. It was there, in a treatment center a thousand miles from Seattle, that the whole thing began. McCready remembers seeing a crusty old guy pull up to the facility in a Dodge Dart with a bumper sticker that read: "What We Have Here Is A Failure To Give A Shit." His immediate thought was that he had to meet this person. That person was John Baker Saunders — a seasoned Chicago blues bassist with a deep résumé and a serious problem.
A couple of days passed, and McCready heard Bob Dylan playing from one of the rooms, where residents weren't supposed to play music. He walked in, and it was Baker. The two bonded over records and eventually over recovery, and by the time they left Minnesota they had a plan.
Back in Seattle, McCready and Saunders brought in Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin and quickly began writing together, producing early versions of what would become "Wake Up" and "River of Deceit." Then McCready made the call that would define the project. He brought in Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley to front the band — hoping that surrounding Staley with sober musicians might give him a reason to get clean himself.
It was an act of friendship as much as it was a musical decision. It didn't entirely work. But what it produced was extraordinary.
The entire album, Above, was recorded at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle — and McCready later recalled that all the music was written in roughly seven days, with Staley adding his vocals in just a few more. Staley had been reading The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran throughout the sessions. Drummer Barrett Martin said Staley felt he was "on a spiritual mission through his music — not a rock mission, a spiritual mission." It shows. Above doesn't sound like a grunge record. It sounds like confession.
The band had played their first shows in late 1994 under the name The Gacy Bunch — unannounced sets at Seattle's Crocodile Cafe, before they'd even settled on a permanent name. By the time April 1995 arrived, Above had been out for six weeks, the single "River of Deceit" was getting genuine radio traction, and Mad Season had exactly one major show left to play.
The Moore Theatre had been waiting 88 years for a night like this — though it would never have known it.
Built for Seattle real estate developer James A. Moore and designed by architect E. W. Houghton, the Moore opened in December 1907 as the grandest room in the Pacific Northwest. With 2,436 seats and a lavishly decorated interior of onyx, marble, stained glass, and mosaic floors, it was developed partly to capture visitors arriving for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The stage was the largest in Seattle. The electrical system was state of the art. Washington's governor and Seattle's mayor attended opening night.
The Moore is Seattle's oldest active theatre, and it has seen everything — vaudeville, the Seattle Symphony, silent films, religious revivals, and the world premiere staging of The Who's rock opera Tommy in 1971. By the 1990s it had become the preferred room for the Seattle grunge scene's biggest names: Nirvana had been booked here before being bumped up to the Paramount; Pearl Jam and Soundgarden had played these boards. The Moore was smaller, more intimate than the Paramount — the kind of room where you could feel the stage from the back row.
On April 29, 1995, that intimacy mattered. A lot.
The show that night was Mad Season's final live performance. Nobody in the room necessarily knew that. But looking back, everything about it has the weight of a goodbye.
Staley performed with the kind of restrained ferocity that made him unique — not a showman, never a showman, but a singer who made you feel like you were overhearing something private. Mark Lanegan joined the band onstage for "Long Gone Day" and "I'm Above," adding a second voice of devastated beauty to songs already almost too heavy to carry. The concert was later released on VHS and eventually reissued with remastered audio in the 2013 deluxe edition of Above.
Mad Season went on semi-permanent hiatus in 1996, with Staley's addiction making a second album impossible. John Baker Saunders died of a heroin overdose in 1999. Layne Staley died the same way, on April 5, 2002.
McCready later said of the band: "It was a brief lightning bolt of music that lasted six months, tops, and then it was gone."
He's right. But the Moore Theatre caught it on film, in a room built for the Gilded Age elite of a city that didn't yet exist in its current form. Some nights a venue becomes more than a venue. It becomes a witness.
Put your headphones on. Turn it up.
The stage remembers.