The Temple Of The Dog narrative will never be rendered more succinctly than bassist Jeff Ament’s handwritten notes in the album’s inlay. Line by line, Jeff’s relays it sparsely, poetically and sometimes even mathematically.
First, he noted in a string of clipped sentences, there was “Green River + Soundgarden” – “’80s Seattle bands making huge sounds”. He then described how both shared a friend in the form of “musician/entertainer Freddie prodigy Andrew Wood, who lived with Chris, worked with Jeff + played an occasional acoustic set with Stone [Gossard]”. Later on he noted how, “Green River broke up + Andrew joined Stone + Jeff… Mother Love Bone.”
That new band, led by frontman/charisma-made-flesh Andy Wood, were destined for huge things. And then, less than a month before their debut album was due to hit shelves…
“We all lost our beautiful friend, Andrew,” wrote Jeff.
On March 19, 1990, Andy Wood died as a result of a heroin overdose, aged 24. He was kept on life-support long enough for his family and friends to say goodbye. In Pearl Jam’s 20th anniversary documentary film PJ20, Jeff relayed the horror of what they had encountered.
“Whenever people would start to get into drugs after that, I wished I had a picture to show them of Andy when he was in the hospital, because it was so horrible,” he said.
“It’s difficult to articulate it,” added Chris Cornell in the same film. “To see him hooked up to a machine… That was the death of the innocence of the scene. It wasn’t later when people surmised that Kurt [Cobain] blowing his head off was the end of the innocence. It was that. It was walking into that room.”
Everyone dealt with the trauma in their own way. For Mother Love Bone’s bereaved alumni, there was the inconceivable loss coupled, eventually, with the very real prospect that that their lives making music were over.
Around the same time, however, Chris – as mired in grief as he was – wrote two songs about his flatmate: Say Hello 2 Heaven and Reach Down. In the first he spoke to Andy directly – a beautiful song that fell somewhere between a eulogy and a personal letter to his fallen friend. The latter almost served as a fever dream or apparition of Andy, deftly conveying his legendary ability to treat even the smallest show like he was playing Wembley in order to win crowds over.
Chris took those songs to Jeff and Stone. As Jeff’s footnote continued: “Life moves on. We jammed.”