Considered a grunge supergroup, Mad Season would be made up of Alice in
Chains frontman Layne Staley, Mike McCready of Pearl Jam,
bassist John Baker Saunders and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin.
The origins of Mad Season began in 1994. Pearl Jam guitarist Mike Mcready had been struggling with
substance abuse and headed to a treatment center in Minnesota where he met bassist John Baker
Saunders who was dealing with a heroin addiction. Following their stint at rehab, both musicians
agreed to start a band to help each other stay sober. They would enlist drummer Barrett Martin
and all they needed now was a frontman. Alice in Chains at the time were on a break following
a failed 1994 tour with Metallica that had to be shelved due to frontman Layne Staley’s substance
abuse issues. McCready knowing that Layne was struggling staying sober, offered the singer
a chance to join the group hoping it would help him stay clean. Staley joined the group and they
played some shows and worked on their first and only album Above, which came out in March of 1995.
The group’s name meanwhile would be thought of by Mcready who told Yahoo.
Also contributing to the group’s album Above was Screaming Trees
frontman mark lanegan who co-wrote and sang vocals on several tracks.
Mad Season would play a total of 6 shows, but the members had other commitments and went back
to their respective bands by early 1995. Despite the limited window of promotion for the record,
Above was a success going gold thanks to thesingle River of Deceit which was a top 10 hit on rock
radio. Despite their other commitments, Columbia records who Mad season was signed to, wanted a
follow up album with Martin telling Loudersound “Columbia wanted us to make another record,
and we said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’” Nobody ever quit the band,
nobody ever called up and said: ‘I can’t do this.’ “Mike, Baker and I had been working on
riffs and chord progressions. We went into the studio and started recording basic tracks and,
basically, Layne never came back. Mark Lanegan came down for one day. He sang on a couple of
songs from the first album, but he wasn’t ready to sing on anything at that point. The truth was,
Layne’s health was deteriorating and I think he really wanted to do it but he just couldn’t.”
Originally called Disinformation, the second Mad Season album would eventually be scrapped. McReady
and Martin’s focus soon changed to starting a new band called disinformation with Lanegan
fronting the group, but again it went no where. Any hopes for a future follow up were shattered
when John Baker Saunders died in January of 1999 due to a heroin overdose. Martin would
recall to Loudersound “It was a very big shock to me, because we bought houses that were just
a few blocks apart, and he would come to my house almost every morning,”. “We’d sit and have coffee
with my girlfriend, and we’d just laugh all the time. He had a lot of great stories about
playing the blues. He and I had talked the night before he died about how we were going
to meet and have breakfast at a diner in our neighbourhood. He died that night. I got a call
early the next morning about how he had died from an overdose and I was in complete shock,
because I had no idea that that was even a possibility, because, like I said, I saw him
almost every day. It was bad.” According to the Mark Yarm book Everybody Loves Our Town, one of
Baker’s friends would recall the time leading up to his death remembering how the bassist
was stressed financially and banking on a new mad season album. In addition to that, Saunders was in
a relationship with a belgian woman who had gone back home and he was feeling lonely. Baker would
end up relapsing while his dealer was at his house and it was said in the book that his dealer waited
too long to call 911. In 1999 during an interview on Rockline the members of Alice in Chains were
interviewed when one caller asked about Mad Season’s future. Here’s what Layne had to say.
Nearly three years later on April 5, 2002 Staley would die from a drug overdose. Mad Season’s sole
record Above would be reissued as a box set in 2013. Then in 2015 Mcready, and Martin would
team up with the seattle symphony orchestra, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Guns N’ Roses bassist
Duff McKagan at a concert called Sonic Evolution that saw the musicians perform a number of Mad
Season songs. It was the same year that Barrett Martin announced on social media he was working
on new Mad Season material with McCready and McKagan. That project would eventually morph
into a band called The Levee Walkers who put out a handful songs with The Killing Joke Frontman Jaz
Coleman in 2016. The following year they’d release the track All Things Fade Away with Ayron Jones.
McCready would tell Loudersound looking back at the legacy of the band “I’m honoured that
people now consider the album classic,” he says. “At the time, I didn’t think so,
but over time I’ve seen, like, Mad Season tattoos on people,
and now I can see that it meant a lot to people, and that makes me very proud and
grateful. At the time, it was done very quickly and it was very fun and exciting,
As for their departed bandmates Martin would add “In a very real way,
I feel the spirits of Layne and Baker,” says Martin. “I can always feel those guys
around. They were helping to guide this thing together. I did a lot of meditating
and praying about what was the right thing to do, because I want it to be in memory of them,
but I also want people to hear a great band and some great new songs. I think their spirits
being involved is what got me and Mike working on some stuff, together. And I feel very blessed."