Mike McCready walked into a Minneapolis rehab facility in 1994 on a break from Pearl Jam and walked out with the bones of a band. The friendship he formed there with bassist John Baker Saunders became the literal foundation of Mad Season, a project assembled with a specific, human intention: to make music sober, and maybe, in doing so, help Layne Staley do the same.
The mechanics of it are worth sitting with. McCready and Saunders returned to Seattle after treatment and recruited Barrett Martin, the Screaming Trees' drummer, to complete a rhythm section. Then McCready reached out to Staley, whose 1994 had been a wreck. Alice in Chains had opened the year with the acoustic EP Jar of Flies, then watched a planned summer tour with Metallica collapse under the weight of addiction and internal fracture. Staley had time, and McCready had an idea: surround him with people trying to stay clean and see what happened. What happened was Above.
Recorded in winter 1994 at Bad Animals studio in Seattle, a room co-owned by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, the album came together with a speed that still feels slightly unreal. McCready later described the instrumental tracking as taking roughly seven days, with Staley spending a few additional days finishing his vocals. The band had rehearsed twice before entering the studio. Two of the tracks, "Lifeless Dead" and "I Don't Know Anything," got their public debut on Pearl Jam's January 8, 1995 Self-Pollution pirate radio broadcast, a four-and-a-half-hour program available to any station that wanted to carry it, before the album was even finished. The whole thing was produced by Brett Eliason alongside the band, with Eliason also handling the mix.
What the speed and the context produced is an album that sounds genuinely unlike anything else in the Seattle catalog. The community shorthand for grunge, the compression and the crunch and the forward momentum, is almost entirely absent from Above. McCready, freed from sharing guitar duties with Stone Gossard, stretched into something rawer and more open. His playing on "River of Deceit," the first single, which reached number two on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, has a patience to it, a willingness to let notes breathe, that his Pearl Jam work rarely allowed. Martin's drumming draws on his background in jazz and world music, giving tracks like "Long Gone Day" a looseness that grunge almost never permitted. That track also features Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees on vocals and additional lyrics, alongside saxophonist Skerik, and it sounds like nothing so much as a late-night blues session that wandered into the wrong decade and decided to stay. "November Hotel," at over seven minutes, takes that same unhurried quality and stretches it further, McCready's guitar circling without urgency while the rhythm section holds steady underneath.
Staley wrote all the lyrics himself, which was its own kind of departure. McCready had told him to take the whole canvas, and he did. The cover art was his own work too. And what he did with the space was quieter and more searching than anything Alice in Chains had put out before. "X-Ray Mind" picks at the music industry's appetite for spectacle around suffering. "I Don't Know Anything," which reached number 20 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, sits in a kind of suspended bewilderment. The album opens with "Wake Up," a slow, coiling track that announces its intentions without urgency, and closes with "All Alone," which does exactly what its title says.
The album peaked at number 24 on the Billboard 200 and went gold. Mad Season played a handful of shows, including a final concert at Seattle's Moore Theatre on April 29, 1995, captured on film and eventually released as a live album in the 2013 deluxe reissue, a three-disc set that also included tracks from the band's unfinished second album with vocals by Lanegan. Then the band went quiet. Staley's addiction deepened. A second album was begun in 1996, but Staley couldn't finish the vocals. John Baker Saunders died of a heroin overdose in 1999. Staley died the same way in 2002.
Above sits in a strange place in the Seattle catalog because of all this. It was made as an act of optimism by people who had reason to be pessimistic, and it carries that contradiction in every track. The music is open and unhurried precisely because McCready wanted to build something that felt like recovery. Staley's lyrics are honest about the distance between wanting to be well and being well. The album doesn't resolve that tension. It just holds it, carefully, for fifty-five minutes, which turns out to be enough.
