Candlebox… those guys got big really fast.
I first heard them in the summer of ’93 when that self-titled album dropped. “Far Behind” was all over the radio and MTV, and some people around here rolled their eyes and said they were late to the party. Maybe they were, but I didn’t care — I liked the songs. Kevin Martin had a strong voice and the band had these big, catchy choruses that stuck in your head. I ended up playing that record more than I expected to.
I saw them live a bunch of times once I was living here. One night at the Off Ramp in ’94 really stands out. The place was packed and they played like they knew they had something people wanted to hear. They weren’t the heaviest band in town, but they had this energy that worked in a club. You could tell they were enjoying the ride while it lasted.
They came right after the first wave had already blown up. A lot of the old-school Seattle crowd never really warmed up to them — they thought Candlebox sounded too polished or too radio-friendly. I get it, but I still thought they wrote some solid songs. They put out Lucy in ’95 and Happy Pills in ’98, and then things slowed down. The band broke up around 2000.
These days in 2002 they’re not together anymore. Kevin’s doing other stuff and the rest of the guys have moved on too. I still throw on that first album every once in a while. It takes me back to ’93 and ’94, when everything was exploding and you could hear new Seattle bands on the radio all the time. Candlebox weren’t the underground heroes, but they were part of the story for a lot of us.
They got massive for a minute there, and some people still give them shit for it. But I liked them. Simple as that.