Malfunkshun make a lot more sense once you stop trying to make them sound like grunge.
I learned that the hard way. I didn't really hear them until Return to Olympus came out in '95. Somebody at the store handed me the CD one day and said, "You like Mother Love Bone, right?"
Yeah.
"Then take this home."
So I did, and what the fuck.
I knew Andrew Wood had been in a band with his brother before Mother Love Bone. I knew the name Malfunkshun. I knew they were on Deep Six. That's the kind of information you absorb living around Seattle and working in a record store whether you've actually heard the records or not. None of it prepared me for what came out of the speakers.
Glam, metal, punk, funk, Kiss, cheap effects, huge guitar solos, Andrew making noises like some alien version of a rock star broadcasting from his bedroom. Parts of it sounded ridiculous. Parts of it sounded great. Quite a few parts managed both at the same time.
I loved it.
Andrew and his older brother Kevin started Malfunkshun over on Bainbridge Island in 1980, when Andrew was fourteen. The very first version wasn't quite the famous trio yet — Dave Rees played bass and David Hunt played drums briefly — but it didn't take long for Andrew to pick up the bass himself and Regan Hagar to come in on drums. That left the lineup everybody means when they talk about Malfunkshun: Andrew singing and playing bass, Kevin playing guitar and Regan pounding away behind them.
Except those weren't necessarily the people they wanted you to think they were.
Andrew became L'Andrew, or Landrew the Love Child depending on where you see it written. Kevin was Kevinstein. Regan was Thundarr. There was makeup, whiteface, costumes and this whole homemade rock-star mythology wrapped around the band. Andrew didn't seem interested in waiting for somebody to give him permission to become larger than life. If the room wasn't big enough for a rock god, fine. He'd bring one anyway.
That might be my favorite thing about him.
There's a version of Seattle history where everybody in the eighties was already practicing for the nineties — dirty clothes, down-tuned guitars, no posing, no bullshit, nobody admitting they wanted to be famous. It's a nice story if you don't mind throwing away half the people who were actually here.
Then there's Malfunkshun.
These guys were drawing on glam and hard rock and metal as much as punk. Kevin could go tearing off into the kind of guitar lead that would have gotten him arrested by the indie-rock police a few years later. Andrew loved the theatrical side of rock music and wasn't shy about it. The whole thing could be heavy, funny, crude, funky and completely over the top within a few minutes. They didn't sound like somebody trying to invent the future. They sounded like three young guys grabbing whatever entertained them and making their own weird little religion out of it.
That helps explain why Deep Six is such a great document.
C/Z put the compilation out in '86 after the bands had recorded at Ironwood the previous year. Malfunkshun were sitting there beside Green River, Melvins, Soundgarden, Skin Yard and the U-Men, with "With Yo' Heart (Not Yo' Hands)" and "Stars-n-You." I keep coming back to Deep Six on this site because you almost have to. Pick up that record and half the family tree is sitting there waiting for you, except the family members don't sound nearly as much alike as twenty years of people calling everything "grunge" would have you believe.
Those were Malfunkshun's first commercially released songs, but they weren't quite the entire story while Andrew was alive. C/Z put another compilation out in 1989, Another Pyrrhic Victory, with "My Only Fan" and "Shotgun Wedding." So there were four Malfunkshun songs officially out there before Andrew died.
What they never had was their own album.
That's an important distinction. Most of the music existed on tapes and in sessions instead. A lot of what eventually became Return to Olympus was recorded at Reciprocal in '86 and '87 with Jack Endino engineering. Not all of Malfunkshun's recordings were Endino jobs — the Deep Six tracks, for instance, came from the earlier Ironwood sessions — but enough of the stuff on the CD came through Reciprocal that you can hear why the name keeps turning up in this particular corner of Seattle history.
Of course it does.
I'm not making the Jack Endino joke again.
Probably.
By late '87 Andrew's attention was moving somewhere else. Green River was coming apart, and Andrew started working with Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament and Bruce Fairweather in a new band. Regan Hagar played drums with them briefly. For a short stretch they used the name Lords of the Wasteland, and after Regan was out and Greg Gilmore came in, that developing band became Mother Love Bone.
Malfunkshun didn't turn into Mother Love Bone. That's too neat.
There wasn't some straight line where one band changed its name and became the other one. Kevin didn't suddenly become Stone Gossard. Malfunkshun just stopped being the place where Andrew was putting all that energy. No grand farewell, no final Malfunkshun album, no nice clean ending for somebody to put at the bottom of a discography.
And I obviously never saw any of it.
I was a kid in Queens while these guys were wearing makeup and playing weird little Northwest shows.
Wrong coast. Again.
By the time I moved to Seattle in September '92, Andrew had already been dead for two years. Mother Love Bone was gone too. All I had were the records, the stories and that strange feeling you get living in a city where people still talk about somebody in the present tense even though they're not here anymore.
Andrew's heroin problem didn't begin with Mother Love Bone. He had already been through treatment before that band really got going. On March 16, 1990, he overdosed on heroin. He died three days later, March 19. He was twenty-four.
That's enough about how he died.
Because this is the trap with Andrew Wood. Somebody dies at twenty-four and suddenly everything they did at fourteen, eighteen or twenty-one starts getting treated like evidence. Every lyric becomes a warning. Every stupid joke becomes sad. Every photograph gets turned into foreshadowing. You listen backward from the hospital instead of forward from the kid making the music.
I hate that.
Which brings me back to Return to Olympus.
Stone Gossard put those old Malfunkshun recordings out in '95 through Loosegroove, the label he had started with Regan Hagar. It wasn't a newly recorded Malfunkshun album and shouldn't really be heard that way. It was old material finally getting an album of its own, much of it from those Reciprocal sessions in '86 and '87. Jack Endino had engineered much of it, different people had mixed pieces of it over the years, and suddenly in 1995 you could walk into a record store and buy a proper Malfunkshun CD instead of knowing the band mainly from two C/Z compilations and whatever tapes had survived.
Which is how it landed in my hands.
The thing I love about Return to Olympus is that it doesn't make Andrew sound like some tragic figure waiting around to become the guy from Mother Love Bone. If anything, it makes that whole tidy version of the story harder to believe. He's too busy being Landrew.
Listen to "Enter Landrew" and the joke is right there. This isn't a guy apologizing for taking up space. The whole record is full of ridiculous gestures and weird turns: Kevin throwing metal guitar all over songs that don't necessarily know what to do with it, Regan hammering underneath him, Andrew jumping between swagger and silliness and sex and whatever strange mythology he's decided belongs in the room that day. Then they'll do something genuinely beautiful and make you wonder whether you underestimated them thirty seconds earlier.
There's a Ted Nugent cover on the damn thing.
Of course there is.
Some of it sounds primitive because it is. Some ideas work better than others. Some of Kevin's guitar playing is so gloriously excessive that you can practically see the hair moving. Andrew can sound funny, horny, completely full of himself and strangely vulnerable without warning. The recordings don't have the polish Mother Love Bone eventually got, and that's part of why I like them. Nobody has sanded off the dumb ideas yet.
Sometimes the dumb ideas are the good part.
And this is where calling Malfunkshun "pre-grunge" or treating them as chapter one of the Pearl Jam story really screws things up. Sure, the family tree matters. Andrew went to Mother Love Bone. Stone and Jeff eventually ended up in Pearl Jam. Regan was part of that brief transition and later helped run the label that finally released these tapes. Seattle bands recycled musicians like the city had a deposit system.
But none of that tells you what Malfunkshun sounded like.
Malfunkshun sounded like Malfunkshun.
Three guys from around Bainbridge and Seattle wearing makeup and giving themselves stupid names, making heavy music that could be glamorous and ugly and funny at the same time. A band strange enough to sit on Deep Six without sounding like the other bands on Deep Six. A band that managed to exist for years without ever getting its own record out while it was actually alive.
That's the part I wish I'd understood before somebody handed me that CD.
I thought I was going home to hear Andrew Wood before Mother Love Bone.
Instead I met L'Andrew the Love Child.
That's better.
Put on "With Yo' Heart (Not Yo' Hands)." Put on "Stars-n-You." Put on "My Only Fan." Put on Return to Olympus.
Forget Mother Love Bone for an hour.
Forget Pearl Jam.
Forget Temple of the Dog.
Forget the word grunge.
Meet Malfunkshun.
