CANDLEBOX: Saying Goodbye (2023)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

KEVIN Martin of Candlebox has a very special relationship with Australia. He and his family usually spent Christmas around Noosa or on a farm near Mount Gambier. Yet he’s never played a show here, not even a solo gig at a pub somewhere.

“I’ve been trying to come there for 30 years!” he says with a laugh from his home in LA, where it is uncharacteristically raining. “I’ve been all over the country, I love it. I’ve even said to my agent, ‘I’ll be there at Christmas, give me an acoustic set at the Great Northern in Byron or somewhere’. I just don’t think promoters thought we meant anything, and now that this nineties resurgence is happening, Silverback has decided to bring us over. I’m super stoked. I can’t wait to play there. They’re going to be long sets, close to 20 to 22 songs per set. I just wish it wasn’t my first and only time playing there.”

Thirty years after the release of their debut album brought them huge and immediate, if fleeting, success, Martin is finally touring Australia with Candlebox in January.

“Unless this record The Long Goodbye takes off and blows up around the world, this is it,” he promises. “I’m retiring. So this is the only time you’ll get to see me.”

The singer is doing what many others find difficult – he’s walking away from music altogether. After a decade or so of touring behind an album that no one has bought in order to fund the recording of the next album that finds no support, he’s “burned out”. He’s exhausted from it and when the pandemic forced him off the tour cycle, he discovered something he loved more.

“I have a 15-year-old son and a wife that I hadn’t seen in years, and then during COVID I was home with them and I realised how much I love them more than I love music. It was a strange thing, but I’m glad I was with the right people.”

Moving with his family to Seattle when he was 15, Martin found himself surrounded by figures that would soon become some of the biggest names in rock music. Working in a shoe store at 16, his colleague there was band manager Susan Silver.

“It was incredible. The first time I saw Soundgarden, Chris was playing drums and singing and they were a three piece. I had never experienced anything like that. Then along came Alice In Chains and Screaming Trees and Blood Circus and the Melvins and Nirvana. I was working in a shoe store with Susan Silver, who was managing Soundgarden and Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees at the time. The guys would come in for the flyers and that’s how I met Layne and Chris and Andy Wood, and it opened my eyes up to who these musicians were.”

A love of punk rock engendered in him by his older sister meant that he could hold his own in conversations with them despite being much younger. What proved to be much harder was hitting out in his own band.

“Nobody wanted to hear Candlebox, nobody wanted us to open their shows, nobody wanted to give us a gig in the city, so we were doing a lot of house parties downtown, playing shitty bars, just to sell our demos and get people to pay attention. It was difficult but it was necessary growing pains and it was necessary for us to experience the negative side, because it prepared us for 30 years’ worth of it.”

Martin formed Candlebox in late 1990 with Scott Mercado, Peter Klett and Bardi Martin in Seattle. By the time of their first album, the bubbling underground scene they were born into had exploded into a global paradigm shift for rock music. Their 1993 self-titled debut album was able to ride the tail-end of that wave, becoming Maverick Records’ first multi-platinum release. “Far Behind” charted in the US for eight months and Candlebox toured with some of the biggest acts of the period. It was near-immediate success that Martin says came as a complete surprise.

“When you come from a city like Seattle and you’re in the second wave of music that came out of there, you knew there was going to be a lot against you,” he says. “As a band we had these discussions when we first started about, ‘What are we doing?’ and ‘This is going to be impossible’ and the fact that it happened, we pinched ourselves every single day.”

By the time the band was ready to make the follow-up, the Seattle shockwave was over. So too was the honeymoon for Martin and Candlebox. The massive success of the first album allowed them to discover what they could be capable of as a band. But attempting to maintain the expectations of that success also led to them making other discoveries about themselves, and the tide was changing.

“The success of the debut album – we didn’t expect it. If you had told me we would sell four million copies of that album in the first two years I would have told you you were crazy. The beauty of that was that it really opened our eyes to what we could do as a band, the creative nature of ourselves and the music we were able to produce after the debut. I think Lucy is not one of my favourite records, but there’s some amazing stuff on there, as well as [on] Happy Pills. So coming off the high of touring with Metallica and Henry Rollins and the Flaming Lips and Woodstock ’94 and all that stuff… then you make a record like Lucy that doesn’t do nearly as well.”

The comedown wasn’t the hardest thing, though, even as the band’s album sales went into freefall when “everyone was done with grunge.”

“As a band, we [realised we] didn’t really know one another. We weren’t friends. So we had to become friends in an environment that is a little tricky. It made it difficult for us to be in a room together. We had to figure out how to become friends and that was the harder thing. It wasn’t the failure of Lucy or Happy Pills, it was more so the failure of our friendship, that was the most difficult thing for the four of us.”

Relations with the Maverick had broken down as well, and by 2000 the band was done. While Martin has toured with various versions of Candlebox since a reformation tour in 2006, and made another five albums, he has never come close to the same level of recognition.

“Your entire existence is touring to make enough money for another record. So these last five albums for me have been entire labours of love, as well as the Gracious Few with the guys from Live, my other band the Hi-Watts and Le Projet that I did with Morgan from Sevendust. These are records that, if 10,000 people have heard them, I’d be surprised. That’s OK, but I want to play those records live. I don’t want to have to keep playing the debut album.”

Kevin Martin neither looks nor sounds jaded. He is, in fact, quite convivial. He seems completely at ease with the idea of walking away.

“It’s hard to put a record out that you’ve put your heart and soul into only to have people say, ‘I haven’t heard that’, or ‘Candlebox is still around?’ So I might as well go out on top of a 30 year career – and be done with it.”

IMAGE: Graham Fielder