Midnight Oil’s inspiration helps Seattle’s Candlebox to ignite with chart-topping debut

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JULY 15, 1994

By Steve Newton

In 1983, Midnight Oil released an album called 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, which included a song called “Tin Legs and Tin Mines”. Within that tune was the lyric “boxed in like candles”, which struck a chord with a young Seattle rocker by the name of Kevin Martin. He decided to call his own band Candlebox after seeing how vividly Midnight Oil could light up a stage with its incendiary live show.

“It was an amazing experience,” says Martin of his first exposure to wild-man vocalist Peter Garrett and his hard-rocking mates. “The energy level was extreme.”

Vocalist Martin and his Candlebox mates–guitarist Peter Klett, drummer Scoyt Mercado and bassist Bardi Martin (no relation)–get their own energized vibe rolling to full effect on the band’s self-titled debut CD, which is currently sitting pretty (with a bullet) in Billboard magazine’s top 30.

And no doubt the band’s status will only be increased by the tour with Alice in Chains, Suicidal Tendencies, and headliner Metallica that rips up Thunderbird Stadium on Sunday (July 17).

The group’s seemingly overnight rise to rock popularity actually began in May of ’91, when Martin teamed up with drummer Mercado and formed a group called Uncle Duke. By the end of the year, Klett and the second Martin had come on board, and the Midnight Oil-inspired moniker was in place.

Next stop: the demo zone.

After selling all their worldly goods, Candlebox booked as much studio time as they could afford, hoping to get maybe three tracks down and use those to land gigs on the ultra-competitive Northwest club scene. Forty-eight hours after entering Bob Lang Studios in April of ’91, however, the group walked out with an eight-song demo that they hawked independently, selling out the initial 600-copy pressing in 60 days.

The positive fan response helped carry a buzz on the band around to various record labels, and it was while performing a showcase for one major label in L.A. that Candlebox was spotted–and signed–by Maverick Records’ Gus Oseary. Oseary put the group into Seattle’s London Bridge Studio with producer Kelly Gray in March of ’93, and the resultant recording has since sold well over half a million copies in the U.S. alone.

“We bought back all our worldly goods,” says Martin, who can now look back and chuckle at the initial desperation involved in getting his band’s music on tape and into the hand of the powers that be. Strangely enough, the two tracks that made it onto the Candlebox CD from the original 1992 demo are also the two singles that brought the group to prominence–“You” and “Far Behind”. The success of these songs in their original form says a lot about doing demos right the first time.

“If you play club dates, that’s great,” says Martin, “because people get to see you, but if you don’t have a demo tape that sounds good, they just won’t listen to it.”

The intense reaction Seattle rock fans had to Candlebox’s quickie demo tape has intensified to the point that now, when the band members tour through town, they are viewed as conquering heroes by the hometown fans.

“That happens when you sell like 60,000 albums at home,” says Martin “People really like to have you come home and play a show, because they feel somewhat responsible for your success. And I think they’re more responsible than they know.”

To hear the full audio of my interview with Kevin Martin from 1994 subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 325 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with: