Today, Andy Wood would have turned 60.
I never saw Andy perform live. Most people who care deeply about him didn’t. And that’s not something to apologize for—it’s actually the quiet center of his story now. Andy exists for many of us through echoes: through albums released too late, through interviews where his name still lands heavy, through the way musicians talk about him like the sentence was never finished.
You don’t inherit that kind of presence by accident.
Learning Andy Backward
If you came to Andy later, you probably met him the same way I did—out of order. Apple already carried loss. Malfunkshun felt like a message from a different timeline. Nothing arrived clean or new. Everything arrived loaded.
When Chris Cornell spoke about Andy, it was never framed as history. It sounded like comparison. Like Andy was still the standard in the room, even when he wasn’t there.
That tells you more than any documentary ever could.
What Other Musicians Saw
People who were around Andy describe the same thing again and again—not hype, not ego, but certainty. He didn’t perform like he was trying to prove something. He performed like he already knew who he was.
Jeff Ament once said Andy made it feel okay to want things—to want success, attention, scale—without losing yourself. In late-’80s Seattle, that was radical. It shifted how people thought about ambition. When Andy was gone, that permission went with him.
The Almost
By the time Mother Love Bone finished Apple, the future wasn’t theoretical anymore. It was close enough to touch. That’s the cruel part. Andy didn’t die at the beginning—he died at the moment things were aligning.
So when the album finally came out, it didn’t feel like a debut. It felt like a document.
Where Many of Us Finally Felt Him
For a lot of fans, Andy becomes most real through Temple of the Dog. Not because he appears there—but because his absence does. Those songs don’t explain Andy. They respond to him. Chris Cornell later said the project wasn’t meant to last. It wasn’t meant to be anything beyond getting something out.
That honesty is why it still hits.
And from that same grief came Pearl Jam—not as a replacement, but as a continuation shaped by loss.
The Small Detail That Changes the Picture
There’s a detail from the Temple of the Dog / Ten period that’s rarely mentioned—even among people who know this era inside out.
At the time, Stone Gossard was passing around a riff he believed in. He gave it to Chris Cornell, who shaped it into “Times of Trouble.” He also gave it to Eddie Vedder, who turned it into “Footsteps.”
That part is generally known.
What’s far less known is this: before either of those versions were recorded, Andy Wood had already demoed his own take over that same riff. It’s not a finished song. It’s early, raw, almost skeletal—but the riff is unmistakable.
That demo exists. You can hear it on YouTube.
And once you do, it quietly reframes the whole moment.
Sixty
Sixty is a strange number to attach to someone who never aged publicly. Andy Wood is forever potential, forever unresolved. But that doesn’t make him abstract. It makes him present in a different way—in influence, in tone, in what might have been allowed if he’d stayed.
