by Greg Prato
MARK ARM: I worked with Bruce Pavitt at Muzak. Jonathan Poneman worked there before I started — a lot of musicians worked there. I played Bruce a tape that we recorded on a boom box at a Mudhoney practice. It was so distorted that you couldn’t tell what was going on. He had us go into Reciprocal and record a few songs with Jack Endino, just so he could hear what we were up to. He trusted that the combination of the four of us would be a good one. Our main goal was to put out a single. We figured that we could get either Amphetamine Reptile or Sub Pop to release it. AmRep head Tom Hazelmyer was a Marine stationed on Whidbey Island [and] played bass in the U-Men for a while. AmRep released the Thrown Ups singles and Sub Pop released Green River records. Our first single, “Touch Me I’m Sick” with “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More,” and the song “Twentyfour,” which appeared on [1989’s] Amphetamine Reptile seven-inch compilation Dope Guns N’ Fucking in the Streets Volume One, came from that very first session. It was weird to record a single before we even played our first show. We were super, super lucky.
JONATHAN PONEMAN: Everybody thought “Sweet Young Thing” was the song at first. We were told by people who knew better than all of us, “No, no, no — it’s ‘Touch Me I’m Sick.’ ” It was a double A-side — such a galvanizing single.
NILS BERNSTEIN: One of the few memories I have is of sitting in Danny Blossom’s truck with Mark Arm shortly after Green River breaking up. He said, “I’m going to do a band with Steve Turner, and it’s going to be the best band Seattle’s ever seen.” About a year later they made “Touch Me I’m Sick.” He was totally right.
BRUCE PAVITT: Mudhoney was the band that I was most excited about. Put out “Touch Me I’m Sick” almost as soon as we started doing the label full-time. But the shows were unbelievable. I don’t think any of the records really capture the looseness, vitality, and insanity of those live shows.
STEVE TURNER: The “Touch Me I’m Sick” single I remember having to wait for it forever. It disappeared fast because it was such a small pressing. That was a riff of mine — it was trying to be “garage punk.” It was inspired by this guy, Rob Vasquez, who had a band, the Nights and Days, at the time. Just really fast chording, but he never used very much distortion — I just kind of hyper-fuzzed it. In retrospect, it sounds like some Stooges song [laughs]. It was real instant. For me, usually the best guitar things I come up with are really instant — they’re not labored.
ART CHANTRY: I can’t tell you the impact that single had. I remember the first time I heard it, I was driving down Broadway, and this song came on the radio. I’m going, “What the fuck is this?!” It was on KCMU, and I had to pull over to the side of the road and listen — I couldn’t drive.
CHARLES PETERSON: They spoke to our basic instincts. Mark sang about dogs and sickness a lot — it rocked, it was funny, it had that insouciance of punk rock, but without the fashion posturing that a lot of it devolved into. And live, Mark was just incredible — contorting and twisting himself. They certainly didn’t go as far as Nirvana — destroying instruments or anything — but just as far as Mark being some sort of “punk rock yogi,” without knowing it … I have pictures of him all sprawled out on the stage. Jumping into the air, jumping into the audience — really going for it.
BRUCE PAVITT: I would say from ’88 to ’90, they were the driving force in the Seattle scene. I could definitely see Soundgarden’s commercial appeal — I thought they might be the most commercially successful. But I thought Mudhoney might be the most significant group.
MARK ARM: Sub Pop had hooked up with this German label, Glitterhouse. Glitterhouse wanted to release a Green River record in Germany, [and] put out a record by the Fluid. The labels just did a swap — “We’ll swap you Green River for the Fluid.” So Sub Pop put out the Fluid records. There was this thing called Berlin Independence Days, which was a CMJ/South by Southwest sort of thing in Berlin. Sub Pop and Glitterhouse chose us to represent both labels. They couldn’t afford to each fly out a band, but they could combine their resources and fly one band out. This was bizarre considering the fact that we hadn’t played outside of the Pacific Northwest and had been together for less than a year. We flew out to Berlin with Bruce and Jonathan, and we stayed there for four days — we played one show. We never even tried to adjust to their time — we slept all day and drank all night. We embarked on our first U.S. tour two days after we came home from Berlin. We went to the East Coast and back on our own. Then we hooked up with Sonic Youth in Seattle, and went down the West Coast, and over to Texas with them. With the exception of Lexington, Kentucky, where we got paid fourteen dollars, a six-pack of pop, and two packs of cigarettes, this tour was a million times easier than any of the Green River tours. This tour paid for itself! I quit Muzak to go on this tour, and I didn’t have to work another day job for over ten years.
JONATHAN PONEMAN: I remember them playing at Berlin Independence Days — in October of 1988. There are tapes of that show around, but I don’t think it caught the overall impact of this runaway rock band. There was the whole “Mudhoney thing” being let loose on unsuspecting Germans. Some people had heard the hype, some people were familiar with Green River, but there was nothing quite like Mudhoney at the time. I remember watching that show, and going, “This is an event.” This is the sort of thing as a fan of rock music you hope to experience — at least one show like this. Where you see a bunch of people’s lives being changed.
STEVE TURNER: We had already recorded the EP by that point — [1988’s] Superfuzz Bigmuff. So it was more about waiting for that to come out, and then we were supposed to go on tour once that came out. We went on tour and it still wasn’t out. It came out while we were on tour.
KIM THAYIL: I liked Mudhoney right off the bat — it was kind of Green River plus more attitude. The music was a little simpler — it left a lot more room for some of that “Mark attitude,” and more of the rock power. A little rawer and more spontaneous — especially Superfuzz Bigmuff. And live, it was certainly that way — those guys were really animated, jumping all over the place. It had this element of chaos — it was certainly a wild band, and that seemed like what rock ’n’ roll was supposed to be.
STEVE MANNING: There was no line between the band and their fans during the show. People were on the stage, they were in the crowd. It was a very interactive experience. One of the photos that’s in [1990’s] Superfuzz Bigmuff and Other Early Singles CD is a picture of me laying on the stage with Steve Turner, sort of spooning, in the midst of the show — and his guitar over the top of both of us. That, to me, is what I remember about those times. I remember a Fluid and Mudhoney show on my birthday — it must have been ’89 or ’90 — and it had snowed. When snow is here, the city completely shuts down — nobody knows how to deal with it. We walked down to the Vogue to see the show, and I thought there weren’t going to be many people there. It ended up being packed. In the midst of Mudhoney, a big snowball fight breaks out in the middle of the club, and snow’s flying everywhere. It must be ninety degrees in the club and twenty degrees outside.
RON HEATHMAN: A wall of sound, and this guy that has a voice that comes out of this tiny little body — at that point, the skinniest. The only thing I can compare it to — when the first time someone saw the Stooges. I never got to see the Stooges back then — it was probably the same thing. You walk into a club, in this case, it was a club called the Backstage, we’re like, “We’re going to see this band Mudhoney. Great, whatever.” You go, and all of a sudden this guy gets up there, and this voice comes out — you’re like, “What the hell is going on?!” Your jaw is on the floor for the whole show. They’re like the Muppets [laughs].
MARK IVERSON: Seeing Mark Arm, and I say this facetiously, but his “rock star pose” — knees bent, leaning back, those beads hanging, the striped Bobby Brady T-shirts. And their distortion [pedals] — they were totally on fire. Amazingly energetic. Matt Lukin was always shit-faced and telling jokes — he was the guy who talked a lot between songs — and Mark Arm was to
tally witty.
KATHY FENNESSY: No offense to Nirvana, but they didn’t look in the early days like they were having much fun. Mudhoney did.
MARK PICKEREL: There were two bands that I was jealous of, in terms of their live shows — Nirvana and Mudhoney. Their ability to make crowds go crazy, in four bars of the song, was pretty amazing. To see the crowd go from being anxious but reserved to absolutely ape shit was always so exciting.
JENNIE BODDY: They had a manager who was into the “personality” himself. He would go to the shows wearing Santa costumes — for no reason.
MARK ARM: We made our friend Bob Whittaker our manager. We took him with us on our first tour for entertainment. He couldn’t run sound, tune a guitar or anything, but he was pretty good at finding people for us to stay with. He worked on and off at Sub Pop too. He became our tour manager and when we were meeting with the labels we made him our manager. I think it’s way more important to have someone who is ethical and understands you be your manager — managers get their percentages from video budgets, and record deals, as well as other stuff, so shyster managers will steer bands towards bigger budget deals so they can line their pockets. We could trust that our friend Bob would never have pulled that shit.
STU HALLERMAN: Sitting in some park in San Francisco, watching Mark Arm carving a table out in this park — “Mudoney was here” — he misspelled the name of his own band! The night before, [Soundgarden and crew] were walking down the street. Everybody was exploring Haight, and we ran into Matt [Lukin] — he was blitzed drunk. He was wearing this long overcoat, and he was like, “I better tie my shoe.” He bends over, and two bottles fall out of his coat. They were both bar bottles, with the “pourer” on there, that he snagged off a bar when the bartender wasn’t looking.
ART CHANTRY: There was one summer of “Mudhoney mania” — it must have been about ’89 or so — where Mudhoney was the band. When they played in town, there were lines that went around the block. For miles.
JEFF GILBERT: You never knew what was going to happen. They didn’t really sing songs, they shouted them. People went to see them to get into the music as much as to “get it out of their systems.” Because at a Mudhoney show, there were no rules — anything goes. If you could throw it, drink it, eat it, fuck it, stomp on it — it was all fair game. They wouldn’t care if you got up onstage and dove into the crowd. Metal guys had been doing that forever. In fact, we used to laugh at the pitiful attempts at the grunge guys to stage dive. It was like, “No, no, no — it’s done like this, you weenies” [laughs]. Metal taught punk how to play their guitars, and punk taught metal how to say “fuck.”
JENNIE BODDY: I was very intimidated by them. Mark just had a glare — like he could see right through you. You just knew if you said something stupid, he would look at you like, “You asshole.” But he actually wasn’t like that at all. Sub Pop wouldn’t have stayed in business whatsoever [without Mudhoney] — they wouldn’t have released a Nirvana record, anything. They were always the ones who brought us back into, “Oh, the phones got turned back on.” They were our cash cow.
SUSAN SILVER: Really, the credit in a lot of ways deserves to be theirs. They were the world ambassadors that took this noise that was coming out of the Pacific Northwest, and took it to Europe. And suddenly, the world noticed. The noise wasn’t being heard outside the Pacific Northwest — until Mudhoney played a show in London.
STU HALLERMAN: One of the best memories was London — Soundgarden was a young band at the time, and Mudhoney was huge in London. They played the School of Oriental Studies — an old-fashioned ballroom kind of place. Soundgarden plays, gets a nice response from the crowd — totally full house. Mudhoney hits the stage, the crowd goes nuts, and the band is having a great night — they’re flying all over the place. Jumping and moving around so much that Steve’s guitar gets unplugged. And Mark at that point, I don’t know if he did a stage dive, but I remember him coming back from the audience up on the stage. They’d only played half a song so far. Kind of crumbles, comes to a stop.
Meanwhile, while Mark went back onstage, a couple of people followed him — crouched by the monitors, which were sitting on these little wobbly tables. I don’t know if they played the same song or they’re going into the next song. About halfway through it, the guitar becomes unplugged again, the song grinds to a halt, and Mark’s out in the crowd with the microphone. He comes back onstage again, and a few more people follow him onstage. By this point, there’s like a dozen people onstage. Mark gets on the microphone, and says, “I’d like to personally invite each and every one of the audience members onstage!” About twenty more people climb onstage. They start to play the next song, and as these people are walking up onstage, the monitor tables broke. The monitors are kind of collapsing, and people are pushing on the light poles — so the lighting rig is shaking.
I’m halfway backstage and halfway in the crowd, on the outside of the main pa speakers — just watching all this mayhem. I notice the monitor guy is unplugging everything, putting the cover on the mixing board, and loading everything out. The lighting guy is cranking down his lights, taking them off, and unplugging them. The band’s looking over, they stop, and they’re like, “What are you doing?” And they’re like, “This is crazy, we’re getting out of here.” At this point, I’m looking at the stairs and the back door, because the crowd is seething — they’re not going to put up with three halves of a song and call that a show. There was going to be a riot. The way we settled it was the main pa stayed up, the monitors [and] lights packed up and left — they just turned up some houselights, and finished the show with no monitors. A great show — some very memorable moments. One guy climbed on top of the pa stack and did a dive with an SLR big camera — flashed on the way down. To this day, people would like to get a hold of that picture.
MARK ARM: Our first European tour went on for nine weeks, which was an eternity for an unknown band with a dozen songs [laughs].
KURT DANIELSON: Later, at the climax of Tad’s first European tour with Nirvana, both bands had the honor of opening for Mudhoney in London at Lame Fest II, a reenactment of the fabled original Lame Fest — held in Seattle about a year before. The lineup was the same both nights — Nirvana opened, Tad held the [middle] slot, and Mudhoney headlined. This gig is hard to beat memory-wise — Tad and Nirvana had been stuck in a van together for seven weeks, doing shows practically every night. It was a transcendent experience to play this show at the end of this seemingly endless and grueling journey, because both bands once again had a chance to open for their Sub Pop brothers. Towards the end of Mudhoney’s set, a few of us — along with a member or two from the Cosmic Psychos — ended up rushing the stage. Tad grabbed Dan, and threw him from the drum riser into the seething crowd, and [Cosmic Psychos’ drummer] Billy and I tried to nab Lukin, who resisted. We ended up stage diving en masse. I can still feel the crush of that crowd slamming me to the beer-soaked concrete floor.
MARK ARM: Word of mouth spread. From then up to about ’95, our shows in the U.K. were great.
STEVE TURNER: The first full-length [1989’s Mudhoney], in retrospect, we didn’t spend very much time on it. It just wasn’t as good as it should have been.
MARK ARM: There were a couple of songs that ended up on our first album that we’d had since before Superfuzz. “You Got It,” “By Her Own Hand,” and “Dead Love” were among our first songs. It might have been a hurried process — the stuff we were writing was not that different from the stuff for Superfuzz.
EMILY RIEMAN: I’ve known Mark since I was nineteen — I think we met in about ’84. When I was in L.A., Mudhoney would tour. It was right around the time [Mudhoney] came out. So when they would come down, they would stay at our house. When I was in L.A. I saw Mudhoney was on the cover of Melody Maker. I was like, “What the hell?” We were really happy for them. Once when Mudhoney was going to play in Hollywood, we called up Jonathan at Sub Pop, and said, “They can stay at our house if they need a place to crash.” Jonathan
said they wouldn’t need to sleep on our floor because this was “the big money tour.” They slept on our floor.
MARK ARM: Bruce and Jon decided to put a show on at the Moore Theatre. I thought they were nuts because the Moore holds, like, 1,500 people. The only underground band to play there was the Dead Kennedys — regular underground bands didn’t play there, and local bands certainly didn’t play there. When Green River opened for the Dead Kennedys at the Moore, I couldn’t figure out where all these kids came from. How come they don’t go to other punk shows? Black Flag was kind of like that — they’d pull weekend punkers out of the woodworks. [Bruce and Jon] booked the Moore, and we headlined. Nirvana played second, Tad opened — and the place was sold out. Where did all these people come from? This is ’89, before things got really out of hand. Playing for 200 people just a few months earlier was a huge show. Next thing we know, there are 1,500 kids at a show of all local bands.
CHAPTER 14
“ GET OUT OF THE WAY!”: The Melvins, Screaming Trees, Skin Yard, Tad
The Melvins and the Screaming Trees continued to gain momentum during the mid–late ’80s, the Jack Endino–led Skin Yard offered a prog take on grunge, while another promising group, the larger-than-life Tad, also appeared on the scene.
SLIM MOON: The Melvins were the band. They were the first band that made any impression on me. It was just sort of widely accepted that they were the great band that we could see. Everybody was like, “The Melvins are going to be huge, the Melvins are geniuses, the Melvins are going to leave their mark on the world — we’re lucky to see the Melvins.” We would go to every Melvins show. Wherever they were playing, all my friends would pile in a car, go see the Melvins, and get wasted. Sleep in the car, and drive home in the morning. The Melvins was more the story of my teenage years than any other band.
