Mudhoney Articles
New Musical Express
3 October '92
The Godfathers Of Soil
They invented grunge, they showed Nirvana how it was done, thet thought
they'd slip into a rut, sign to a major and churn out bad music . . . and
now here are MUDHONEY, sitting pretty at Warner Brothers and ready to follow
their former support band straight into the mainstream. KEITH CAMERON catches
up with the Fun Boy Four who originally put Seattle on the map and ponders
wheter anything's really changed. Mud in your eye: ED SIRRS
The men who invented grunge and first twinned the concept
with a town called Seattle are sprawled about the plushy-appointed London
offices of Warner Brothers. They are puzzled.
They are puzzled at many things. The mentality of the archetypal British
rock festival crowd, for whose edification and delight they had performed
two days earlier, for one; why anyone would be more likely to buy a music
magazine because it came with a free poster of Happy Monday's resident
warthog, S Ryder Esq, for another. But most of all, Mudhoney are puzzled
at the consequences wrought by the musical goofball they set rolling four
years ago with a song called "Touch me I'm sick". Indeed, they are puzzled
to the point of complete and utter incomprehension.
It's not the fact that their former labelmates Nirvana, the band that were
grateful to open for Mudhoney, have become the rock phenomenon of the '90s.
Nor that these one-time bastions of the anti-estabilishment punk rock ethic
now find themselves locked in a loving embrace with one of the world's
largest media corporations. Nope, what's got Mark Arm, Matt Lukin, Dan Peters
and Steve Turner rolling their eyes in befuddlement is, ahem, Sky
magazine's grunge-ocious "Guide to Seattle".
Such corny attempts by the mainstream to get an angle on the seismic cultural
developements epicentred on their hometown are now commonplace back in the
US. But this is an extra-special, and it's the handy slang glossary - "How
To Talk Seattle" - that has particularly energised the four from their
two-days'-worth-of-interviews induced torpor.
Most are generic dudespeak like "awesome" and "hot" (Steve: "Those mean
good"), some fail even on that score ("weird", for instance, apparently
means strange), while others seem figments of an evil sub-editor's
imagination. Certainly, none of this "slang" is confined to Seattle.
"Some of those things are confined to Pluto!" hoots Dan.
Like this phrase for hanging out - "Swinging on the flippety-flop"?
Dan: "Yeah, that's Pluto."
Mark: "Or at least Uranus!"
Ho ho, what about "Okey-dokey artichokey"?
Steve: "OK, that one's real. The biker gangs always say that."
Dan, adopting thoroughly convincing biker gang tones: "Okey-dokey artichokey -
gimme another beer!"
"Bog-out?"
Steve: "I've never heard anyone say that."
"Action?" "Scene?"
Mark: "Mmmm. Good word. Could work a lot better than 'swinging on the
flippety-flop'."
And what about "K'ching!"?
Dan: "Ah, our favourite. K'ching - we just cashed in!"
THREE YEARS ago, I interviewed Mudhoney in New York,
halfway through the middle of a gruelling tour that would take them across
America (twice), the UK, Europe and Australia, and cement their position as
the jewels in the Sub Pop crown of noise. Tired, flu-ridden and hunapply
anticipating a ten-hours drive to North Carolina, Mark Arm predicted "We'll
probably get stuck in this rut and have no way out. Sign to a major label,
put out bad music, but what the hell?!"
Remember that one, eh Marky?
"Heeheeheehee!" he crackles, beaming at his comprades. "It's coming true!"
"No comment!" splutters Steve. "The interview's over!"
How long have you had this gift for clairvoyance?
"Actually, when we were at Reading, I was talking to Donita from L7 about
where we'd be staying in London. Turned out we were both staying at the
Embassy, and I said, 'I'll be in room 555'. And I get there and I'm in room
555!"
Weird, as they say in Seattle. But in the k'ching stakes, there are those
who reckon Mudhoney should have cashed in their chips at least a couple of
years ago, convinced that here ws one joyride to Cheapthrillsville built
for speed and not to last. For a while, it looked like Mudhoney agreed.
Spurred by news of Steve Turner's return to the university, rumors of the
band's imminent break-up surrounded their triumphant display at the 1990
Reading Festival, which would have been a fine way to say farewell.
Mudhoney struggled to sustain their fitful muse over an album's duration,
but they had nailed down enough hard-boiled grunge nuggets to leave the
world a happier place for their presence. And hey - isn't it always better
to burn-out than to fade-away?
Well, it rarely happens in the real world, and anyway, when Mudhoney returned
with their strongest single body of work, no-one was complaining. Recorded
on a slap-in-the-face basic eight-track, "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge"
was a brilliant distillation of contemporary white-boy blues attitude and
suggested Mudhoney might be content to settle for a role as masters of their
own, happly anachronistic, craft, a sort of garage industry with no apparent
desire to take on the Big Autos of the music world. "Fudge" stated
uncompromisingly and with no little style that, yeah, it was only rock'n'roll,
but you could still like it for all that.
Yet by the time of its release, the Mud-boys reckoned fudge ws all they were
likely to see from Sub Pop. Bumping into them on last year's UK tour, the
talk frequently turned to how much money they weren't getting, how they
were getting ripped off by virtually everyone they worked with. Four years
down the road - much of it spent on the bloody road - and their
originally cherished ideals of independence were all but worn away. It was
no great surprise when Mudhoney signed up with Warner-Reprise in the spring
of this year. After all, these guys aren't as young as they act. K'ching!
"For us, signing to a major became an inevitability," says Mark. "When 'Fudge'
came out we were supposed to get an advance. It was finished in March, it
didn't come out until we came over in August, and we never got the advance
until four or five months ago, after we'd signed to Warners."
"Well, some of the money we got after signing to Warners was royalties,"
corrects Steve. "The advance was pretty much through last December. But
yeah, it was really late, Sub Pop were in really bad financial troubles."
"We couldn't get a straight answer as to how many records we'd sold from
anyone," Mark continues. "From Glitterhouse, from Sub Pop, from Caroline -
no-one would tell us shit and it was really frustrating. We figured at
least we should deal with someone who has to legally account for everything.
So many indes don't know what they're doing business-wise, 'cos they started
out being fans - 'oh, I'd love to put out your record' - and it ends up
being a big mess."
Steve: "Sub Pop's pretty organised now. They got bailed out, basically, by
Nirvana, and to a lesser extent by our record which, when it came out, kept
their heads above water for a while."
Mark: "They needed the money they made off that record to keep their heads
afloat instead of us! Aw, it's all under the bridge now, and we didn't know
Nirvana was going to be huge, so we bailed out of there thinking we've been
friends with these people, some of us since 1983, and we didn't want to
jeopardise our friendship over stupid little money things."
Considering it was Mudhoney who blew down the door through which Nirvana
would subsequently walk, it's hardly surprising that the end of their
relationship should be tinged with acrimony.
"There were just really weird things that happened off and on throughout,"
recalls Mark. "They'd tell us, 'Oh, you'll get your money', and then they'd
tell us, 'Sorry, we don't have any money', but they'd fly in the Afghan
Whigs to record in Seattle. Shit like that. Well, you should take care of
what you should take care of first. Let the Afghan Whigs wait a month or
two."
"So yeah, there was obviously some resentement," says Steve. "This time last
year we were pretty pissed off at them, that's why we decided to leave. It
was almost down to not letting them put out 'Fudge', because we didn't have
a contract or anything, we didn't have to hand them the tapes."
"We had a pretty big down time there," Mark says, a little sadly, "'cos the
band was kind of on hold for a while with Steve going back to school. And
yet," he chuckles, "me and Steve still did the Monkeywrench album and still
gave those tapes to Sub Pop, so... Ha ha! Go figure!"
This is, please note, the man who once reckoned his band ran Dinosaur a
close second in the lazy stakes. One had half-suspected Mudhoney's instinct
for a quick k'ching would alwasy be tempered by the fact that getting off
one label and on another would require a bit of effort.
Yet 1992 being Year One AN (After Nirvana), you only have to sneeze in a
vaguely grungesome fashon and, providing someone in the family can spell
S-E-A-T-T-L-E, the cheque's in the post. Mudhoney kept the schmooze period
to a minimum and used their finely-honed collective business sense to select
the most compatible bedfellow.
"Everybody said the same thing," says Mark. "But you'd go into Epic and
there's these huge Michael Jackson posters everywhere. In Warners you'd
go into some guy's officie and there's four 13th Floor Elevators posters
and two Jimmy Reed posters, and nothing to do with Warner Bros! We might
be completely deluding ourselves, but they seemd willing to let us do
whatever we want. The very first label we talked to were sorta like, the
guitars need a little sweetening up... and this is with posters of bands
like Trickster on the wall! Mmmm, sounds sweet to me!"
WHAT WARNERS have let Mudhoney do is make a
spruced-up version of what they've always done; a mosh-compatible update
of '60s garage punk. Their new album is roughly 50 pre cent inspired, 50
per cent insipid, the whole thing would have been improved by sticking to
"Fudge"'s eight-track studio ethic, and as ever the songs kill live.
Instructively titled "Piece of Cake", it opens with a 30-seconds of mock
techno, featuring Mark crowing like an E-ed up a rooster and yelling
"piece of cake", that's as close to genius as anything Mudhoney have
ever done. After that, well, you know what to expect.
Mark: "Oh, so you were really into it for that one track and then you heard
the rest of it?!"
Yeah! - Oh, it's the same old Mudhoney album!
Dan: "Same old?!"
Steve: "Same new?!"
Actually, Mark's excursion into Altern-8 territory - "now at least the kids
know where my heart really lies" - is one of four mini-solo pieces contributed
by each member, each cutting through the collective band persona and revealing
the, erm, true soul of Mark, Matt, Dan and Steve. To which end, bassman Matt's
is a series of farting noises, drummer Dan's a burst of speed metal and
all-purpose guitar operative Steve some "retarded country music".
Mark and Steve, of course, are noted for their extra-curricular activities,
and Dan warmed the stool for the Screaming Trees not so long ago. Is
Mudhoney a formula they feel constricted by?
"There's things on the new record that don't sound like anything we've done
before," states Mark. "But yeah, it's identifiably Mudhoney. I think we all
have pretty uniqe styles, I don't think any of us are really generic players.
We're probably way too inept."
"I think our motivation's always been the same," adds Steve. "We like playing
together. And now we can play pretty much any time we want."
"The whole hype thing is stupid, but it's great for all the bands in Seattle,"
considers Dan, "be it bad bands or good bands. You call up your friend - 'Hey,
d'you get a record deal today? I got one!' 'I'm on the cover of a magazine!'
'Alright! So am I!' 'I got two record deals today! Let's eat dinner together
tonight!' 'Sorry, Time magazine's coming over to my house...!'"
Not bad for a band whose members got together after years on the Seattle
scene with one thing in common - lack of success - and who once described
themselves as "the lowest common denominator of all our other bands".
Mudhoney have managed to make a full-time go of being Mudhoney for four
years now, something that still amazes English graduate Mark Arm ("If I
wanted to actually get a career I could probably teach, although I've pretty
much forgotten how to read!") and rather worries ex-dishwasher Dan Peters
("who's gonna wanna hire someone who hasn't had a job in five years?!").
So why not a move into films next for the Fun Boy Four? After all, they don't
actually appear with Matt Dillon in the Seattle-scene love story Singles,
but some tidy business has been taken care of by contributing a song to the
soundtrack.
Dan: "The soundtrack's gone gold, too."
Mark: "Has it?"
Dan: "Yeah, we've all got gold records."
Mark nearly falls off his Warner Brothers sofa. "Hahahahahaha!!! They gave
us, what was it, a $20,000 advance just to record the song? And it cost us
$167 to record it! Hoohoohoooooo!!!"
Dan: "Thank you!"
K'CHING!
