Mudhoney Articles
Flipside
February '98
MUDHONEY
I was a little surprised when I read Rolling stone's review of Mudhoney's
latest release that declared "Tomorrow Hit Today" as the album that Neil Young
should have made with Pearl Jam. It just amazes me that there are still rock
journalists out there who consider that Mudhoney and Pearl Jam are in the same
ball park musically. Hell, musically Mudhoney and Pearl Jam aren't even playing
on the same field. I'd like to believe that liking Mudhoney in 1998 is the
equivalent of what being into The MC5 and The Stooges was back in the early
seventies. Though most of their critics still don't get them, their sold out
show at the Roxy in West Hollywood confirmed, in my mind anyway, that the fans
still do understand. Hours before that show Fred M. Elizabeth Hoffman II, and
I had a poolside chat with Mark Arm and Steve Turner at the Roosevelt Hotel in
the center of tourist-ridden Hollywood, CA.
Bob: Was July, 1988 at the Vogue your first show as Mudhoney?
Steve: No, it would have been a couple of months before that.
Mark: Probably.
Bob: I got that date out of Clark Humphrey's book Loser: The Real
Seattle Music Story. Is the book very accurate?
Mark: No.
Steve: There's a lot of small mistakes. But I'm sure half the things I
think are mistakes someone would argue with me that they aren't mistakes.
Collective memory is pretty shaky. But we definitely played before that.
Mark: We recorded in April and I'm sure that we played maybe two or three
weeks after we recorded for the first time.
Bob: So, you're well past your tenth anniversary point?
Mark: Yeah.
Steve: We're coming up to Mudhoney's eleventh anniversary. January first
is our official date.
Mark: Because that was the first time that we ever practiced with everyone.
It was a very hung over New Year's Day. I don't even remember, but apparently it
happened!
Bob: I wanted to ask you about a couple of other things in the Loser
book. Is the account of how Mr. Epp formed accurate? According to the book, Mark
and Jeff Smith used to put flyers up for this fictitious band and you guys got
cornered into playing a real show...
Mark: No, no, no. The band didn't exist for several years before that.
[laughter] The band was actually the figment of some friends of mine's imagination.
They did a European tour when the French class went to France. I don't even think
Darren was in the French class either, so Rob Goodmasonwas the drummer for the
European tour. I think the summer after Smitty and I graduated we decided to make
it real. Darren was actually a real good drummer but the rest of us had never
played an instrument in our lives. Besides piano lessons or whatever. Smitty and
I went halves on a guitar. A sixty five dollar guitar and the smallest P.V. you
could find at the time. It was all we could afford. We talked Darren's brother
into playing bass with us. When we first started we didn't know what anybody was
going to do except that Darren was going to drum. We'd been doing weird shit the
whole time, making noise into tape recorders. It took us a while to become a rock
band. We were very arty.
Bob: Didn't you write a letter to the Rocket or something saying
that Mr. Epp was the most overrated band in Seattle?
Mark: That was from the flyering period when the band existed and hadn't
played yet. That was a ploy to generate some kind of interest.
Bob: People do that.
Mark: And it wasn't to the Rocket, it was to this little magazine
called Desperate Times. The Rocket wouldn't have bothered.
Bob: And Steve was in the second line up of Mr. Epp?
Steve: Well, it was the same line up and then I joined it.
Mark: This is the funniest thing about Mr. Epp- when it was the fake band
this guy Peter Wick was in the band and then Peter made this announcement that he
couldn't continue on anymore because he didn't want to dedicate his life to music!
We were like, OK, before things get serious... And when we got to the point of playing
a live show, Darren refused to play. He would have been embarrassed to play with a
bunch of hacks like us. So we had this guy, Randy Ramano, play for the first one or
two shows. Then shortly after that Darren said "What the fuck? I'll play."
Bob: And Steve, before you joined Mr. Epp, were you in a band called The
Ducky Boys?
Steve: That was my senior year of high school. I had pretty much flunked out
of my junior year. That was my punk rock year and I didn't really go to school much.
Bob: The hours were too early?
Steve: I don't know. Anarchy, y'know. For the fall of '82 I started going to
a private school. An arty school called Northwest School For The Arts, Humanity And
Environment. I met [future Pearl Jam member] Stone Gossard there. He was kind of a
heavy metal kid and we didn't like each other much at first. There was kind of a metal
vs. punk war going on. So we started hanging out a little bit and he started playing
me cool music that I liked and that I'd never heard before. Like Motorhead and early
Alice Cooper stuff. I turned him on to Black Flag and Bad Religion.
Mark: Stone was a big Agent Orange fan.
Steve: But I didn'0t turn him on to Agent Orange.
Bob: This was the early eighties?
Steve: This was '82, early '83. So then we formed this band called The Ducky
Boys and we practiced in Jeff's basement. We learned two songs, basically. "Dr. Love"
by Kiss and "Louie Louie." The guy who was supposed to be singing in the band would
only show up occasionally and he was too embarrassed to sing in front of us. He thought
he was really cool and stuff and we handed him a microphone and he chickened out. We
never really got very far, but we had our one groupie. We had one groupie and two songs.
Bob: That would be a fine career for some bands. It also says in Loser
that "Touch Me I'm Sick" is "a note for note copy of 'The Witch' by The Sonics."
Steve: No, it's not.
Mark: Clark has his head up his ass when it comes to music.
Steve: I'm glad he wrote the book, though. It was quite an undertaking and you
can't possibly get everything right.
Bob: It's a pretty extensive book.
Steve: He gave me an early manuscript and I corrected all the things that I could
remember. I told him, boy, you better hand out a lot of these.
Mark: Yeah, there are a lot of mistakes. I thought about giving him my corrections
but then I just said, what the fuck. "Touch Me I'm Sick" is more like "Happening Ten Years
Time Ago" or the fast part of "I'm Sick Of You" by The Stooges. Steve was trying to rip
off...
Steve: I was trying to play like Robert Vasquez of The Nights & Days.
Mark: The vocal stylings of Gerry Roslie are something that is near and dear to
my heart.
Bob: That comes across. You guys got a pretty decent review in Rolling Stone
for "Tomorrow Hit Today."
Mark: Yeah, I think that four stars is a pretty good review.
Steve: It's not bad.
Bob: What I thought was interesting was that they said that you guys are back to
doing the kind of album you used to do when you did the first Mudhoney album.
Mark: They said the same thing in the LA Weekly. I don't really see it as
a re-working of the firs album. I think "My Brother the Cow" was more like that.
Steve: "My Brother the Cow" is like a good version of the first album!
Mark: Yeah.
Bob: But then you guys got a six out of ten possible points for "My Brother the
Cow" in Spin Magazine when it first came out and the reviewer said that you guys
never seem to "grow musically."
Mark: We also had that little jibe at Spin in "Generation Spokesmodel"
which they took a little seriously.
Steve: You should read sine if the English reviews. [laughter]
Mark: There's people over there who think what you're not doing anything unless
you put your "antiques" - meaning guitars, drums and bass - aside and move forward.
Steve: The London Times actually said "If they're going to continue playing
such antique instruments as guitars, bass and drums then they should at least try and do
something with them."
Mark: That's totally a weird mindset. We should get some newer instruments like
analog synthesizers. [laughter]
Bob: You know, I always assumed...
Mark: Don't assume.
Bob: I always thought that you guys got the name Green River from the Credence
song. That's not where it's from, is it?
Mark: It's more from the serial killings from that time, I think you and I came
up with that at different times.
Steve: No, it was Jeff or Alex. It wasn't me.
Mark: No, weren't you wearing Green River Community College track shorts or
something?
Steve: It wasn't me. See, this is why the Loser book is so hotly contested!
Mark: Well, someone besides me in the band thought that Green River sounded good
and fucked up and we started laughing.
Steve: We played a show in '84 with Green River, The Crucifucks and The Dead
Kennedys and the Seattle Times guy was just disgusted with all of the names. All
the article was about was how disgusting the names of the three bands were!
Mark: Now names seem innocuous and homey and rootsy.
Bob: Is that you guys playing "Touch Me I'm Dick" as Citizen Dick in the movie
"Singles"?
Steve: No.
Bob: Who is it?
Steve: Pearl Jam?
Mark: I think some form of Pearl Jam. Maybe with Matt Dillon.
Steve: No, they wanted Matt Dillon to sing but he chickened out.
Bob: Did your cover of "Pump It Up" end up in the credits of a movie?
Some comedy?
Mark & Steve: "P.C.U."
Bob: Is that the one with Rodney Dangerfield?
Steve: No, David Spade. Some eighth generation knock off of Animal House.
Mark: They're calling it "the Animal House of the '90s."
Bob: I just saw the credits in the video store.
Steve: Not one of our higher moments.
Mark: It's probably one of my least favorite things that we've done.
Steve: I don't mind it that much.
Mark: I think it's bad.
Bob: I thought it was kinda cool at the time.
Mark: We had a perfectly good eight track version of it that we did for this
benefit compilation "Freedom Of Choice." It's all New Wave covers and it was for
Planned Parenthood and it was perfectly fine. And then this guy, Ralph Saul, was
that his name? - we may as well let people know who it was - he was putting together
the soundtrack to this movie. He had this brainstorm, why don't you guys do "Pump It
Up"? We're like, we already did it. So, he takes us into this studio and he's got two
twenty four tracks slaved. We're on forty eight tracks here and we're doing a song
that we've already done on eight track! Me, Steve and Matt did like, what?
Steve: Twelve different tracks of backing vocals!
Mark: I just had this horrible feeling, like, I should just go now. So instead
what we did was we went into the back room and watched the Playboy Channel while this
guy did whatever he did in that other room.
Steve: We didn't care anymore.
Mark: It's out of our hands. It's nothing like I want to be a part of. It's
too late. The damage is done.
Bob: Is it on the "P.C.U." soundtrack, if there is such a thing?
Mark: Yeah.
Steve: There's a single of it.
Mark: With George Clinton's P Funk All Stars on the other side.
Bob: How did that happen?
Steve: It's one of our stranger split singles!
Bob: Often the best collectable items are really someone else's mistakes.
Steve: Yep. But they paid well for it. It's forgotten.
Bob: Do you get a little something every time it runs on cable?
Mark: An angry call! "What the fuck were you thinking!" Click.
Steve: I gotta change my number again! They must be showing "P.C.U."
again. Damn it!
Bob: I heard a rumor that when you were making the "Five Dollar Bob's
Mock Cooter Stew" EP that...
Mark: That I was breaking out in hives? That's true.
Steve: I believe that it had something to do with too much MSG.
Bob: Well, what I had heard was that Reprise was either disappointed or confused
by the finished product because it didn't turn out the way they thought it would.
Steve: It was a bad idea, basically. It was the label's idea to do this EP
real fast.
Mark: Just to put something out because it was going to be a while before the
next album but we had four or five new songs.
Steve: I like it, but it was a mistake at the time.
Bob: Really? You still think so?
Steve: In terms of what their theory of it was, it was completely wrong. Basically,
they don't promote EPs, which the people who suggested to us that we do an EP didn't know
until it was too late. They don't waste their time on an EP so why did we do it?
Mark: If we were on Drag City or something that EP would have gotten some
promotion.
Bob: Well, I like it.
Steve: Yeah, I like it too.
Bob: I encourage everyone who likes you guys to dig around the used bin at their
record store and find that copy with the hole punched out in the corner.
Steve: You can get it pretty cheap.
Bob: $3.99! You guys have a video compilation available called "Number One Video
In America This Week" and there's a lot of interesting stuff going on inbetween the
videos, mostly involving Dan Peters and Matt Lukin. Wasn't the pyromaniac on the video
your manager Bob Whittaker?
Mark: Right.
Steve: The guy who lit Dan on fire! [laughter] The naked guy is Curtis Clark.
Mark: That little section is better than any of the song videos.
Steve: I like the sandwich eating scene.
Bob: Is that behavior typical of a Mudhoney tour? How often does Bob Whittaker...
Steve: He's here.
Bob: Lighting fires?
Mark: No. He's staying at [Reprise A&R guy] Dave Katznelson's so he might be
lighting fires there!
Steve: He's more curious about threesomes on this tour. That's his big concern.
That was the "Fire Tour." This is the "Ain't Getting None" tour.
Bob: "Tomorrow Hit Today" was produced by Jim Dickinson who's this big Memphis
guy who produced the last Claw Hammer CD and has worked with The Rolling Stones,
right?
Mark: Big. He's not that tall, but he's big.
Steve: Portly. He's a big ol' biker. Snaggletooth earring in one ear, long
hair, leather jacket.
Mark: Leather jacket, like the long flowing kind.
Steve: He has a motorcycle one, too.
Bob: He played on The Rolling Stones "Sticky Fingers" album.
Mark: Right, he played on "Wild Horses" because Ian Stewart refused to play
minor chords. Ian Stewart was there but that song starts off with a minor chord and
for some reason he had this idea that minor chords are evil and bad and so Jim Dickinson
played. He said that the Stones would never tune to a real tuner, they would just sort of
tune to each other. It was never exactly standard tuning. And there was this old upright
in the studio that was totally dusty and hadn'0t been played forever and it was in the
same out of whack tuning that the band was in.
Bob: I wonder if they started using electronic tuners after "Some Girls"? It seems
like something changed...
Mark: Or "Black And Blue."
Steve: I like "Emotional Rescue."
Mark: I like "Some Girls" better than I do "Black And Blue."
Steve: Yeah, "Black And Blue" is weak.
Bob: So working with Jim Dickinson was a good experience?
Mark: It was great.
Steve: We didn't mix the album with him.
Mark: We mixed it with David Bianco who's an LA boy.
Steve: We did the basic stuff with Dickinson in Seattle and in Memphis for a
couple of weeks and then mixed it out here without Jim.
Mark: Dickinson has a this real heavy LA phobia. He used to come out here in
the early '70s working on Ry Cooder records and stuff. He worked a lot with Lenny
Waronker who used to be president or whatever of Warner Bros. Somewhere along the
line he just grew to hate the industry in LA. He was out here doing a Texas Tornados
record and he had some minor freak out the first week of the recording. He doesn't
dig the scene here.
Steve: He didn't like Seattle much either. We were in the middle of a snow
storm when he was out there.
Mark: He liked it fine but you could tell that his whole demeanor changed
once we were in his home turf. I thought everything was fine once we got into Seattle
but when we got to Memphis he was really pleased.
Steve: Happier. Much happier.
Mark: Not that he was unpleasant but it was a whole new side of Jim that we
hadn't seen before.
Steve: Since we didn't really know him to begin with.
Bob: Why did you decide to work with him?
Steve: Basically from Claw Hammer working with him. We knew we wanted to work
with somebody who wasn't Jack Endino or Conrad Uno. To do something different after
ten years.
Mark: And we didn't want to work with some producer who was just going to
like...
Steve: We were really afraid of the term "producer." Like, LA guy...
Mark: The kind of guy that's got that "rock sound."
Steve: But to be fair, David Bianco was one of those guys and he was really
great.
Mark: But he's not one of those guys who has a certain sound that all bands
conform to.
Steve: But he's a big wig Hollywood guy.
Mark: He did an amazing job mixing the record. I think we were very lucky
to have worked with both those people. It wouldn't be the record it is without them.
Bob: For this part of the tour you've got The Urinals and Super Electro
Recordings artists The Kent 3.
Steve: We're taking The Kent 3 all the way around the country.
Bon: Did you guys ask for The Urinals?
Mark: We played with The Urinals...
Steve: In Seattle.
Mark: Was that a Beneath the Valley of the Underdog show?
Steve: Yes, it was.
Mark: We did a couple of shows before recording the record under the name
Beneath the Valley of the Underdog just so we could play all the songs.
Steve: That was like last October.
Mark: About a year ago.
Steve: Bumbershoot weekend.
Mark: The Urinals just happened to be in town around that time and the people
at the Crocodile were like, °Would you like The Urinals?" Fuck yeah!
Steve: That was our only possible chance to se The Urinals.
Mark: And that night Wellwater Conspiracy played and I think that was like
their only show. So that was kind of a weird one-of-a-kind show.
Steve: Where we got to see bands we never thought we'd see.
Mark: In Texas we hook up with Nebula, are you familiar with Nebula? It's
Eddie Glass, he used to drum in another band with O.
Bob: Olive Lawn?
Mark: Yeah. He then went on to play guitar in Fu Manchu and now it's him and
two other guys that were in Fu Manchu. Basically, Nebula is more Fu Manchu than Fu
Manchu is at this point. And they start out at the same place. Blue Cheer, Black
Sabbath, but it's way more psychedelic. They're fuckin' amazing.
Steve: We're only playing with three piece bands on this tour.
Bob: The headlining band should be bigger.
Mark: We get one more. We have to do a whole tour with like Resin Eaters, Leather
Men and The Bassholes, all two man bills.
Bob: How is Super Electro doing? What's Dave Holmes from the Fall Outs new band
called?
Steve: Wiretaps. They just finished recording a whole album, actually. I don't
know if Super Electro is going to put it out or not. We might take it somewhere else just
because I don't have any money right now to put out a long player. Supposedly, The Fall
Outs are back together and have a bass player.
Bob: Really? That's cool.
Steve: Dave had a bunch of new songs two years ago, with any luck, he has one or
two more. They supposedly have a bas player and they're going to do something again.
They've been on a break for over two years. They've had a longer break than we had.
Bob: You guys had a long break between "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge" and the
self-titled album.
Mark: I can't remember if that was before or after. Around that time there were
rumors flying around that we were breaking up.
Steve: It was kind of weird. We toured and then we made the record and I went
back to school. But during the time that I was back in school we were making the record
and we were making the Monkeywrench record. So it was a really busy time for being time
off. We just didn't tour during that time.
Mark: Dan was touring with The Screaming Trees at that Rime.
Steve: We were pretty busy doing other stuff. This time it was a full solid year
break where we didn't practice or do anything.
Mark: We didn't speak to each other or nothing.
Steve: We had our lawyers talk. [laughing] We sent faxes to our lawyers
occasionally, but that was about it.
Bob; Weren't you doing Bloodloss during that time?
Mark: That year we took off? I did two full U.S. ours and one west coast tour.
That last west coast tour was a bitch! The van fried!
Bob: Where?
Mark: It actually limped back into Seattle but we were pouring massive amounts
of oil into it. We'd blown a cylinder going somewhere over the Grapevine. Se we made
it into the LA area and played Downey and Fullerton. We stayed around here for a week
and went to Fresno on a Monday night. The saving grace of the tour was playing Chico.
It was a small place but it was a lot of fun. Sierra Nevada. Everyone was smiling.
Steve: Two things that don't happen on a Mudhoney tour.
Mark: [laughing] Actually, it happens almost every night on a Mudhoney tour but
it didn't happen very much on that Bloodloss tour!
Bob: So what happens after this tour? Another long break?
Steve: We're going to tour again.
Mark: We're going to Australia in January.
Steve: We might get some shows opening for somebody, we're not sure about that
yet. We're going to tour a little bit more than we did for "My Brother the Cow." For
that we did one European tour and one U.S. tour. This time we might not even make it
to Europe. We went over to London for one show a few weeks ago. Just out of curiosity,
to see what it was like.
Bob: How did you manage that?
Steve: We did a bunch of east coast dates with Pearl Jam and a few of our own.
We were in New York and you can fly to London pretty easily from there. We wanted to
do one show and do some press just to see what it's like over there because it changes
so quickly. Last time it was good but this time it was a living nightmare.
Mark: The show was great, but the press...! We used to go over there and have
a full day of talking to the Melody Maker and whatnot. This time we got one phone
interview from the Melody Maker with someone who had not heard the record. "Why
are you doing this? If you don't give a shit enough to listen to the record then why are
you talking to me," you know what I mean?
Bob: Wow! Everett True didn't even show up?
Mark: He lives in Seattle now!
Steve: He's the music editor of The Stranger now. He was kicked out of
England! What is the worst possible place you can send an English journalist? Seattle!
The home of all things that we revile!
Bob: Was that his punishment for bringing grunge over to England in the first
place?
Steve: I think so. They finally managed to get rid of Everett. They sent him
to Siberia.
Bob: Do you see him much?
Steve: Yeah. I like Everett a lot.
Mark: He's writing all these reviews of local bands and just panning them. All
these power pop bands trying to make it, he just rakes 'em over the coals and there are
so many angry people. It's really good. It's about time.
Steve: He's trying to make up, I think, for starting something that actually
made people think that they could go to Seattle and get a record deal.
Mark: It's time to clean the house.
Bob: Mark, did you ever write for Maximum Rock'n'Roll?
Mark: Huh?
Bob: They published an obituary of Tim Yohannon in Spin and it mentioned
all these luminaries that wrote for Maximum Rock'n'Roll and your name was among
them.
Mark: I think I did maybe a scene report under an assumed name so I could slag
local bands that I didn't like without getting killed at their show.
Fred: I've got a question, you used to play a Silver Jet, right?
Mark: Still do.
Fred: Are you going to play it tonight?
Mark: Hell yeah.
Fred: I'm a huge Gretsch fan.
Steve: It's one of the reissues.
Fred: Is it? I have a reissue too.
Mark: Right on reissues!
Fred: It's one of the early ones right?
Mark: It's like a '91 I think.
Fred: The new reissues are different.
Mark: There was one in this guitar shop a couple of years before that, when
I finally had enough money to spend on a guitar of my choosing. I'd been looking at
it for a while and when I finally had the money together I went in and it was gone.
That was actually an old one. I'm kind of glad I got the reissue 'cause I don't think
the old one had the Bigsby [tremolo] on it.
Fred: Did you have to special order the Bigsby?
Mark: No, it came with it.
Bob: You were an English literature major and you got your degree, right Mark?
Mark: Uh huh.
Bob: And doing bands the whole time. That's pretty cool.
Steve: I dropped out of four schools, does that count?
Mark: It's pretty easy. Hey, you wanna play some tunes? OK! Being in a band
is no great achievement in and of itself. Anyone can do it. As we've prove. [laughter]
Mr. Epp proved that. There's tons of other bands that prove it daily. You don't have
to have any fucking clue to start making music.
Steve: It's often better not to.
