Mudhoney Articles
Bassa Fedeltá
July/August '98
Translated from Italian
Diggin' for gold - the "definitive" records
MUDHONEY
Superfuzz Bigmuff (Subpop)
Exactly ten years ago. It was July '88, if our memories are right, when
came out the first single of a band with a strange name (Mudhoney or Mud
Honey? The doubt was solved when the first LP came out: it was written
all in a word, just like a Russ Meyer movie) and that evidently didn't
like to go soft. "Touch me I'm sick, fuck me I'm sick...": in a time when
AIDS was spreading all across the world, those words, screamed with no
grace over a guitar groove of unexpected violence, touched an open wound,
throwing fuel on the fire of fears noone wanted to admit. Still, there
was no splatter pleasure in Touch me I'm sick - this the title of
the single - as well in any of Mudhoney's other songs. Only (only?) a
morbid, wicked love for life's obscure side and for negativity in general,
an almost exaggerated faith in the cathartic potentials of pain and
desperation. The same song and the same suffocating atmospheres were
going to be found, six months later, in Superfuzz Bigmuff, the e.p.
labeled Subpop that more than any other record (except, maybe, Nirvana's
Bleach) fully represents the "grunge" ideology. Or at lest, what
grunge should have been and that has never been, transofrmed too soon
in the favourite toy of fashon stylists and big magazines. Evolved hard
rock, was back then said: a fascinating work hipostesis, that preached
contaminations between Led Zeppelin (that by the way Mudhoney always
claimed to detest), Sabbath and Motorhead, with the nihilist fury of
punk and the innocence of garage, all this mixed with Nugget-ish
proto-psychedely. A "genre" (terrible word) definitely incestuous, as
incestuous was the Seatte scene, that was leaded by the indie run by
Bruce Pavitt and John Ponemann. Mudhoney themselves were kinda living
resume of it: guitarists Mark Arm and Steve Turner had been involved,
with different times, in Green River - two LPs (Dry as a Bone and Rehab
Doll, both on Subpop) behind, and heading toward a shiny future called
Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam - while bassist Matt Lukin came from the
daddies of the scene, those Melvins whose in the successive years would
recive a widely deserved reflex popularity. Band memebers' different
experience would find in Superfuzz Bigmuff a complete synthesis. After
the whip strike of Touch me I'm sick (that will be later taken
up bi Sonic Youth, in a split single where on the other side Mudhoney
would brutalize Halloween) comes the quasi-hardcore of Chain that door,
and then another very toxic homage to the Stooges, a slow acid song called
Mud Rider, with the wah-wah remembering Real Cool Time and a
hammering and "zommbiesque" cadence that instead looked more at the
Melvins. Let's flip side: a couple of rides filled with Motorheadian
riffs (No one has and If I think) introduce to the main
track of the record, that In'n'out of Grace from which emerge
the other great daddies of Mudhoney: Blue Cheer. Here more than a tribute
we talk of a real robber with no back bill (there's a solo which is
brazenly the same of a track of Vincebus Eruptum), even if what mainly
intrigues is the citation of late-60s biker imaginery, also thanks to
the "sampling" - back then it wasn't called so yet - of Peter Fonda in
The Wild Angels. We'll repeat it again: it was not the grammar,
as simple as fascinating, of their music to make Mudhoney essential, but
the spirit that pervaded it. "The equivalent of an horror movie with no
machines or special effects, but only the axe of the killer falling on
the head of the innocents, that are innocents no more." This wrote Guido
Chiesa in one of his unforgettable reportages from the american underground.
A perfect definition. Ten years have passed, grunge was freeze-dried in
pret-a-porter collections, idiot movies (Singles) and dozens of records
full of shit, Kurt Cobain became the Jim Morrison of the Dolce & Gabbana
generation, and Mudhoney are now the very last ones in the first generation
of Seattle that still haven't earned billions, recycling themselves over
and over in the eternal role of "loser" garage band. But, ten years after,
Touch Me I'm Sick words still sound brutal and desperate. And
foresaw ten years that have been too, under the appearences, very brutal
and very desperate.
The Groovers
(Carlo Bordone and Pierpaolo Vettori)
© 1998 Bassa Fedeltá
NOTES: Looks like the authors only have Superfuzz Bigmuff on german 12",
since they talk about Touch me I'm sick being the first song on
the record (it was instead only a peculiarity of the german edition, that
on the other hand didn't feature Need). They also mispelled one song
title (Mudride, not Mud Rider) and forgot to mention the first Green River
LP (Come On Down, on Homestead). Dolce & Gabbana, for the non-italian readers,
is a very big fashon griffe.
