Mudhoney Articles
Spin Online
11 February '00
Yesterday's Hits Today: A Mudhoney Interview
"This might be all you're ever going to hear of Mudhoney, but that's ok with
us," says guitarist Steve Turner about March To Fuzz, the 2 disc
Mudhoney best of and rarities collection their old buddies at Sub Pop have
just released. Sadly, he also means that after 12 years the Seattle band
just might be no more. Last year, founding bassist/laugh riot Matt Lukin
"retired" from music and the band parted ways with Warner Bros./Reprise.
Fortunately, if this indeed is the last we hear from these fine Seattleittes,
it's a helluva farewell. Full of loud, dirgy guitars, and Mark Arm's
sarcastic snarl and shriek, the collection spans everything from 1998's
seminal "Touch Me, I'm Sick" to three gems from 1988's underappreciated
Tomorrow Hit Today. The effect of squeezing 22 "best of" songs onto
one disc and 30 "rarities" onto the other is a lot like scarfing Kool-Aid
powder right out of the damn packet: a concentrated, face puckeringly
sweet-sour high. On the eve of the release of March to Fuzz, Spin.com's
Jessica Letkemann (skoopjr@aol.com)
spoke to Mudhoney's Steve Turner about the album, the past and the future.
Wouldn't it be ironic if March To Fuzz turned out to be the best
selling Mudhoney record?
Steve Turner: I hope it is. Honestly. I'd be satisfied if this was the only
Mudhoney record out there. It definitely feels like a capper.
It was good to see that songs from Mudhoney's last studio album,
Tomorrow Hit Today, were well represented.
Turner: We really like that record. Mark was kind of joking that we should
just rerelease it as a best of and chop the price in half. [laughs] We tried
to keep it pretty balanced. We tried to get lots of opinions from friends
like David Katznelson and [Sub-Pop co-founder] Bruce Pavitt. David was the
youngest and lowest paid A&R guy when he signed us. A lot of it was in my
hands for lack of anyone else willing to do it. We wanted it to be something
that would pretty much sum up what we did and also get all of the odd stuff
on there too.
Was it weird to go back and listen to everything Mudhoney's done?
Turner: It was really funny. Mark and I would get together and spend like 5
or 6 hours listening to ourselves together trying to figure out what to use.
The best of was hard to do. The b-sides kind of took care of itself.
There's a certain nostalgia to some of it. It makes me wonder what
Mudhoney's first shows were like.
Turner: We don't remember it that well. I remember being drunk somewhere
once. [laughs] We'd recorded the "Touch Me I'm Sick" single in March of '88.
We hadn't played a show yet. By July we played a big show with, I think,
Blood Circus and Catt Butt at the Boxing Club, a gay bar where they didn't
have many shows. It was sold out, lines around the block, fire marshalls were
there. The interest in these brand new bands that didn't have any [records]
out took people by surprise. The local scene was starting to explode all of
the sudden.
What about early tours?
Turner: In September of '88 we were flown over to Berlin by their government
for the Berlin Independence days, just one show. It was unbelieveable. It's
this big music festival with independent artists of all different types.
European countries fund their arts so much better. They actually view art as
importnant somehow. So we were flown over there and Bruce and Jonathan from
Sub Pop went with us and we couldn't believe that somebody would do that. It
was absolutely ridiculous. We fucked the place up, acted like fools. Then
right when we got home, we took off on the us tour where we got in a van and
drove across the country and back and then had another couple days off and
then we went down the West coast with Sonic Youth. It was all in the fall of
'88. It happened pretty fast.
I smiled when I re-read a quote from Krist Novoselic recently in the
official Nirvana book where he talking about the days when your drummer, Dan
Peters, was drumming simultaneously for Nirvana. And he said they couldn't
keep him because "it would be theend of Mudhoney and we loved Mudhoney so
much, we didn't want to be responsible for that."
Turner: When Dan was drumming with Nirvana, I was taking a break from
Mudhoney too. So Mudhoney was in question even then. It was the end of '90
when I said I'm going to go back to school because I don't want to go on
tour. I was getting burnt out.
At that point, a lot of Muhoney's best music was still to come! What about
now? Is there any chance of continuing?
Turner: We don't have any plans to do anything. We're not going to replace
Matt and that kind of leaves us a little hog tied. Maybe the three of us
that are left will get together and see what comes out of it.
