Mudhoney Articles
The News Tribune
29 July '03
Pioneering grunge band Mudhoney
has plenty of new music
Once again I've got to give credit to Hell's Kitchen, a club that's galvanized Tacoma's rock
scene like no other.
What's the big deal about that Sixth Avenue club? For starters, it has already attracted the
likes of the Reverend Horton Heat, Evanescence and Peter Buck's supergroup Minus 5 this year -
the kinds of bands that used to routinely skip right over our sleepy little town en route to
Seattle, Portland and Olympia before the Kitchen opened. (For the record, the Reverend is
perched at the top of my list of the year's best shows. But the Roots and Radiohead are on
the way to challenge.)
Well, the peeps down at the Kitchen scored again by landing a date with Seattle cult icons
Mudhoney. What's more, Friday's show will be the band's first in T-town - at least as far as
front man Mark Arm can remember.
Mudhoney, of course, was part of that whole grunge thing that established Seattle as the
world's rock capitol in the late '80s and early '90s. Some would go so far as to say they
were somewhat responsible for it.
"Arm, with his band Mudhoney and his previous group Green River, had virtually invented the
musical style and had even come up with the term 'grunge,' writing in a Seattle fanzine in
the early '80s," Seattle rock historian Charles Cross writes in his Kurt Cobain bio "Heavier
Than Heaven."
Ironically, my first Mudhoney memory was hearing Arm make fun of all the grunge hype on
"Overblown," that track his band recorded for the "Singles" soundtrack. Sing along: "Everybody
looooves us, everybody loves our town. That's why I'm thinkin' lately, the time for leavin' is
nooooow."
When I called Arm earlier this month, he seemed a bit bewildered by the notion that his band
had launched anything. The original goal was just to release a single, and they figured they'd
be together for less than a year.
"It's sort of weird for me to assume we influenced other people, 'cause, I mean, if anyone was
influenced by us they're probably also influenced by the things we were influenced by," Arm
said, rattling off personal favorites such as the Stooges, Neil Young, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur
Junior. "It wasn't like we set out to change the face of rock or anything. All we wanted to do
was play music that we liked and maybe weren't hearing as much as we wanted to, so we had to
play it ourselves."
Arm said he doesn't often think much about such matters - at least not until some guy like me
calls. "I guess the best thing I can come up with to encapsulate how it feels to kind of look
back at that is 'Wow! That was weird,'" he said, laughing.
"I think we were really lucky," he continued. "We had really good ringside seats. None of the
focus was on us really. Some undergroundish focus was on us in '89, '90. Then it was
Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, you know. We were friends with people in all
those bands, so we had some fairly amazing access. We saw some great, funny, sad things up
close."
He remembered it being a difficult time for a lot of his famous friends. "I'm not sure why,
exactly. I guess I can imagine the pressure of hundreds of thousands of people's expectations
and eyes focused on you. The most detrimental thing for us is, I think we took a lot of things
for granted. Things were super easy for us from the get-go, because we had friends who were
starting up a record label. It was super easy for us to get the records out. We went to Europe
shortly thereafter. ... And that doesn't happen for most bands."
When did they realize things wouldn't always be so easy?
"I think when the IRS came after us in '95," he said, laughing.
Oops. Sorry about your luck.
Well, that's all in the past. What's relevant today is the band's return to Seattle's Sub Pop
Records (minus bassist Matt Lukin) after several years' hiatus. The reunion resulted in last
year's phenomenal "Since We've Become Transparent" release - an album that finds the guys that
brought you "Touch Me I'm Sick" toying with jazzy horn arrangements and '60s-style psychedelia.
But the music is still punk at its core.
And Arm said fans can expect to hear a handful of new songs at Friday's gig - their names include
"That Trench You're Digging," "In Search Of" and " for War." (Sorry. Can't print the full title
of that last one. Let's just say it suggests being really excited about war.)
It's a different sort of commentary on events in the Middle East; one befitting the band's sense
of humor. "I don't normally like to get into the meaning of lyrics because things are a little
more opaque and open to interpretation," Arm said. "But this one is pretty direct. The basic
premise is that with all the young men off to war, then the old men can (have sex ) more."
Arm was at a loss to describe the other songs. "Besides ' for War,' these songs haven't been
recorded, so I'm not really able to look at 'em from an outside perspective," he said. "I'm
better able to describe something once it's on a record."
So you'll just have to show up and listen for yourself - that is, if you were one of the 300
lucky enough to snag a ticket. You can check at 253-759-6003 to see if any are left, or see
www.hellskitchenonline.com for more details.
