Mudhoney Articles
Radio Student
30 May '04
Radio Student Interview
NOTE: This interview was recorded in the London, and then broadcasted a couple of weeks later by Slovenia's Radio Student. Tina then spent some time typing it down and donated it to this website so that everybody could read it. Thanks again, Tina!
How was it yesterday in Norway?
Mark: It was good, it was cold.
Steve: It was almost dark when we played. And it was cold.
Mark: But it was a fun show.
How come you have just three shows in Europe? Is this a European tour?
Mark and Steve: It's our European tour for 2004.
So, don't you want to play more, or you're not invited, or you get paid too little?
Mark: We can't really leave that much because Dan is a stay-at-home dad, his wife works, he has two kids and he has to take care of them during the week. So if we leave it's usually around the weekend, when his wife isn't working. And in America this weekend is a three-day weekend.
Steve: So, it was a long weekend and we got two offers. And Guy is a full-time nurse, so he can't leave often, either. And we have jobs and things like that, too.
You have other jobs, I mean, not in music?
Mark: No, not in music.
After 15 years you are still playing over the weekends?
Mark: It's not "still", before we used to tour all the time. And then we slowed down, people got settled with families.
Steve: We made our living for a long time from music, but then we slowed down.
Mark: We settled down with families, and we are getting older.
What do you do for living?
Mark: I work in a warehouse.
And Steve?
Steve: I'm a gardener.
You are pulling our legs!
Mark: I wish to God I was!
But you sold almost half a million records!
Mark and Steve: No, no.
Wasn't Piece of Cake sold in 200,000 copies?
Mark: Maybe worldwide, maybe by now, but at the time it was about 150,000.
Steve: You don't get much money unless you're selling millions of records.
Mark: We made our living by touring. And doing soundtracks for a while.
But the show today is sold out, 1,500 people, it's a big act!
Mark: Yes, it's great. But if we were coming here every month it wouldn't be that way.
Steve: And this is the biggest show we played here in years. We were here in 1998 and we didn't sell out the Garage - an about 500 capacity club. Last year we played the Electric Ballroom for 1,000 people. That was sold out.
Does it bother you when you have to play in small venues?
Mark and Steve: No.
Mark: In fact, some of the best shows we have are in small venues. Like in Seattle, there's this place called The Sunset which maybe holds about 150 people, and we love playing there.
We have small venues in Slovenia, you should come! And your friend Chris Eckman lives there.
Mark: Really? Sometimes we run into Carla of The Walkabouts, but Chris hasn't been in Seattle for a while.
Chris lives in Slovenia, that's why he hasn't been in Seattle.
Mark: Right.
Do you know where Slovenia is?
Mark: Yeah, it's over there. My map of Eastern Europe isn't very good.
You never played in Eastern Europe?
Mark and Steve: No, we were never invited.
Mark: And even when we were touring a lot, we didn't go on long tours. The longest tour we ever did was for nine weeks. That was our very first European tour. At that time we had maybe twelve songs, and to play twelve songs for nine weeks... We decided at that point we'd never do a tour that long again. So, when we would come over, we'd come for three weeks at a time.
You're saying this just for Europe, or also the States?
Mark: And the States, anywhere.
I read that you had a couple of shows with The Melvins in the States?
Mark: Yes, it was three shows, it was over the weekend. The show in Olympia was twenty years to the day of their very first show in the same city. That was very special. But it was an hour away from our house.
Steve: So back to Slovenia, where the hell is it?
It's a neighbor of Italy and Austria.
Mark: Was it a part of Yugoslavia?
It was the northern part of Yugoslavia, it's a very small country.
Steve: Even if I did know where those countries were, they've changed.
Do you still enjoy being on stage like you did ten years ago?
Mark: I probably enjoy it more sometimes now. Ten years ago I was taking it for granted a little bit. We were touring a lot and playing very often. Now it's like: oh, I get to play, I get to go to Barcelona, I get to go to Fredrikstad, I get to go to London and there's people from Slovenia who fly out to hang out at the shows. This is great.
What are your conditions for having a show somewhere?
Steve: Two of the Spice Girls must be there.
Mark: Number one thing is that everyone is available to do it at the same time. Which means all of us. Which is like this Barcelona weekend - we were asked to do it months in advance. We need more than three months in advance for any kind of thing. We need to be able to cover the trip over here and food. And it always helps Dan to be able to get away if his wife knows he's gonna make some money.
Steve: If he's going to bring home the bacon, then he can leave for the weekend. If not, he has to stay home.
Mark: The only way that we could make it happen this weekend was because two festivals have paid a fair amount of money. 'Cause it's expensive to put five people on a plane.
Steve: And it's hard. We are tired, we haven't been sleeping.
Mark: We don't even see the hotels. The first night we had three hours' sleep, last night five hours' sleep.
This is the punk rock life, you chose it 15 years ago!
Mark and Steve: Yeah, we chose it.
So don't complain now.
Mark: I'm not complaining, I'm hardly complaining.
Steve: I'd rather be on a two-week tour instead of a three-day tour, to have a day off.
What about the audience response, is it the same as it was?
Mark: It seems good.
Steve: My guess for tonight, judging from the crowd out there, is a lot of young kids with Nirvana shirts on...
You mentioned Nirvana, but if you don't want to talk about it...
Steve: No, I think the show is so big because it's the tenth anniversary of Cobain's death. Every fucking magazine has articles about it. So, there might be a few more curiosity-seekers.
Mark: Of course none of us have talked to any journalists about the tenth anniversary.
It seems to me that maybe the media remembered you because of this tenth anniversary of Cobain's death. I saw you guys twice on Slovenian TV talking about Kurt Cobain in some documentary.
Steve: They're repeating that over and over. Damn it!
Mark: We did that well before we realized what it was going to be like on this tenth anniversary.
Steve: A few months ago I warned Mark we should be very cautious about who we do interviews with for the next few months, because it's a tenth anniversary. I put out a solo record last year, and all of a sudden I was getting a lot more requests for interviews, and they were all slightly hidden -- just wanting to talk about Cobain. Then I told my manager: no more, we'll find out exactly what they want to talk about.
What kind of music scene was there in Seattle before the grunge euphoria?
Steve: Punk rock.
Mark: The Walkabouts were playing...
Steve: When Mudhoney started in 1988 we'd come up through the hardcore punk scene, but one of the main bands we identified with was the Walkabouts. Actually, we played a lot of shows with the Walkabouts in the early days. We were just the louder, noisier version of hippie rock, they were the more peaceful hippies.
What do you think about The Country Teasers?
Mark: I love The Country Teasers.
Do you choose the bands that support you?
Mark: Oh yeah. We asked for the Country Teasers and Holly Golightly. But yesterday and the day before we played at festivals, so we didn't have a voice. Because I wouldn't have asked for the Pixies.
Yeah, the Pixies would ask for you!
Mark: No, I don't think they would have asked for us. I don't know if they even know who we are.
Have you had an argument with them, or what?
Mark: No, no. I don't know if they even know who we are.
Can you tell us more about the Pixies? They are coming to Ljubljana and the show sold out in nearly one day.
Mark: I'm sure.
Steve: They play their songs very well.
And what do you think about their comeback?
Mark: Whatever they wanna do is fine with me.
Steve: It was cool to see it, to see what they look like. They know what they're doing.
Mark: They know what they're doing.
I sense some irony here.
Mark: No, there's no irony, they're not one of my favorite bands. What they're doing is perfectly fine, but I don't go home and listen to the Pixies.
Steve: And one would assume that they don't go home and listen to Mudhoney.
Mark: One would only assume...
A question about the Country Teasers: do you dare to drink with them?
Steve: They are on their own there.
Because in Ljubljana the singer drank a bottle of whiskey on stage and finished up on the floor.
Mark: I've seen the same thing. I saw him a couple of times in Seattle and one time he drank a whole bottle of whiskey. I hope he doesn't try it before we play.
Steve: It's really crazy when Holly does that. When Holly drinks a bottle of whiskey on stage she gets really crazy.
The Country Teasers were the drunkest band I saw on stage. I saw Shane McGowan and...
Steve: Shane McGowan I've seen a few times, and what amazed me actually more than Shane was the weird banjo player. I was backstage and I watched him do it, so I know it was real vodka. He opened a fresh bottle of vodka and poured two pint glasses of straight vodka, no ice, nothing. And took it on stage and drank it.
Mark: People probably thought he was drinking water.
Steve: And he was fine, it didn't even slow him down.
Probably he couldn't play if he didn't drink it. So what about your experience, have you ever been drunk on stage?
Mark: Yeah!
Did you play better or worse?
Mark: Depends on whose point of view you're talking about.
That's true. From your point of view, never mind the audience.
Steve: When you're drunk sometimes you're the smartest, the best looking person in the world.
I know the feeling. And Holly Golightly?
Steve: She's on The White Stripes' record. She's part of the Billy Childish camp of people.
Mark: She's been putting out records for years.
Is it the first time you invited them?
Steve: Holly? She's gotten on stage with some of us before, because she covered one of our songs on one of her first records.
Mark: I think we've probably asked both bands before, but neither were able to do it.
Which is the coolest support group you've had? What tour do you have the best memories of?
Steve: We've been pretty lucky in London. We've gotten to see some bands like Billy Childish and the Headcoats.
Eighty records?
Steve: Over a hundred now. But he's slowing down, he only puts out one record a year lately. Very slow!
Mark: He's lost the fire.
And how is tonight's show going to be? Are you playing mostly new songs, or is it a mixture?
Mark and Steve: It's a mixture.
Mark: We don't want to totally bore people with brand new stuff. And we don't wanna totally bore ourselves by only playing old stuff.
Steve: It's a good mix. We kind of rotate the old songs, so we don't play the exact same old songs every night. We do the obvious ones, usually the songs that were singles.
But do these kids you saw outside with Nirvana t-shirts only know "Touch Me I'm Sick", or...?
Steve: Last night [in Norway] was really weird, 'cause they knew the new record, lots of people in the front were singing along with new songs from the Translucent record, which really surprised me, 'cause I don't get to see that very often.
Mark: Right. And it was in a small town, an hour and a half away from Oslo. It wasn't a huge thing.
How did you find that place?
Mark: They contacted us and said they were putting together a festival and wanted us to play it. And it just so happened to be on the same weekend that we decided we're gonna do the Barcelona festival.
Steve: First we thought we were just gonna be in Barcelona and here. Then they came up with that offer. So, I guess we'll do all three of them.
Mark: Guess we're not gonna sleep this weekend.
Did you play in a big venue in Barcelona?
Mark and Steve: Yes, with the Pixies headliners.
Yeah, sure.
Steve: And Wilco. Wilco was great. I can say good things about Wilco, I don't know why I can't say good things about the Pixies. And I don't think I dislike the Pixies.
And what do you like so much about Wilco?
Steve: I like the songs a lot, I like that it's gotten a lot more weird. They remind me of the Flaming Lips. Kind of weird noises and stuff. And I think he writes really good songs.
And do you have any other bands you could recommend? New bands? What have you been listening to lately?
Mark: Hawkwind, Can.
So you're listening to older music?
Mark: More often. And once in a while something new. Like I went to see the Pronus the other night. Kind of a noisy Detroit band, more like the Wolfies than the Gories.
Steve: I'm really curious and excited to hear the new Jessie Sykes and The Sweat Hereafter record. It's woman from Seattle. She was just here on tour for a month. I haven't been listening to very much punk rock lately. The Spits are the greatest punk band in the world. They are from Seattle. You can't get any better than the Spits.
Mark: I like a lot of stuff that In The Red puts out. But that's an easy one, 'cause Larry is a friend of ours and he sends us the records.
How is everything now in the Seattle grunge scene, does it still exist?
Steve: People still play music. But all the historic bands have gone except us. There's a really good scene of bands in Seattle. But I've always thought there were good bands in Seattle. I didn't like most of the grunge bands. I liked punk rock, those guys had better songs. Nirvana was great, I like what we do, and there the list stops. I liked a lot of other bands at that time in Seattle that were poppier, I guess. Flop was one of my favorite bands in Seattle.
Mark: Flop was great.
Steve: The Fall-Outs, but I'm biased 'cause I was in the band when they put out the records. I think there's some cool bands in Seattle lately. The A-Frames are great.
Mark: Yeah.
Steve: The Intelligence, which is an A-Frames spin-off. The Dipers, which is another A-Frames spin-off. They are really good.
So the Seattle scene is still alive.
Steve: Yeah. And every few years it seems there's a bunch of bands that I think are really great around Seattle. I was really excited when the Murder City Devils started out. I thought they were great.
They played in Ljubljana, but they kind of sucked. They played with Zeke and Zeke were so loud. Zeke were great.
Steve: Zeke is hilarious! That's a scary band. I like what they're doing. It's kind of weird mix and I really like his voice a lot.
Screaming...
Steve: Yeah, but he does a very tuneful scream.
And you're doing something with Nebula?
Mark: I sang one song. Just on the record.
Steve: I like some of the Queens of the Stone Age stuff. That's a sort of brother to the Seattle scene.
Mark: Josh Homme lived in Seattle for a while, and John McBain was in the band. I liked the early version of Queens of the Stone Age: Mike Johnson, John McBain, Matt Cameron on drums and Josh Fireball.
What is Matt Lukin doing?
Mark: He's a carpenter.
So he's not doing anything in music?
Mark and Steve: No.
Steve: He quit the band because he just didn't want to play music anymore. He doesn't even listen to music. He just doesn't have any more interest in music. He used it all up.
Mark: His heart wasn't in it anymore.
Then I think it's better to quit.
Steve: Of course. You should not play music if you don't want to.
Mark: That's a last thing you should be doing. You know, you shouldn't work in a warehouse if you don't want to, either!
Is it a big difference since you changed Matt Lukin for Guy Maddison?
Mark: Yeah, Guy has a very different approach to playing the bass.
Steve: But at least we've known Guy for a long time. We met Guy in 1988.
Mark: When Lubricated Goat first came to Seattle.
Steve: And Mark and Guy were in a band together [Bloodloss].
Mark: For the last couple of years with Matt, when Matt wasn't really all into it, I kept thinking: maybe some day Guy will play with us.
Was there ever a question that you would break up?
Steve: We thought about it. We always said we wouldn't replace any members.
Mark: Of course we are liars.
But you parted with Matt as friends?
Mark: Yeah, my wife had a birthday party a couple of weeks ago, and Matt was over.
Steve: He was urging us to keep going.
Mark: He said: Don't stop because I do.
Steve: And he was afraid that we would stop, and he didn't want to be the guy...
So when he was bored with the band, did it affect the whole feeling of the band?
Mark and Steve: Yeah.
Steve: But we were getting kind of more into it as he was getting less into it. 'Cause we were all a little bit jaded for a few years in the mid nineties.
Mark: We took things for granted.
Steve: And once it got harder to do and Matt wasn't really that into it, we kind of got more charged up.
So all this negative energy just made you stronger.
Mark: Then we went in to record Tomorrow Hit Today, which I think is a really good record.
I read in an interview that when you were touring the States promoting Tomorrow Hit Today, you had thirty people in some clubs. I couldn't believe it. I saw you when Piece of Cake came out, we went to Germany and there were 2,000 people!
Steve: And when we toured Europe in 1995 it also sucked. Not to bring everything back to Cobain, but there was a lot of negative vibes to the whole Seattle thing once Cobain killed himself. The whole world was sick of Seattle. And the younger kids had their new punk rock - Green Day, Offspring and the all Epitaph stuff.
Mark: And that's happier.
Steve: But that was their thing, and we were someone else's thing. Whatever their age is, people that really get into Offspring and Green Day, we don't have those people.
Mark: Not just Offspring and Green Day but also the more emo stuff, like Sunny Day Real Estate. These people don't give a shit about us, either.
Steve: Lemmy told me once.
Lemmy?
Mark: Not Lenny Kravitz, Lemmy from Motorhead.
Steve: Lemmy told us: if you stick around long enough you'll become a legend.
That's exactly what he's doing.
Steve: That's what he's doing, and he was urging us to do it.
When did you have your biggest creative crisis, if you had one?
Steve: It wasn't really a creative crisis. When Matt was quitting the writing was on the wall: people are not coming to the shows, we're not making a living out of it anymore, we kind of started working and Matt was like: I don't even wanna play music anymore, it's not fun. And it was just getting worse. We took a year off Mudhoney and did the Monkeywrench record. Dan had a hard time coming to terms with Matt quitting. But there's no sense in changing the name or something stupid like that.
It's still Mudhoney.
Steve: That's right, that would be dumb.
Mark: Then we'd never get offers to play festivals.
Steve: And then me, Mark and Dan started doing that Sonics cover band with a bunch of other people from Seattle, like Scott McCaughey. And then I realized at one point that we were playing way more music than we had in years, and weren't getting paid for any of it. It was weird, we were playing so much more than we had in years, we were so charged up about the music. The other shit just didn't matter anymore, we just wanted to enjoy.
Mark: And when we started out, we never were a band that was about: oh, we want to have a hit, we wanna be on the radio, we wanna be famous. That stuff was so out of our minds, so out of our intentions. We knew the history of rock'n'roll up to that point, we knew our favorite bands, and how far they got.
Steve: Nowhere.
Mark: And this was the kind of stuff we were drawn to, for some reason.
Steve: We were drawn to failure.
But basically you became famous when Sonic Youth took you on their tour.
Mark: Sonic Youth really helped us out.
Steve: Sonic Youth helped everybody out, like they did to Dinosaur Jr. In 1988, if they said you were cool, everyone said: ok, you're cool.
And today it's the same, they've really become some kind of icon in doing this.
Steve: Yeah, 'cause they're all interested in new music. They like to know what's going on and constantly try to understand what's happening. I don't really care myself. And Mark doesn't either. We are not the type of band that helps new bands.
Mark: Except maybe the Country Teasers.
What's going on with Bloodloss, does it still exist?
Mark: No. We just actually...
...took their bass player.
Mark: Yeah. Bloodloss have pretty much stopped going. Ren, the guitar player and sax player guy, had severe problems keeping his shit together. He eventually had a breakdown in the studio last time we recorded. Then he went into rehab in L.A., and then lived in L.A. for a long time. Then he moved to New York. We went up to New York last December and he was almost homeless there, his liver stopped working, his pancreas stopped working. So we raised enough money to send him back to his dad in Australia. Now he's living in Australia. Hopefully he'll get his shit together, but it seems a little late.
And Guy Maddison lives in Seattle?
Mark: Yes, and so does Martin - the drummer from Bloodloss - he works in the same warehouse as I do.
How about Monkeywrench?
Mark and Steve: Hey!
Steve: We've gotten something accomplished with Monkeywrench recently. New album is 8/10s done.
Mark: It's close to being done. It would have been done very soon, except I'm not gonna be around this summer.
Steve: Because - what is Mark doing this summer?
Mark: I'm going on tour with the MC5.
And you'll sing?
Mark: Yes.
Steve: And Evan Dando is singing some songs.
Mark: We were planning on finishing the Monkeywrench record and working on a new Mudhoney record this summer.
You're making a new record? So you're not totally translucent!
Steve: We're not totally translucent.
Mark: No, no. We're translucent, we're ghostly, we're still haunting the castle.
It's good to know that you're planning to stay around! What about a Monkeywrench tour?
Mark: It's the same kind of story with Monkeywrench as with Mudhoney.
Steve: It's worse with Monkeywrench, actually. Tim Kerr can tour, but he's really busy producing bands and stuff.
Mark: And he has a full-time job at the University of Texas Library.
Steve: And he's doing all this art now, paintings.
He's a painter?
Steve: Now he is. He's all about art. His paintings are of iconic artists.
Mark: Like Hound Dog Taylor or Bobby Seale.
Steve: So he's super busy doing that.
Mark: And Tom has got two kids, Martin just had a kid.
Steve: I'm about to have a kid.
When?
Steve: In November.
Did you watch the movie Mudhoney?
Steve: Yeah, but not till after we had the band.
Did you like it?
Mark: It's good!
Did you have any problems with Russ Meyer?
Mark: Somebody asked Russ Meyer in an interview if he had heard of the band Mudhoney, and he hadn't. He seemed to have no problem with it.
So you have his blessing.
Mark: It's not his blessing, he probably just doesn't give a shit.
Steve: We are really lucky that it's one of his better movies.
Mark: We could have been called Up!
Or Supervixens.
Steve: Supervixens is good.
But basically they are all the same.
Mark: Nooo.
Steve: Lorna, that's not bad, either.
Mark: But not as good as Mudhoney, though.
Steve: My favorite is his first one - The Immoral Mr. Tease. It's about a guy who can't help it, but every time he's walking around and looks at a girl, he sees her wearing just her underwear.
His movies are funny.
Mark: Yeah, there's that Nazi Martin Bormann, he's in like five of his movies, this Martin Bormann character. So strange.
Were you ever invited to do some music for a movie? Apart from Judgment Night.
Steve: Like one song. We've never done a porno soundtrack. And we always wanted to do one.
Mark: That's where the big money is.
And did you like the movie Judgment Night?
Mark: No. It's horrible. We were on tour with Nirvana when that came out. We had a night off some place and we went to see that movie. There was nothing else to do that we knew of. And the next day we went to the club that we were gonna play, and it turned out that Cypress Hill had played the previous night, when we were watching the movie.
Steve: We played with Cypress Hill, though. That's a good story.
Mark: You can't believe that there was a time when we'd go out and play in front of hardly anyone, like in 1998. At one time this grunge thing was so blown out of proportion that we were put on a bill with Cypress Hill and Run DMC, we were before Cypress Hill and after Run DMC. That's really weird. It was a completely wide audience, but as soon as Danny, our guitar tech, was setting up the drums and amplifiers people started booing, before they even knew who it was.
Did you enjoy playing monkeys?
Mark: I went up to Cypress Hill backstage to say hi to those guys. There was a joint going around. I took one hit and I've never been so stoned in my life. One hit of this death weed. And then of course to be confronted by a whole angry mob, I was being completely paranoid and stoned. It was a very weird show, but I managed to find something deep inside me and pull it out and fight back.
Steve: So we said: no more rap shows, don't ever let yourself get tricked into this kind of thing.
What is it like for you in America under Bush?
Mark: Better now then it was before, in the run up before the war. People would say something against the war, and 70% of the country would get upset. And now a lot of people are realizing that it was bullshit, a stupid mistake. Hopefully he won't be there after November.
Steve: Hopefully.
Has your life changed on a daily basis?
Mark: It doesn't affect me on a daily basis. The only thing is that now I'm walking around with a clenched fist and I'm pissed off a lot more than I've ever been. You know, it's worse than under Reagan, it's worse than Bush's dad. From what I understand, it's worse than under Nixon. Have you seen the movie The Fog of War? An Errol Morris documentary, fantastic. It's about Robert McNamara. He was the guy who was behind the Vietnam war. He doesn't have many regrets. He was also involved in the fire bombing of Tokyo.
So you're going to vote in these elections?
Mark: Oh yeah. The only good thing in having Bush is that maybe punk rock will get angry again. I'm going for Bush again!
This is what Al Jorgenson from Ministry said. When republicans are in the White House their records are actually better, because they're pissed off. When Clinton was in the White House they sucked.
Mark: I think there was probably another reason why Ministry sucked: huge amounts of drugs...
How come that you don't have an official website? Every band has one.
Mark: Because we don't know anything about computers, that's why I work in a warehouse.
So there's no special reason?
Mark: No, we're lazy. We don't know anything about it.
So this is totally unimportant to you?
Mark: Obviously not a big priority.
How do you feel about people downloading your music?
Mark: That's fine. We're not a band that gets played on the radio. So to me that's like being played on the radio. Otherwise, how are people gonna find out about us?
