Mudhoney Started the Blaze & Continue to Stoke It

Mudhoney

It’s fair to say that the massive, indelible imprint and explosive power that 1980s/1990s Seattle rock and roll—dare I call it “grunge”—has left on the world can be pinned on a couple of Iggy and the Stooges-loving, misfit schoolboys in the suburb of Bellevue, Washington.

Were it not for singer/guitarist Mark Arm and the relentless, six-string-slinging Steve Turner, it’s a fair bet there’d be no Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden—in other words, nothing to kill the heinous reign of Top 40 and cock rock in the early 1990s.

It turns out that calling the primal, surging, stacked-amp brand of northwestern, plaid-flannel-draped rock “grunge” is actually more than fair in this case. Arm himself is most often cited as first coining the term when, in a 1981 letter to famed Seattle zine Desperate Times, he described his own first band, Mr. Epp, with the dismissive and self-effacing slam “Pure grunge!”

Arm and Turner met as teens in Bellevue where they formed the hardcore band Limp Richerds in 1981. That outfit limped along until around 1984, when the duo, along with bassist Jeff Ament and then guitarist Stone Gossard, formed Green River, a band that over the course of its three years would come to create the template for and ultimately typify the Seattle sound—an unabashedly raw and abrasive backdrop to Arm’s freaky frontman shebang.

By 1987 Green River had run its course. Ament and Gossard split to start the glammy and metal-leaning Mother Love Bone, and later formed Pearl Jam. Arm and Turner, however, continued on their own twisted path.

Perfecting the aforementioned Stooges’ sneering, take-no-prisoners, nihilistic, freakazoid blues, while alchemizing in shades of black—the sludgy riffery and schizo nature of Black Sabbath and the apostate punk of Ginn/Rollins-regime Black Flag—Mudhoney coalesced, Arm and Turner joined by bassist Matt Lukin and drummer Dan Peters.

A stretch of legendary recordings and shows followed. While grunge was catching the ears of the world in the 1990s on the back of a sound that Mudhoney perfected if not invented, their resolute nature to buck trends and challenge conventions consistently put them at odds with prevailing popularity. While their peers became stars, they remained underground and largely unsung.

Decades on, though, Mudhoney remains. To paraphrase one of the band’s classics, the sweet young things ain’t sweet or young no more.

In the years since the band’s heyday, the significance of their body of work has only grown. And while so many other totems of the Seattle have died, faded, or simply broken up and given in, things couldn’t be any busier on planet Mudhoney.

Like the last bastard bastions of the bunch, the band, after a stretch of years on Reprise, is still making records at home on Seattle’s famed imprint Sub Pop and has a new release. Recorded in true punk fashion—in less than four days, the songs centered on the precision rattle and thud of drummer Dan Peters and bassist Guy Maddison—The Lucky Ones is the band’s eighth full-length.

Then there’s the rebirth of the qualified classic, 1988’s Superfuzz Bigmuff EP. The once lean six-song, 22 1/2-minute opus was first reissued and expanded in 1990 to include a clutch of additional early singles and now comes to glory in a thoroughly bolstered deluxe edition.

As Arm once told an interviewer about the song “Touch Me, I’m Sick”—a centerpiece of Superfuzz Bigmuff, which is arguably the band’s finest moment among many—“It was just a cool, fried-out sound.”

Fortunately Mudhoney still sounds as cool and fried out as ever.

Mudhoney brings the road show to Buffalo this Wednesday, June 4, at Mohawk Place, supported by Pittsburgh’s garage rock gallants the Cynics and Buffalo’s own psych freaks the Irving Klaws.