Distorting the truth

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/09/2011 (5363 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When grunge exploded in the early 1990s, one of the pioneers of the genre was nowhere to be heard on the radio.

Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and numerous other bands who combined metal, punk, fuzzy distortion and melody were played ad nauseam — and still are — but Mudhoney was noticeably absent from that mix, despite being one of the best bands to come out of the fertile Pacific Northwest scene.

Not that Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm is bitter about it. He understands the band was too much for radio programmers, who can only take so much distortion and need certain production values that Mudhoney was always a little too dirty and fuzzed-out to achieve.

“I have a pretty clear theory about that: have you played (Mudhoney’s 1988 EP) Superfuzz Bigmuff and listened to the radio? It’s a much rawer record than anything that gets played on the radio,” Arm says over the phone from the Sub Pop records warehouse in Seattle, which he manages when he’s not on tour.

His association with the label dates back to its earliest days when his former group, Green River, released its 1987 EP Dry as a Bone on the then-upstart imprint. Green River is considered one of the first grunge bands and features Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner and Pearl Jam members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard among its alumni.

When Green River split up at the end of 1987, Mudhoney was formed and the six-song Superfuzz Bigmuff was one of the first examples of the Seattle scene to break out to a wider audience, setting the stage for the West Coast music revolution that helped drive a spike through the heart of hair metal and soulless synth-pop that came to define the 1980s (and which has since returned).

While the sound coming out of Seattle in the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed like a breath of fresh air to music fans, Arm didn’t see Mudhoney as being new or revolutionary, since the group was just building on the sounds of bands that came before it.

“I don’t think we came up with anything original at all. We took obviously influences, mixed them up and put them in the blender of Mudhoney. You can hear the Stooges and Blue Cheer and Neil Young and Scientists and Feedtime and a million other things in there,” says Arm, whose speaking voice reveals no trace of his instantly recognizable singing voice, which sounds as though he’s rubbed the inside of his throat with sandpaper and gargled with raw dirt.

That is not a diss.

Mudhoney songs like Touch Me I’m Sick, In ‘N’ Out of Grace, Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More and If I Think are some of the definitive tracks of the early grunge movement and were the gateway into the scene for many music fans, but when Nirvana and Pearl Jam broke big in 1991, Mudhoney’s rough, uncompromising sound never translated to the mainstream masses.

“We always knew what we were up against and where we lived in the world. By the time Mudhoney started I was in my mid- to late 20s — I was 26 — and I wasn’t easily seduced at that point,” Arm says. “Of the hundreds, thousands of bands we were into, we knew that the percentage of the ones that were pretty (successful) were minuscule.

“Most of the bands we were attracted to were commercial failures. Some of them were huge to us, but not so much commercially.

“If you listen to Black Sabbath records, there aren’t many pop songs (on them), but they lived in an era where War Pigs could get played on the radio. It’s totally random. Big Star wrote great pop songs but never got played (on the radio). If you listen to (Nirvana’s) Bleach and Nevermind, they don’t really sound anything alike. By the time Nevermind rolled around, the production on that record is pretty slick.”

Mudhoney never became an arena-rock band, but maintains a healthy fanbase. The band doesn’t tour year-round the way it used to, but has continued to release a steady diet of albums every two to four years, with 2006’s Under a Billion Suns and 2008’s The Lucky Ones the most recent releases.

All of the members are in their 40s and, like Arm, most hold day jobs when not on the road: Turner sells records online and at an antiques mall, bassist Guy Maddison is a nurse and drummer Dan Peters is a stay-at-home dad.

Arm doesn’t feel any animosity towards the bands that did make it, since many are his friends who remain his friends to this day.

“There was no jealously at all. Sometimes there was confusion, though, like when Candlebox came out. It was, ‘What the hell was that?’” Arm says with a laugh, referring to the often-mocked, coattail-riding Seattle grunge act.

Most of the bands playing Seattle in the old days helped each other out, were on the same bills and toured together, playing with each other even when some of them became arena-filling superstars.

That sense of camaraderie still exists in a small way today, as Pearl Jam has enlisted Mudhoney to open the dates on its tour that stops at the MTS Centre Saturday (tickets are $81.50 at Ticketmaster.) It will be Mudhoney’s first time in the city and its first full-fledged cross-Canada tour in a 23-year career that has produced eight full-length albums, four EPs and more than a dozen singles.

Mudhoney has played arenas with Pearl Jam before and knows a large percentage of the audience have no idea who they are, so they can take certain liberties with the setlist and have fun playing whatever they want.

They know about three songs from each record and relearned all of Superfuzz Bigmuff and their early singles to play an All Tomorrow’s Parties show in New York last year, meaning anything could make the setlist.

As for the Seattle scene these days, Arm doesn’t pay that much attention to it, since he doesn’t get out to see bands like he used to.

“I don’t go to shows that much anymore. At this point I’ve spent so much of my time in clubs over the years I just have other places I’d rather be,” he says.

“I hope people still want to go see live music, though.”

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca