MUDHONEY
Mudhoney; possibly the most influential band of the American Northwest music scene. The full history of Mudhoney is a long-and-winding almighty MESS; the number of bands the various members have played with over the years is so large there is rumored to be a computer program devoted to cataloging, or at least making sense of, their vast contributions.
In the early 1980's, Mark MacLaughlin (better known by his stage name, Mark Arm) formed Mr. Epp and the Calculations with some of his classmates, named for one of his school's math teachers. Rather than bother with such trivialities as writing songs and playing shows, they would design posters for shows that didn't exist and would "practice" by banging on pots and pans. Two promoters and the eventual founders of Pravda records, Marie Masco and Dennis White, enjoying the band's irreverence, happened to stumble upon Arm and band-mate Joe Smitty putting up some more of the posters and began yelling at them. Thinking that they were about to be attacked, they ran. Far from that, they wanted the guys to put on a real show. When met with the offer, Mark's response was "Gee, I guess we'd better get some instruments!"
Soon after that, Arm joined another group, the Limp Richerds. Both bands recorded, but while the Limp Richerds had a small recorded output, and many of the releases featured a lineup without Arm, Mr. Epp appeared on a tremendous number of records - mainly compilations. Mr. Epp also released a live album, Mr. Epp Live As All Get Out.
Around the same time, Matt Lukin, who grew up in Aberdeen Washington (a small community approximately a two-hour drive from Seattle, in southwestern Washington) became involved with local bands. As a teenager, he played on the same baseball team as a young Kurt Cobain, and joined a local band called the Melvins.
Arm first met Steve Turner in 1982. At the time, Turner was in a band called the Ducky Boys. After they disbanded, Shumway wanted Turner to join his band, Spluii Numa, which he did for a short period of time, alongside future Mudhoney accountant, Keith Strobel. Spluii Numa were generally liked, if not enthusiasticly recieved, but Mark wasn't exactly a huge fan.
Turner soon left the Ducky Boys and joined both Mr. Epp and the Limp Richerds; however, he had the misfortune of joining the Limp Richerds in the midst of their demise. After three months of practice, and before Turner and a chance to perform live with the band, the Limp Richerds called it quits. Mr. Epp were finished by 1984.
In the Summer of 1984, their previous bands having disbanded, Arm, Turner and Alex Shumway, decided to form a new band. Their only requirement for a bassist was that he have a distortion pedal. The only person that fit the bill was Missoula, Montana transplant and former member of Deranged Diction, Jeff Ament. There was one problem; he'd hated Mr. Epp. When Ament finally relented, Green River (named for Ted Bundy, the infamous Pacific Northwest serial killer), came into existence.
The band played a handful of shows during the next sixth months. Soon after, Arm stopped playing guitar to concentrate on his vocals, but the sound wasn't large enough for them. Stone Gossard, former member of the Ducky Boys with Turner, joined the band.
After another series of shows, including a slot opening for the Dead Kennedys in Seattle's Moore Theater, the band entered the studio in December to record the six song Come on Down EP with producer Chris Hanzek, for Homestead. The album wasn't released until late 1985. By that time, Turner had already left the band several months earlier, in August, because of musical differences. He spent the next two years in university, while Green River replaced him with Bruce Fairweather.
The newly formed lineup boldly set out on a truly disastrous tour of the United States. Come On Down had not yet been released, and few people outside of the Northwest had heard of the group. The tour was, in short, a disaster; during a show in Detroit, both Ament and Arm had to be rescued from the aggressive crowd by an armed policeman.
The band recovered from the mishaps well enough to conduct several recording sessions, from which came the Dry as a Bone EP, as well as a large number of tracks for compilations. Dry as a Bone was the first release by a single band by a newly created record company called Sub Pop. The band also conducted a much more successful tour of the U.S. Green River then began work on a follow-up to Dry as a Bone in August of 1987. Titled Rehab Doll, it was to have been released in late 1987 or early 1988. However, Sub Pop was experiencing extreme financial difficulties stemming from the release of Dry as a Bone and a Soundgarden EP, and had to push the date back until July of 1988. By that time, Green River had disbanded. Green River's last performance was at the Scream in Los Angeles on October 24th, opening for Jane's Addiction.
With the end of Green River, Bruce, Gossard and Ament went onto The Lords of the Wasteland, which they later renamed Mother Love Bone. After singer Andy Wood died of an overdose in 1990, Bruce joined Love Battery as a bassist, and Gossard and Ament formed what would eventually be Pearl Jam. Shumway went to Japan to study law. As Green River was breaking up, Turner had been begun jamming with Dan and Ed Fotheringham. In early November, Arm called up Turner, and soon joined in these sessions.
Lukin had been fired from the Melvins in the early part of the year, mainly due to an inability to get along with Buzz Osbourne. The Melvins promptly moved away, leaving for San Francisco in July.
On New Year's Day, 1988, Fotheringham, Arm, Lukin and Turner first got together to practice, with Lukin travelling from Aberdeen - which he soon began doing quite often. They named themselves Mudhoney, after a Russ Meyer film of the same name (despite the fact that no one in the band had actually seen the movie at the time; such was Mudhoney). In April, they made their first public performance, opening unbilled for Das Damen at the Vogue. In the summer, they had their first recording sessions with producer Jack Endino. Sub Pop took a pair of songs from these sessions, "Touch Me I'm Sick" and "Sweet Young Thing (Ain't Sweet No More)", releasing them as a very limited 7" single on brown vinyl in a plain sleeve. As with most Green River releases, the record was delayed because of Sub Pop's financial difficulties.
It was the "Touch Me I'm Sick" single that attracted both Sub Pop and the band attention, and this was followed by the release of the Superfuzz Bigmuff EP in October, named after the distortion pedals that Arm and Turner used, respectively. They also contributed to the Sub Pop 200 3x12" EP compilation that also featured songs by Green River and The Thrown-Ups, as well as the Fastbacks covering Green River's "Swallow My Pride", released in December. They then went on their first full scale tour, first heading off for a single gig in Europe at the Berlin Independence Days Music Festival, and then doing a full tour of the United States. They did a large tour of Europe in the spring, supporting Sonic Youth.
In March, a series of articles Everett True had written for Melody Maker on the Seattle scene in general and Mudhoney in particular were published. Mudhoney did a BBC session, and then played half a dozen shows. The most notable of these was a performance on May 12th, opened by Soundgarden; 10 minutes into the show, Arm jokingly invited the audience to join him onstage - and before he knew what was going on, they did. The guys ended up pressed against the back wall, unable to move. By the time that order was restored, the stage monitors were missing and the P.A. was trashed. After that was fixed, Arm invited people to climb on the P.A. stacks, which broke them again. In between all this chaos, they found time to play some songs, and the show received nearly unanimously glowing reviews from the legions of reporters that witnessed it.
Upon returning home from conquering the United Kingdom, they went into the studio with Jack Endino in July to record their first full length album. In 1990, Turner wanted to take a break from touring, and went to Western Washington University to finish his degree in anthropology, leading to rumors that Mudhoney had broken up. These rumors were fueled when Fotheringham performed with Nirvana and Screaming Trees, both of whom were looking for new drummers at the time. Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic were considering asking Fotheringham to join Nirvana, but reconsidered when they decided that they didn't want Mudhoney to disband, and instead recruited Dave Grohl from the Washington D.C. hardcore band Scream.
In the Spring of 1991, Mudhoney began to record their second full-length album, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, at the time it was Sub Pop's most commercially successful release. In support of the album, Mudhoney spent the second half of 1991 and the first half of 1992 touring North America, Europe and Asia.
In the spring of 1992, the tension between Mudhoney and Sub Pop caused the band to leave the label. While Mudhoney waited to receive their royalties, Sub Pop had used the money they earned from selling that album to finance other projects and pay their creditors. The situation only got worse with the release of Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. The last straw came when Sub Pop spent a lot of money - money that could have been spent paying bands they owed royalties to - to fly in the Afghan Whigs into Seattle to record. After initial talks with Epic went nowhere, Mudhoney signed with Reprise, on which they soon released their third full-length album Piece of Cake.
In late summer, the movie Singles was released. A tale of twenty-somethings coping with their relationships with the Seattle music scene as the backdrop, it featured a very brief, non-speaking appearance by Arm, and tracks by many Seattle bands, including Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Mudhoney's contribution to the soundtrack, "Overblown," for which they were paid $20,000, cost them a mere $182 to record - something that the guys couldn't resist laughing about to any person that would listen. The movie did decently at the box office, but the soundtrack went platinum.
They toured extensively behind the album, including a few shows in the Pacific Northwest in the fall in which Nirvana was the unannounced opening act, and a major tour of the U.S. in the spring.
They went out on tour with Pearl Jam in April of 1994 and then came back home to focus on writing and recording songs for their next album. They recorded My Brother the Cow, again with Jack Endino, at The Ranch in Seattle in October. Mudhoney performed three songs from the forthcoming release during the Self-Pollution Radio broadcast on January 8th, 1995. My Brother the Cow was released in March, and the band went on a world tour in support of the album, going to the Pacific Rim with Pearl Jam in February and March, and then headlining its own shows in Europe and North America that lasted through July. They performed sporadically in 1996 and early 1997, before they began having shows on a regular basis in Seattle, and occasionally in other cities. Some of the shows were done under the name "Beneath the Valley of the Underdog," a very poorly kept secret. On such occasions, they would perform sets of entirely new material. One of the shows done under their real name, on December 19th at the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle, celebrated the tenth anniversary of the band's existence (which was held earlier than the actual date because they were set to soon go to Memphis to record their next album). Whereas before Mudhoney had recorded albums rather economically, this time around they got a full-sized recording budget from Reprise to achieve the album that they all felt they could make.
After finishing the album, the band kept a low profile for the first half of 1998, only playing a handful of shows along the West Coast. In August and September, Mudhoney played some shows, both supporting Pearl Jam and headlining, and did a large amount of press in anticipation of releasing their album Tomorrow Hit Today. Released on September 22nd, Tomorrow Hit Today was met with almost universal critical acclaim. Supporting the record, Mudhoney toured relentlessly through the Spring of 1999. They covered the United States multiple times, as well as playing Australia and Japan. After finishing those dates, they headed home for a well-deserved rest.
During this time, Mudhoney was dropped from Reprise Records. The label was frustrated with Mudhoney's inability to sell an obscene amount of records, and Mudhoney was frustrated that the artist-friendly Reprise that they signed to in 1992 no longer existed. Shortly thereafter, in June, Lukin decided to leave both the band and music- he is now working as a carpenter.
In the wake of Lukin's departure, Fotheringham, Arm and Turner took a break from active involvement with Mudhoney, which many people incorrectly interpreted as meaning that the band had broken up.
In April 2000, Mudhoney finally regrouped. Fotheringham, Arm and Turner got back together to rehearse new songs. In doing this, Turner alternated between playing guitar and bass. When a few songs had been written, they went into the studio and recorded a few songs.
In May, Fotheringham, Arm and Turner got together in another band, The New Strychnines. Currently, Arm and Turner are touring with The Monkeywrench. Fotheringham continues to play with Mike Johnson, and Mudhoney has no plans to perform or record as of yet.
