**THE MAKING OF SUPERFUZZ BIGMUFF by mudhoney - FEATURING Mark Arm and Steve Turner**

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Mudhoney formed in Seattle, Washington in 1988 by Mark Arm, Steve Turner, Dan Peters and Matt Lukin. Arm and Turner had been playing together in multiple bands, including Green River, before deciding to form Mudhoney. Green River had been signed to Sub Pop so when Mudhoney formed, Bruce Pavitt agreed to pay for a recording session with Jack Endino. From that session, Sub Pop released the “Touch Me I’m Sick” single in the summer of 1988. At that point, they booked more studio time with Jack Endino to work on songs for an EP. Superfuzz Bigmuff was eventually released in the fall of 1988.

In this episode, for the 35th anniversary, Mark Arm and Steve Turner reflect on how the EP came together. This is the making of Superfuzz Bigmuff.

Mark Arm: Alright, this is Mark Arm from the band Mudhoney, and I am talking about Superfuzz Bigmuff, our very first 12-inch release from 1988. Steve was given a Super Fuzz back in Green River days by someone that he worked with at a sushi restaurant. And Steve had mentioned to him that, you know, he plugged into his amp and his guitar just sounded thin and didn't do what he thought a guitar should do. And the next day, the guy presented Steve with a Super Fuzz, which is kind of miraculous. And Steve then also got like a Big Muff. And so he played the Big Muff and I played his Super Fuzz. Our sound, like one of the things we, it might have been a sort of a defense mechanism, but like our thought was, at the time was like, “If we can clear the room, we're doing a job well done.”

Yeah, I met Steve, I was introduced to him by Alex Shumway, who ended up later on being the drummer in Green River. And Alex introduces like, “Hey, you guys are both straight edge.” Like at the time I wasn't drinking or smoking pot and neither was Steve. Steve, I don't think, ever drank at all at that point. The thing was, like, at the time, I was still, like, I was experimenting with psychedelics (laughs). So, I was like, “That's, you know, something that I might be able to learn something from, whereas everything else just seems like smashing yourself over the head with a hammer.” Now, at this point in my life, I'm totally happy to smash myself over the head with a hammer. It turned out that Steve was one of the few people that I ever ran into that was like, “Hey, I like your band,” talking about Mr. Epp, my first band. And so eventually he joined.

Steve Turner: My name is Steve Turner, I play guitar in Mudhoney and have for the last 35 years. I met Mark in 1982, I was going to a private school for my last, my senior year in high school, where I met Stone Gossard and Alex Shumway. And me and Alex were in line, we think it was going into the T.S.O.L. show at The Showbox, but it was the fall of ‘82. And Alex introduced me to Mark, and I was already aware of Mr. Epp and the Calculations. I really liked the 7-inch record that they did. So we just kind of became friends, and started hanging out together, and nine months later I joined Mr. Epp as second guitarist. And you know, he was a big influence on me, Mark was three years older than me, and knew more about music than I did at that point. Yeah, you know, we just became good friends, and have remained good friends. You know, it's a very long relationship, we've been in bands together now officially for 40 years together. That's crazy.

Mark Arm: When that band fell apart, Steve and I decided to start another one and that was, ended up being Green River. We brought Alex in and got Jeff Ament on bass and eventually Stone (Gossard).

Steve Turner: We started Green River, me Mark, Jeff Ament, and Alex Shumway in the spring of 1984. Jeff had been in a band called Deranged Diction that was still sort of, not totally done, but kind of done. And we thought Jeff would be a great bass player to have cause he jumped around a lot and he played through a distortion box on like the Deranged Diction stuff. So I got a job at a coffee shop called Raison d'Être that Jeff worked at to try to convince Jeff to join a band with me and Mark, cause he wasn't a fan of Mr. Epp and the Calculations. And we convinced him that we were going to try to have a real band this time around (laughs). So he got on board with that. It changed fairly quickly. We got Stone Gossard in there on second guitar, he beefed up the sound quite a bit and he brought, a more classic rock thing to it, I think. You know, we were all kind of tired of hardcore.

Mark Arm: Well, I mean, we were all trying to figure out what to do after hardcore. And it seemed like there were a couple of paths that people were taking. One was sort of like, kind of doing a more speed metal thing. Another one was just sort of kind of being more standard rock. Like, I guess like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü were kind of becoming. And then there was sort of like the weirder stuff. You know, like, the Butthole Surfers or Sonic Youth. And some people were, like, totally just getting into kind of glam. Like, L. A. glam. Not like The Sweet or something what had happened in the 70s. I mean, the first time I ever heard the first Mötley Crüe record, I was like, “Oh, this sounds a little bit like The Sweet.” So I thought that was kind of cool. And then I bought Shout at the Devil and thought, like, that was a terrible record. So that's kind of how my flirtation with that stuff ended (laughs).

Steve Turner: Well, Green River, there were, I guess, more metal elements creeping into it, and I wasn't really a fan, I wasn't a metal dude at all. So I got kind of tired of and frustrated with what was going on. So I bailed out after a while where it was obvious I wasn't helping the band at all at that point. So I quit after the first record and they got much better without me.

Mark Arm: And then, you know, Green River existed for a couple of years. Like Bruce Fairweather took Steve's place and people's idea of like what they wanted to play kind of began to verge, differentiate a little bit more.

Steve Turner: My point of view was I just didn't see that there was any realistic goals to achieve in music. My only goal was to put out a 7-inch. I was doing pretty good if I got there. I couldn't see how it would be a career at the time. I was not open to that idea for myself and you know, that's I guess my own stubbornness and whatever, but I just didn't see it working for any of them either. Clearly, I was wrong (laughs).

Mark Arm: The subject of me taking singing lessons, vocal lessons actually, definitely came up and you know, I was just like, “I…” There was this vocal coach in West Seattle who, you know, like, apparently Geoff Tate and a bunch of other Eastside metal guys went to. And I was just like, “I don't want to just, I want to have my own thing. You know, even if it sucks, I want to just approach vocals my own way instead of like, the way you're supposed to or whatever.” And, you know, in terms of that, I think like a couple of huge influences were, at the time and still, were like Iggy Pop and Gerry Roslie from the Sonics. And of course, like, Nick Cave with The Birthday Party. You know, like, there was nothing sweet about any of those people's voices. But they were all, like, super intriguing to me. And I remember John Bigley from The U-Men, he said, “I'm not a singer, I don't sing, I vocalize.” And I thought that was a pretty cool approach to things. When Green River broke up, I immediately contacted Steve.

Steve Turner: Me and Mark were still hanging around all the time and influencing each other musically. And when Green River broke up, he called me that night saying Green River broke up and that we should do another band, I said, “Sure.” The break in Green River was really obvious as soon as Mother Love Bone and Mudhoney formed. You know, I have a different opinion of Mother Love Bone now than I did in 1988. I didn't like it, you know, now it's charming to me, you know, and I love all the people involved, but at the time it was like, it's just not my jam at all.

Mark Arm: And Steve and I played in the Thrown Ups together while Green River was still happening, I played drums in that band. We were kind of in tune with each other musically and we would get together and like listen to records and our feet and our hearts were more towards like the punk rock and like the underground sounds, especially stuff coming out of Australia.

Steve Turner: We were very influenced by really crude bands like Feed Time out of Australia, the Scientists and punk rock and obscure 60s Nuggets-type garage punk and psychedelic stuff. Stooges obviously were a cornerstone, but Mark and I had a very united front on what we kind of wanted to do, at least the perimeters, if you will. It was, you know, distorted guitars. He was going to play some slide guitar. I wanted him back on guitar because I liked the way he played guitar. He was kind of a savant on the guitar. And it kept him grounded as well a little bit.

Mark Arm: It was new for me at the time to be playing guitar and like in Green River, basically Stone and Jeff and Bruce and, and Steve, like they, and Alex even, like they wrote all the music. And I think I was fairly immature about it. Like, my approach was, “Oh, I have to sing over every part” (laughs). You know, I just kind of, like I didn't let the songs really breathe. So I kind of like overwrote lyrics. But I think it was just sort of out of a place of insecurity. Like, “What am I going to do if I'm not singing? Am I just going to stand there?” (laughs). And so like when Mudhoney started and I played, you know, like Steve was like, “You have to play guitar.” It was a two pronged approach, one, because he just didn't want me to like just jumping off the stage into the crowd all the time, like I did in Green River. And it also kind of gave me something to do when there wasn't singing. So that allowed me to like allow space in the songs, which I wish I'd learned earlier (laughs).

Steve Turner: So we started thinking about who else to get in a new band. And we got Dan Peters, who was a drummer about town. I didn't know Dan very well, but we jammed together once.

Mark Arm: The fact that he was already playing with Dan was an added bonus because, like, Dan was one of my favorite drummers in town. He was a lot younger than me. Well, seemed like a lot younger because I was like 26 and he was 20 when Mudhoney started. But he was around for years and playing in bands and just getting kicked out of venues because he was underage (laughs).

Steve Turner: He's a killer drummer, so he agreed to do it, even though he was in two bands at that point. And the Melvins had just moved, or they had broken up, and Buzz and Dale had moved to San Francisco, leaving Matt Lukin behind. He was a buddy of ours and, you know, we loved the Melvins, so we thought we should get Lukin involved.

Mark Arm: So we reached out to him, he was still living in Montesano, which is right next to Aberdeen, like, you know, two hours away, pretty much, from Seattle. And he was like, “Ah, it's a long way to go just for practice.” So he was coming into town for New Year's Eve so our very first practice with all four of us was on New Year's Day, 1988, and that's kind of when we marked the birth of the band. And I have no recollection of that practice. I'm sure none of us felt very good.

Steve Turner: We meshed really well, really quickly. Lukin had some song ideas, I had a little stash of songs, and Mark was quickly getting some lyrics together for some of the things that I'd had, because I hadn't been in a real band for a couple years at that point. So I had a pile of riffs, basically and some ideas. The rehearsals went really quickly, really well. And we had pretty much all the songs that would be on Superfuzz Bigmuff and some songs that ended up on the first self-titled record too. We had them all within three months. We were friends with Bruce Pavitt at Sub Pop and Jonathan (Poneman) at Sub Pop. They were just kind of getting going as an actual label. They put out the Green River records and Soundgarden’s first EP and stuff. But at this point, the first Tad 7-inch came out around this time and Swallow 7-inch. So we told them we were a band, they said they wanted to put out our records, whatever it turned out to be. So we didn't really pay any dues. We already had a record label, as soon as we said we were a band, basically. But we were recording our practices, and Mark brought a tape into work. He worked at Muzak with Bruce Pavitt and a bunch of other musicians in the scene at the time.

Mark Arm: And I remember, like, after a practice where we tried to record our songs on a boombox, I gave Bruce a tape. And he tried to listen to it, but it was just static, basically. You know, the mic was completely overloaded by the instruments in the room. He said, like, “I can't make sense of this. I trust you guys. How about we pay for you guys to go into the studio with Jack Endino, just to record something, and so I can even tell what you have.” And we hadn’t played a show yet or anything like that, and so we went in and recorded, I think, five songs with Jack. And we figured, like, we should pick what we felt were the two strongest songs and put them out there as a single and then “Touch Me I’m Sick” and “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” came out on a 7-inch.

Steve Turner: You know we recorded it quickly and Jack Endino is great at recording things quickly and not letting little things like slightly out of tune guitars get in the way of a performance. The guitar on “Touch Me I’m Sick,” Mark's guitar is really out of tune. We didn't have a tuner at this point in our careers. We're not really tuned to anything there. I think we're a little bit low, but we're not to like E flat yet (laughs).

Mark Arm: Jack Endino was fantastic to work with. The only thing, and this might've been during the recording of the very first single, at one point he did say, “Are you sure you want your guitars to sound like this?” Cause, you know, they're just so fuzzed out and wiped out that like if we started picking a chord, you wouldn't be able to tell. And he in Skin Yard, like that was kind of like how he played, like sort of arpeggiated chords and whatnot. But I think he got it pretty quickly.

Steve Turner: Yeah I mean, he understood what we were doing. He knew all of us from other recording sessions. He recorded all the Thrown Ups’ stuff already by that point with me and Mark. And he understood, he was a like minded fellow traveler, if you will. You know, he knew what we were trying to do, but we did that first recording session and then did another recording session a couple months later to complete all the Superfuzz Bigmuff stuff.

Mark Arm: You know, we had enough songs to play a set and I think Bruce and Jonathan were just like, “Go in and record some more.” And I think this is probably, a lot of it was because, you know, Green River broke up before the last Green River record. They had nothing really, the band wasn't even pushing that release. We didn't exist anymore. So they were kind of scrambling in a way, they still had Soundgarden, but that was kind of it, you know, in like 1988. At the time, like in the 80s, like EPs were like a really good kind of introduction to a band. Like kind of a, you know, a four to six song, 12-inch. They cost less than an album and it just seemed like bands who did that were just putting their best foot forward, not just filling a record with crap.

Steve Turner: I love the format of a six song EP. That was really popular in the 80s in indie rock and underground stuff. I love the EP format. CDs kind of ruined things because it made so many records so much longer than they should have been. Cause you could fit all this music on there and like suddenly records are 75 minutes long. Like, “Ah, come on, man. I don't got that much time” (laughs).

“Need”

Mark Arm: As far as “Need” is concerned, I would say that's probably a song that's sort of like maybe influenced by like kind of the Replacements side of things or, you know, it was just like a straight forward, almost pop song.

Steve Turner: “Need” was Mark. I really like it because it's simple kind of folk chords. I like really simple songs, generally. You know, the song that killed me in Green River was “Tunnel of Love.” I don't think I ever played that song right all the way through cause it just kept changing. And these little slight changes I could never remember and it drove me crazy. That was a song that killed me for Green River. So I like songs like “Need,” I think are just so simple and powerful. I really like that song. We don't play it very often. I don't think Mark likes the lyrics as much as he's gotten older.

Mark Arm: I can't believe how stupid those lyrics are. They're just so, like, incredibly overly angsty and dumb (laughs). But I guess that's just, like, from the perspective of someone in their mid twenties.

Steve Turner: It's hard to sing songs that you wrote when you were a twenty three year-old or whatever, I think sometimes for people. I think there's certain songs that it just seems like maybe fake to the writer a little bit, but to me, it stands up.

Jack Endino had a weird theory about my guitar soloing at one point. Like he thinks a lot, he'll like sit there and like, move his hands like this and he goes like, “I think I figured out what you're doing on your solos. You're two frets back from where you should be all the time” (laughs). I thought that was hilarious. I was like, it I actually got in my head a little bit, you know, for a while. I was like, “Am I actually two frets off? Should I be up two frets from here or something?” But I thought that was funny, I don't know. I try to make them sound good. I know that much. And my other big musical lesson was if it sounds really bad, you're one fret off and then move a fret, you know? So I definitely find myself pulling back if it's like, “Oh, that's not a good note, like moving back a fret.” If I play the song, I try to recreate the solo the same way, but they're simple. I mean, when I think of great guitar solos, I think of “Louie Louie,” first off the Kingsmen and the Wailers’ version of “Louie Louie” is one of the perfect guitar solos ever. “Pushing Too Hard” by the Seeds is also another perfect guitar solo. And they're very similar to what I'm doing in “Need” (laughs).

“Chain That Door”

Mark Arm: “Chain That Door,” I think in our minds, like kind of an homage to Feedtime and that's, we both sing on it together. Or vocalize, I guess.

Steve Turner: He has such a distinctive voice, but I think he's a little bit flat. On, like, lots of parts of songs, but that's kind of what makes his voice so great. But it's really hard for me to do backing vocals with. And when I joined this band, The Fall-Outs, and I had a lot of backing vocals to do, it was so easy, right off the bat. I had to start thinking about why it's so hard for me to sing along with Mark sometimes. But, you know, we make it work (laughs).

Mark Arm: I wanted to play slide just to get that sound, that “grrrrr,” you know, which was cool. But I didn't know anything about open tuning yet. So on these recordings, you know, like on the very first single and this, I was just like playing standard and it's a miracle that it doesn't sound any worse than it does.

Steve Turner: Like I said, he's a fairly crude guitar player at that point. And that's why we thought the slide would be good where he didn't have to concentrate too much on the guitar and he could still concentrate on singing.

Mark Arm: That's one of the few songs that Steve actually came up with the words for.

Steve Turner: I did write some lyrics on that one, yeah. There's only a handful of songs that I had any lyrical input on in Mudhoney and that was one of them. I had that, most of that song written when I was living up in Bellingham the year before Mudhoney formed. I would say that that was inspired by the Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II, like, what's the first song on Meat Puppets II, I can't think of the title. But it's got kind of, “da na na na na na da na na na na na na” But we also then, made it so grungy, if you will, that you would never know that it was inspired by the Meat Puppets.

Mark Arm: One thing I always loved about Dan's drumming, is he wasn't just like a straight up rock drummer. He had, like, kind of, a little bit of Mitch Mitchell in him. A little bit of that, kind of, looser, almost jazzier feel. He thinks really hard about his drum patterns and coming up with something cool and you know, unique. Not just like, kind of like going, keeping the pace or whatever.

Steve Turner: He never did what I expected him to do on the drums in those early days. It was a bit of a learning process for us. I didn't have the greatest, steadiest rhythm at the time. So Dan sometimes could not figure out what I was trying to show him because I would change the rhythm of whatever it was I was playing. Like, “You Got It,” in particular. He was like, “I don't know what you're doing here.” But you know, we kind of learned together how to blend together. And he grew up loving prog rock and then got into punk rock, but kind of the, the post-punk side of punk rock, Gang of Four was one of his favorite bands. So he was coming at it from a different point of view necessarily than we were. Like he wasn't well versed in, you know, garage rock or anything at the time. He's had to suffer through it for decades now so he's well versed now, but yeah his drum patterns would surprise me. And it wouldn't be exactly what I wanted, but then once we got it going, it was like, “Okay, that makes total sense.” And I think that gave a lot of our early stuff, and still, a different sound, because of his drumming.

Mark Arm: The drum patterns on “No One Has” and “Chain That Door,” I mean, those are all his. Like, you know, no one was like, “Hey, play it like, “bdd bdd bdd bdd bdd bdd.” And I remember when this came out, like, there was some one review in the UK, which kind of got into Dan's craw, and understandably so, saying that “the drumming on ‘Chain That Door’ was a thoughtless barrage.” You know, which to us is like, maybe that person just wants, you know, like a steady, in the background drummer, but like, we didn't want that, you know, we wanted something to propel things and push things forward.

“Mudride”

Mark Arm: At that time, in the early days of Mudhoney, Steve and I would actually get together, like probably my apartment and play guitar at each other, you know, like, “Oh, I like that, I like that.” And then also things kind of came up in practice, you know, like a song like “Mudride” would actually need to be going through an amp in order to get the sustain of the notes, you know, that's not going to work and just without any kind of amplification. So that probably did not come up in strumming unplugged guitars (laughs), in my apartment.

Steve Turner: The main riff of that might be from Mark as well. But that was definitely Spacemen 3 inspired. Some of their longer, heavy fuzz guitar workouts that they had at the time. They were a big influence on us as well. So yeah, that was definitely, that was coming from there, but I don't think we're ripping them off at all, it was just inspired by them.

Mark Arm: “Mudride” was kind of our tip of the hat to Spacemen 3, you know, droning, and we tried to write long songs, but we can't. We just sort of lose patience after a while, so we could never do like, you know, in a 15-minute extended drugged out thing, no matter how hard we try. We just, after a while, go like, “Okay, that seems like long enough. So it's a, you know, like a shorter version of a fake Spacemen 3 song.

The Stooges were a huge influence, and they're a huge influence on Spacemen 3 so it's all kind of like, you know, getting filtered through other things. And that is, Superfuzz Bigmuff, that's like the very first time we put a record together. And “Mudride” being kind of like the slow song, that's like, we got that from like, Fun House, basically. Like, at the end of side one, that's where you put “Dirt.” Before, like, kicking it up a notch on side two. And so, like, from that point on, almost all of our records, at least for a good long run, like, a song like “Come to Mind” would be, on the self-titled album, would be like right there, right before, at the end of side two. I think maybe, I mean, I'd have to look at the track listing for Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, but I bet “Broken Hands” is like the last song on side one. That's kind of the placement for like the Neil Young, Alice Cooper ballad, kind of, you know, Stooges, slower tunes. That's where they go.

Steve Turner: I know Mark thinks about that a lot more than I do, traditionally. And at this point in the game, I leave the sequencing and the selection of songs up to Mark because, like the last couple of records we've done we've had an excess of tracks and I let him kind of do that because often he has a underlying bigger message in the songs and stuff and he likes putting them together that makes sense to him. And yeah, I'm totally fine with that. I think he does a great job of sequencing the record. So he probably thought about Superfuzz more than I did. I'm gonna guess (laughs).

Mark Arm: Getting the sequence right on a record has always been pretty important to us. You know, both Steve and I were like DJs at college radio. So, you know, you thought about like, the flow of songs when you're playing stuff on the air and like how things would fit together. Like, “I'm playing The Birthday Party, but I want to get to Janis Joplin. How do I make that happen?” And so I think that's kind of, you know, the way we were thinking about sequencing records and putting them together.

Yeah, “Mud Ride” is the Super Fuzz. I mean, on all those recordings, I only played with the Super Fuzz on. I didn't think of like, “Hey, let's do a cleaner guitar sound,” or anything like that. And, you know, eventually the Super Fuzz broke. It just couldn't, it was a fragile thing to begin with, but like on tour, it just kind of broke down and I ended up using other stuff. But for the early recordings, that was definitely the thing.

Steve Turner: Mark played a Super Fuzz and I played a Big Muff, essentially. They were both my fuzz boxes, but old fuzz boxes at that point were really easy to find, they were cheap. If not free, I mean, I got more than one vintage fuzz box free back then, or I'd go into a pawn shop and there'd be one for five bucks, you know, they were easy to find at the time. They weren't as hip and collectible as they are and have been for the last 30 years.

Mark Arm: That was just like old technology or whatever, an old sound that like, I guess was associated with hippies. Although like, you know, it's not like Crosby, Stills & Nash was playing through fuzz boxes, but at least like 60s garage, you know, stuff, which was something that we're all into. And it was like, “Oh, this is that sound. This is that, like, “You Must Be a Witch” sound. Or, you know, Satisfaction,” if you're not as familiar with The Lollipop Shoppe. And I used to have a guitar when I was in Mr. Epp, but everything just kind of collapsed and broke at the end of that band, which I guess was sort of appropriate. And Tom Mick from Feast was desperate to sell his baby blue Hagstrom and I bought it off of him for 80 dollars. And I felt, always, a little bit bad about that, but, you know, it worked to my advantage. And Steve had like a baby blue Mustang. So Matt actually painted his Precision bass, baby blue, to match our guitars. We're probably the only band that was just like rocking baby blue guitars, like, “Look how tough we are” (laughs).

Steve Turner: The Mustang, I just thought they looked really cool. That's why I ended up with one. And I was really stoked because Tom Price, who was in The U-Men at this point in his career, the U-Men were like, in 1984, they were like the coolest band in town. And Tom played a Mustang, a red one with a stripe on it, actually. And we just all thought it was the coolest guitar. And my sister's boyfriend, one of his brothers at his frat had a Mustang for sale for 200 bucks, so I bought it (laughs). But I loved the Mustang because it looked cool and had a 60s vibe to it, and to me, with the Big Muff, I could get that tone that the Stooges and Blue Cheer had. And I know they were playing very different gear than I was. They were playing, you know, Marshall stacks and giant Sunn amps and SGs and whatnot. But to me, the Mustang had that kind of tone, like kind of woody, deeper tone with the neck pickup. And I love the vibrato bar because you didn't even have to have a bar in it. Like the bridge, if you hit the bridge with your hand, it would do this really fast kind of vibrato. And that reminded me of Link Wray. So it was a perfect guitar for me at the time. It's funny, I don't play the Mustang much anymore because it feels like a toy in my hands. Now it feels so tiny. I can't make it work. It's like my fingers got fat or something. You know, I'm an old man now, so the Mustang doesn't work anymore for me. They're cool guitars, they're small, they were cheap at the time. They stopped being cheap. This is funny, in ‘92, probably, I needed a new guitar. I wanted to get another Mustang and I could buy them cheaper, like I bought two matching blue competition stripe ones. They were cheaper for me to buy in Hollywood than Seattle. Cause they were such a hot commodity in Seattle, everybody wanted a Mustang, but nobody cared about them in the bigger picture yet.

If I hit the Wah wah, I want it to be kind of going crazy. I don't think there's any Mudhoney song where I'm doing a really rhythmic Wah wah thing. It's usually just getting wild with the wah. And Ron Ashton definitely did that. And I mean, I've got so many guitar heroes. Link Wray is always in my mind. Bo Diddley, always there in my mind because they're kind of wild, they get wild. You know, it's not a mapped out solo necessarily. It's just kind of going off the rails or trying to go off the rails.

Mark Arm: Well, Steve never maps out his solos. To me, he's one of the most interesting people who play guitar solos because he doesn't just kind of like play the scale and it's not like, you know, kind of like normal guitar playing. He's still pretty innovative and it's more, I guess, like kind of an abstract expressionist approach as opposed to a paint by numbers approach. And I think that's a little bit more freeing and more fun and more interesting.

Steve Turner: 60s garage and psychedelic stuff, that's always there, you know, in my mind. I have literally hundreds of 60s garage compilation LPs. And I don't really even necessarily know the names of the bands that are on them, I just think of it as one big teenage band from 1966 that put out a lot of records (laughs). All that local, Northwest garage rock was, and still is, a huge influence. That was made apparent to me by going to record stores in Seattle. That heritage was looming large as soon as I started buying punk rock records, I was aware of the Sonics and the Wailers. Paul Revere and the Raiders, even though they're officially from Boise, where I'm at right now. But yeah, the Northwest stuff, the Kingsmen, Portland area band. I mean, did anyone ever rock as hard as the Sonics? I'm not sure.

“No One Has”

Mark Arm: Putting “No One Has” together, we're pretty much thinking of it as like kind of a Wipers thing. Like the drive of the drums, but you know, of course that has slide guitar, so that's not Wipers. But, you know, like Steve's driving riff and the bassline and the drums kind of felt like an offshoot.

Steve Turner: When we were kind of forming the song, it kind of reminded us a little bit of the Wipers, another Northwest influence on us. And all these songs came together so quickly, there wasn't a whole lot of thought, but usually in my mind, I always try to think of something that I think it sounds like, either good or bad. Like, you know, “What are we accidentally ripping off?” if you will. And sometimes it's like, “Great, we're ripping it off. Cool.” Other times like, “Ah, let's change this a little bit cause that's too much like something else that we could think of.”

I don't know who came up with that riff. That might've been a Matt Lukin thing actually. You know, Mark had that great slide guitar on it, and, you know, I'm just doing basic open chords for most of that song, and sliding up a little bit. But yeah, that's one of my favorite songs on the EP for sure. We still play that one live. I mean, we play a lot of the songs live. We don't really do “Need” much, like I said.

Mark Arm: Well, that one's dramatic, but it feels a lot better to me than “Need.” You know, it's not like a relationship song so much. It's more just like a “I got my back against the wall kind of song” (laughs). I’m not sure what, what I felt the impression was at the time.

Steve Turner: Yeah, I thought that was a great song and I think it's still a great song. And there's a lot of great interplay between the guitars and the bass.

Mark Arm: And that was a song where, you know, the guitars would stop and there would be vocals and then the guitars would start again. We were learning about arranging things.

“If I Think”

Steve Turner: Me and Mark together came up with, “If I Think,” just, “if I think, I think of you.” That was something, I remember walking down the street, and one of us sang that, and we were kind of riffing on it, and it made us laugh, and a song came out of that.

Mark Arm: “If I Think” was for sure a Steve song, top to bottom, and I had most of the lyrics together, except I didn't quite have, you know, the hook or whatever, and I was like, I think I was talking to Steve about like, “Maybe the line would be like, when I think…” And Steve thought about it for a bit, and then was like, “How about if I think?” (laughs). Which is just way funnier. And so we went with that, of course.

I think Steve almost like had the whole thing mapped out and was kind of good to go pretty early on.

Steve Turner: I don't really remember, I'm pretty sure that was my lick. I think the middle part might have been a Lukin thing too, might have been Mark. I know I didn't write all the music to that song. But the main little intro lick was me and then we kind of just added the heavier parts to it. But yeah, I don't really remember how exactly. We had that lick and we had that little stupid lyric to base the song around and then Mark wrote the rest of the lyrics. My point of view, I wanted to have as many different dynamics as we could. Just getting all the different influences and blending them together. I mean Velvet Underground is very apt, they're still one of the greatest bands ever. Yeah, I think we were just trying to make a fairly diverse record because again, I wasn't sure how many records we were going to make so we were trying to get it all out there as fast as we could.

"In 'n' Out of Grace"

Mark Arm: Matt, I know, he had the riff for “In ‘n’ Out of Grace,” and then, like, as a band, we arranged it as an homage to the songs on the first Blue Cheer record.

Steve Turner: Matt brought all the music to “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” to us, so, I mean, there was definitely a unified sound right there. That was one of our first really good songs, I think, and that was all Lukin, and it was more complicated than what I would have come up with. Oh, he was a great bass player and he was coming from a very tight and fairly rigid band, the Melvins, you know, they were really well rehearsed and some really complicated arrangements in their early songs, you know, like that first EP and the first album that he's on. You know, he relaxed through the years with us because he realized it didn't, it wasn't the same band, he could be looking a little bit more Lukin.

Mark Arm: I think Matt, like was really relieved when he joined our band because the songs weren't super proggy and complicated and he's like, “Hey, I can just drink in this band (laughs), and not sweat it through the shows.” He was kind of the most like rock guy of all of us. Like he remained a huge fan of like Motörhead and AC/DC. Like a lot of people in punk rock and hardcore, there was a time when they would, you know, like disavow the records that they bought before they got into punk rock and hardcore. You know, there's sort of like this year zero mentality. Matt was never like that, you know, he went to arena shows as well as tiny punk rock shows.

Steve Turner: He had some great riffs coming into the band and he'd had them stockpiled for a while, I think. And he blended so well and effortlessly with Dan right off the bat I mean they became best buddies, roommates, you know through all Lukin's years in the band, you know. They were definitely a really perfectly executed rhythm team.

Mark Arm: It's kind of like “Touch Me I'm Sick” and like I had this idea, which was basically the title and then had to write words around it. Some of the verses are a little bit more successful than others, I think. I think the second one is maybe the drag on the song. I think kind of growing up in like sort of a Christian environment, it was just kind of fun to be sort of a little bit sacrilegious. Without diving into like the whole Satanic bullshit.

Steve Turner: That was his frame of mind back then, you know, he was definitely dabbling in the dark side of life at that point. And he was singing about it.

Mark Arm: Kim Thayil used to think it was brilliant, the line, “Oh God, how I love to hate.” At this point, that kind of makes me cringe a little bit, you know, cause I think the world actually does need love, sweet love (laughs). I mean, there's plenty to be angry about, you know.

Steve Turner: We thought it was great. It was such a different rhythmic pulse than what me or Mark would have come up with. You know, it was kind of an epic song and we added Dan’s drum solo to make it even more epic (laughs). But yeah, it was kind of like a an early centerpiece I think and still is.

Mark Arm: Well what I remember about “In ‘n’ Out of Grace,” was that it was like Matt’s riff, which was really cool. And we're trying to think what to do with it, and we just sort of threw in the Blue Cheer bass and drum break and then a dual out of tune guitar solo, like on the first Blue Cheer record. And I remember Dan was really hesitant initially about doing that kind of bass and drum break. Cause you know, like drum solos at the time were like pretty fucking uncool unless you were into arena rock. But if you're into punk rock, that was just like, no one did drum solos (laughs). Which was kind of to us, the funny part about doing it.

Steve Turner: Our people love that song too. And, you know, we don't play that song every show, but we probably should. It's the same with “Touch Me I'm Sick,” you know, we have to play that song every show or I feel like an asshole if we don't. We definitely close a lot of shows with “In ‘n’ Out of Grace,” and still do, you know. Dan gets kind of burnt out on it after a while cause he's got to do that big drum solo, but through the years, it's morphed a little bit, you know. Guy (Maddison) and Dan have really worked on the drum solo part where it's kind of more coordinated between the two of them. Like me and Mark drop out completely and they kind of do this thing where they start and stop, like Guy will come and go, and it's more dynamic now than it used to be for sure. It was just kind of craziness in the early days. And once Dan did his famous drum roll, bringing us back in, me and Mark would just go crazy. We don't go crazy as much anymore. We're too old. No flying across the stage anymore (laughs). You know, “In ‘n’ Out of Grace,” it was both me and Mark going kind of wild and doing different things. You know, Mark is a much different guitar player now than he was in 1988. He's much better and more thoughtful about it, which I guess is good. I love the crudity of the early Mudhoney stuff too, though. And I try to remind myself of that sometimes, like not to overthink it and just kind of try to get lost in the guitar on certain moments like that. I do it without the Wah wah for the first half and then I hit the Wah wah at some point when it feels like I should hit the Wah wah and then let it kind of hopefully make it more crazy. Yeah, mostly it's the time to freak out.

Mark Arm: Yeah, I remember getting the test pressing for it and just being really kind of stoked. Like, “Hey, we sound like a real band” (laughs). And we were hitting different things, like, it wasn't like, “We're a band with just sort of like, one thing.” As much as I love Discharge, or Motörhead, or AC/DC, there was kind of an ebb and flow and kind of more of a ride of like different feelings or whatever, you know, different tempos on the record. And it ends with a monster (laughs).

Steve Turner: You know, it came out in the fall of 1988 and we hit the road. We did a full U.S. tour of most, almost all the U. S., we went to the East Coast and through the Midwest and whatnot, and came back to Seattle and then went down the West Coast and into Texas with Sonic Youth. Like I said, we didn't pay any dues. We had Sonic Youth knighting us, if you will, as the next cool thing. And that helped us an awful lot and we were playing to big crowds down in California. That we wouldn't have been able to on our own. They helped us a lot and we had a hip label behind us. We were feeling pretty good about what we were doing and kind of taking advantage of it.

Mark Arm: The first single and Superfuzz Bigmuff were like received really well, kind of like in the underground, you know, fanzine world, except maybe Conflict. I think Gerard Cosloy stepped all over “Touch Me I'm Sick” when the first 7-inch came out. I think he said it reminded him of like, “‘Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More’ was something that Brett Michaels could have written (laughs). And I don't think that's true.

Steve Turner: It was the beginning of something. You know, I had no idea where it was going to go, but we were taking advantage of it as best we could and taking every opportunity that was offered to us, either from Sub Pop or the UK label or going to Europe in early ‘89. You know, whatever we were offered, we were taking basically at that point.

Mark Arm: Without Sub Pop, I mean, we would have just been another band in some town that like maybe put out a record, probably not. I mean, we didn't have any money. And there were lots of really cool bands all over the U.S. that didn't have the same kind of traction. And I think it's just largely because they didn't really have the infrastructure, you know, helping them out. And we were very, very lucky to be friends with Bruce and Jonathan and I think they were lucky to be friends with us (laughs). I don't really look back all that often, I'm not like a super nostalgic person. It was definitely a point where things opened up for us. You know, like Green River tried touring and it was never easy. And the very first half of our first U.S. tour wasn't super easy, but we actually had a booking agent who set up shows for us, which Green River never did. And then the second half of it, we met up with Sonic Youth and went down the west coast of Texas with them. And, you know, I remember those guys, like, asking us, like, “How much do you want for a show?” And I was just thinking about, like Green River tours, and I'm like, “How about a hundred bucks?” And they're like, “We'll give you two hundred. You'll need it.” And I'm like, okay! (laughs). Yeah and then going to Europe, especially in the UK opening up for Sonic Youth that following spring, that was just nuts.

Steve Turner: I certainly didn't think I'd still be in Mudhoney 35 years later. You know, I really thought it would last two years, tops. That's what I told my folks and that's what I truly believed. I tried to go back to college even, and kind of stalled out again on that. You know, I love playing music, so it was hard to leave it. But there's been lots of career highlights, I guess. There still are. I mean, I'm really happy with our new record, we're playing great live right now and we still like each other. So it’s all, it's all good (laughs). We got lucky getting the four of us together, I think, because it blended really well, really quickly. And it wasn't just one person's vision or anything like that. It was the four of us, you know, kind of coming together effortlessly. I can't think of describing it any better way.

Mark Arm: Yeah when the band got together, we worked really quickly. You know, it was kind of amazing how quickly things came together. This is kind of a weird thing to say, you know, like, because it maybe sounds a little bit like I'm patting myself on the back, but my wife is like, you know, like she's watched some of the footage from the Berlin Independence Days, which is before our very first tour. She's like, “It's amazing how kind of together and fully formed you were right at the beginning.” But at that point, I was 26. You know, it wasn't like we were teenagers. It's kind of amazing how quickly and easily everything fell into place and I think it's just a combination of the right people.

Steve Turner: Well, from my point of view, I think Superfuzz Bigmuff is the first 12-inch record we made and it remains so (laughs). No, it was the beginning of our thing. And I understand why it holds a real place in people's hearts to this day. You know, if we hadn't have made another record, I would have been very satisfied.

Outro:
Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Mudhoney. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Superfuzz Bigmuff. Instrumental music by Hot Lunch. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Need"

"Chain That Door"

"Mudride"

"No One Has"

"If I Think”

"In 'n' Out of Grace"

Mark Arm: Guitar, vocals

Steve Turner: Guitar, vocals

Matt Lukin: Bass

Dan Peters: Drums

All songs written by Mudhoney, ℗ Better Than Your Music (ASCAP)

All tracks recorded and mixed by Jack Endino at Reciprocal Recording

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Monks on the Moon” by Hot Lunch from the album, Hot Lunch

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam