{"id":55447,"date":"2014-05-01T09:11:53","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T16:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/?p=55447"},"modified":"2022-08-19T18:10:55","modified_gmt":"2022-08-20T01:10:55","slug":"mudhoney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/mudhoney\/","title":{"rendered":"Mudhoney"},"content":{"rendered":"

MUDHONEY<\/strong><\/h3>\n

INTERVIEW & INTRODUCTION by STEVE OLSON<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHOTO BY NIFFER CALDERWOOD<\/strong><\/p>\n

MARK ARM:\u00a0<\/strong>When does it sound right? When you know it is… Scream when you sing. Love what it is that you do. Do it for what you need it to be. Never make exceptions, or try not to. Making it is making what it is you want, not following what others think it should be. Now you have something that sounds like MUDHONEY. This is through the words of one of the innovators…\u00a0This is MARK ARM.\u00a0This is MUDHONEY. – Introduction by Steve Olson<\/p>\n

STEVE TURNER:\u00a0<\/strong>When you find what is yours, you take it, and make it your best, then you find out others agree. What happens next is uncertain, but with uncertainty, comes answers. Answers clear up the uncertainty… then it\u2019s ON, and maybe bigger than you thought. Following your heart, impulses, beliefs, the outcome is one that\u00a0could never have been imagined. Steve Turner is what the above is all about. Trust me, I\u2019m aware of this process of life, if you don\u2019t believe, then read on non-believers, and find out for yourself. It\u2019s an attitude\u00a0that speaks volumes. Turn it up for Christsake. – Introduction by Steve Olson<\/p>\n

===========<\/p>\n

INTERVIEW WITH MARK ARM<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Hi Mark. I\u2019m wondering how you\u2019re doing.<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m doing well, Steve. How are you?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m doing great. Okay. I\u2019m going to just bounce around and ask you some questions about you and how you got to where you are, okay?<\/strong>
\nOkay.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that big of a deal. Wait. I mean it\u2019s a great deal, Mudhoney, but the approach to the interview is no big deal.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs.] Okay Olson.<\/p>\n

Where did you grow up?<\/strong>
\nI grew up in suburb of Seattle called Kirkland.<\/p>\n

Is Kirkland anywhere near Kenmore?<\/strong>
\nYep. I did time in Kenmore. In between where I grew up and Kenmore, there is Bothell.<\/p>\n

Okay. Now I know where you grew up. How was it growing up in Seattle?<\/strong>
\nWell, I didn\u2019t really grow up in Seattle. I was in this faceless housing development in the suburbs. One of the most freeing things was discovering, in the sixth grade, that 35 cents could get me on a bus and get me to downtown Seattle.<\/p>\n

Were you into music as a kid?<\/strong>
\nYeah. Partially, because it was completely forbidden. My mom is an opera singer from Germany and she just despised anything that wasn\u2019t classical music.<\/p>\n

Oh really? That basically helps in a roundabout way.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Yeah. When I was really little we had a Volkswagen bug and I would sneak into it and listen to Top 40 radio in the garage.<\/p>\n

Yeah. Top 40 radio was good back then.<\/strong>
\nYeah. That was in the \u201860s.<\/p>\n

You guys had the Sonics, which is one of my favorite bands.<\/strong>
\nOh yeah. I didn\u2019t hear about them until I got into hardcore and punk rock. I read about them in Trouser Press. There was a review by Mick Farren, which always cracked me up, because I learned about a band that was in my own backyard from this British guy.<\/p>\n

\n

“There was the criticism that punk bands only played three chords, but it\u2019s like, \u201cYeah, but they played really good chords. It\u2019s getting to the heart of the matter.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Right. With your mom being an opera singer, did she try to get you to sing opera?<\/strong>
\nNo. But she bought a baby grand piano. It was always around. It was like, \u201cI\u2019m going to have a kid and my kid is going to be a classical pianist.\u201d I was made to take piano lessons for a number of years, until I was old enough to put my foot down and say, \u201cI\u2019m not doing this anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did you have to do scales on the piano with your voice? I mean, you\u2019re the singer for Mudhoney.<\/strong>
\nNo. I didn\u2019t sing at all. I sang a little in church, but it was a Lutheran church, so most of the people just sang under their breaths.<\/p>\n

So you didn\u2019t sing, but did you figure out the piano?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I could play, but it was something that I didn\u2019t really care about. It was just something else for us to do. My mom was super high-strung and I think she was going through menopause at the time. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Oh, wow. Let\u2019s give her a little break right now.<\/strong>
\nWell, when I would hit a wrong note, I would hear this shriek from the kitchen. [Laughs] So that made it even less fun.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Right. Can you still play?<\/strong>
\nNo. I mean, if we have a simple keyboard part on a record, I can do it. On the last record, we actually brought in a guy that plays really well because I had this idea for a Billy Preston part and I can\u2019t play that.<\/p>\n

Do you think it helped, later on in your music career, to know the sounds of being in key?<\/strong>
\nWell, I knew that there were notes and how scales worked but, by the time, I started playing punk rock, I had stuffed that shit down so hard.<\/p>\n

How did you get into the punk rock thing?<\/strong>
\nWell, I had two groups of friends in high school. One group was skater stoner kids and with them I\u2019d listen to Aerosmith, Van Halen, Rush, Ted Nugent and stuff like that. There were these other friends of mine that were a little geekier. Somehow they had heard of Velvet Underground and we were listening to Eno records. I went to this really small Christian high school and there were two kinds of kids there. There were kids who had been there since kindergarten because their parents didn\u2019t want them to get corrupted by the outside world, and there were the kids that I was hanging out with, which were the ones that had already gotten in some kind of trouble and were sent there in junior high.<\/p>\n

Which category did you fall into?<\/strong>
\nThe latter.<\/p>\n

What kind of trouble?<\/strong>
\nI stole a bike.<\/p>\n

Bicycle Thief. Good movie.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Yes. I was already shoplifting and stuff, like some kids at that age will experiment with, I think. We\u2019d go to the Safeway with three or four friends and one of my friends would be so brazen. This was before high school. These were the kids in my neighborhood that my parents were trying to get me away from. My friend would reach behind the counter and grab a paper bag, fill it with air and walk about the store like we had already come in with something. [Laughs] We\u2019d go down to the beer aisle and put a couple of six packs in it, while one of us stood on each end of the aisle to make sure no one was coming, and then walk out with a couple of six-packs of beer. [Laughs] It was like, \u201cThis plan will work.\u201d And it did a couple of times.<\/p>\n

Did you ever get caught?<\/strong>
\nNo. Not for that.<\/p>\n

Well, but you still had to go to the Christian school.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It was a non-denominational Christian school. The one saving grace was that the year that I started there, kids in junior high school and above didn\u2019t have to wear uniforms.<\/p>\n

Well, that helps, right?<\/strong>
\nThat definitely helped walking through the neighborhood.[Laughs]<\/p>\n

Right. So growing up there, you had the woods to play in. I know a little bit about that area.<\/strong>
\nYeah. That was part of the bike thing. All of my beer thief friends had BMX bikes and, for some reason, my parents thought that was too dangerous, so my friends hatched a plan with me to get a bike. They were like, \u201cWe can just keep it in our garage.\u201d So we went to the library and stole a bike and hid it in the woods. We went back to it later and started stripping it and these kids came up and said, \u201cHey, that\u2019s our bike.\u201d [Laughs] We scrambled and we were like, \u201cOh, we just found this.\u201d They were like, \u201cYeah. Sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs] I\u2019m sorry. I just really like this story.<\/strong>
\nWe made a pact to avoid the library and the Safeway for a couple of weeks, but we were weak and, by that evening, we were hanging out there again. We got spotted and they called the cops. My dad was a super mild-mannered guy and I\u2019ve never seen him so pissed off as that day when he came home from work.<\/p>\n

What kind of work did he do?<\/strong>
\nHe worked at Boeing. He did 20 years in the military and brought his German bride back with him to the States and got a job at Boeing.<\/p>\n

Wow. I like to look back when those types of things happen as a kid, because when you become an adult, you understand how it is to come home from work and deal with a kid that\u2019s in trouble.<\/strong>
\nOh, I know. My parents were kind of older and my dad grew up in Kansas in the Dust Bowl. He was the youngest of ten in a family of dirt farmers and they were totally poor. My mom lived through WWII and survived bombings and lack of food. Her parents died by the time she was 19. I\u2019m just this kid in the suburbs and my life is totally easy and I\u2019m like, \u201cFuck you!\u201d [Laughs] It must have been jaw-dropping for them, like, \u201cYou ungrateful little shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

When did you start to mess around with music and singing?<\/strong>
\nI didn\u2019t start messing with music until the summer after high school, so I started making noise in 1980. Our friend, Darren, was a drummer and he had drums at his place. My friend Smitty and I went in halves on a guitar and a Peavey backstage 30-watt amp that we found in a pawn shop. These were more the geeky music kids than the stoner skater kids.<\/p>\n

Right. Did you skate then?<\/strong>
\nYeah. Skating up here, at least for me, was mostly looking at Skateboarder magazine and dreaming. There weren\u2019t an abundance of swimming pools in our area.<\/p>\n

There weren\u2019t many swimming pools or skateparks, but I did skate a park out in Tri-Cities.<\/strong>
\nThat\u2019s in southeast Washington state. I remember doing these trips in eastern Washington with my parents and just looking for pipes. I\u2019d see some, but they were tiny. I was hoping I would just stumble into something like the big pipes they had out in Arizona.<\/p>\n

That keeps a good dream alive. One day you might come across that pipe and you\u2019re like, \u201cWe\u2019ve found the holy grail!\u201d<\/strong>
\nYeah. I remember traveling away from my neighborhood to skate with these kids that had a quarterpipe and it didn\u2019t even have any transition. It was just three slabs of plywood, chunk-chunk-chunk. That felt like, \u201cMan, we\u2019re really skating now. I hope I can do a kickturn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Were you into skating?<\/strong>
\nYeah. Very much. My first board was a little metal board that was orange with two stripes of grip tape and urethane wheels with loose ball bearings.<\/p>\n

So you started making noise after you shared the guitar and the Peavey 30-watt amp. What kind of noise?<\/strong>
\nWell, it was very rudimentary shit. At first, none of us knew anything about how to tune a guitar, so we just played this guitar in the random tuning that it had. We didn\u2019t know anything about chords. We just made noise. You could turn up the gain on that amp and it would feedback like crazy, but I felt like I was Jimi Hendrix on live records between songs when the feedback is just going crazy. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

That\u2019s hilarious.<\/strong>
\nThe tuning peg for the A string was broken and it had this old flat wound string on it. Eventually, a friend of mine showed me about tuning and bar chords and stuff like that, but everyone had to tune to that flatwound A string. Steve [Turner] joined the band, for the last six months of that band, so we had two guitars for a while and everyone and to tune to that shitty flatwound A string.<\/p>\n

\n

“After getting into punk rock, Ted Nugent and KISS sounded a little weak to me. Then you compare Nugent\u00a0to the MC5s or the Stooges and it\u2019s like, \u201cHack.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[Laughs] So you started a band. You weren\u2019t just messing around?<\/strong>
\nYeah. It became a band. My friends, Smitty, Darren and Peter (Peter didn\u2019t end up being in the band) made this fake band called Mr. Epp and the Calculations that they invented in math class. It was just kids with nothing to do, making shit up. That eventually became a real band where we actually played at people.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a funny expression. You\u2019re not playing for people. You\u2019re playing at them.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Yeah. That was kind of our approach too. We were just these arrogant little shits and we felt like, if we weren\u2019t pissing people off, we weren\u2019t doing something right.<\/p>\n

So you had the punk rock attitude going into it. What kind of stuff were you influenced by besides the early stuff that you mentioned?<\/strong>
\nWell, I was totally into hardcore. I remember hearing the first Minor Threat single and being like, \u201cFuck.\u201d We all got the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and Circle Jerk records at the same time. The first Flipper single reinforced my thinking that, as long as we have a drummer who can keep a beat, we can play whatever the fuck we want to over the top of it. It\u2019s not like we had anything as good as Flipper going on though.<\/p>\n

What was the line-up in your band?<\/strong>
\nDarren played drums and his brother, Todd, played bass. Smitty and I would switch off between guitar and vocals. I played more guitar than he did. He also picked up a little soprano sax because he was really into Albert Ayler. We thought it was a big compliment when people would stream out of the room when we played. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Oh really? That\u2019s great. Where were you guys playing? Were you playing at venues or parties?<\/strong>
\nMost of the shows were in rented halls. We\u2019d meet people in other punk bands and we\u2019d rent a hall. There was a place called the Ground Zero Art Gallery that let us do a couple of shows. Eventually, this club called the Metropolis opened up, and that probably lasted about a year. It was an all ages venue and they sort of had an open-door policy. The first time we played there, we made $100 and we were like, \u201cWhoa.\u201d We were used to renting out the Polish hall and losing the damage deposit because someone destroyed the toilet.<\/p>\n

What kind of music do you think it was that you guys were making? Was it hardcore or punk rock or what?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know. We were totally into punk rock and we were into some industrial shit. Todd would say his favorite bands at the time were Black Flag, Throbbing Gristle and P.I.L.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a crazy combination.<\/strong>
\nYou\u2019re out in your own little world trying to figure shit out. We weren\u2019t the cool kids in the punk rock scene, so we didn\u2019t know what you were supposed to like.<\/p>\n

How long did Mr. Epp and the Calculations continue to play?<\/strong>
\nWe stopped in \u201884. I think Darren, the drummer, thought it was getting too rock or something.<\/p>\n

What does that mean it was getting too rock?<\/strong>
\nWell, our crap wasn\u2019t normal rock. By this time, I had learned chords and we were writing stuff that was a little more structured. The Stooges had become a huge influence for me. Those guys liked them too, so I\u2019m not quite sure.<\/p>\n

What happened after Darren said, \u201cYou guys are too rock n\u2019 roll. I\u2019m out of here?\u201d<\/strong>
\nSteve had joined the band six months before that, so we started writing two guitar songs. We wrote this whole new batch of songs, and maybe Darren didn\u2019t dig that new batch of songs. We played two shows with Steve. One before we knew we were going to break up and one after, like one last hurrah thing. It was kind of crazy because we had been reviled locally. Everyone was like, \u201cFuck those guys.\u201d But we had made friends with these other outsider kids who were into punk rock from Federal Way, which is a suburb way in the south. It was these guys in a band called Limp Richerds, and it was other people that didn\u2019t think they fit in with the leather jacket, spiky hair crowd.<\/p>\n

Was it an outsider scene when you first started doing it, where everyone was into that movement of punk rock up there?<\/strong>
\nFor sure. It was such a small scene up here. I mean no one got beat up for having long hair or a mustache or anything like that. It\u2019s not like what was happening in California where people were getting pinned to the ground and getting their heads shaved or whatever.<\/p>\n

That did happen, but that was only because the sun was shining. [Laughs] It\u2019s a joke.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] There were people who were older than us, and I learned about the roots of that stuff later. Around the early \u201870s, before punk rock came along, there was a group of people that were involved with these theatrical productions and musical things called Ze Whiz Kidz. They were sort of aligned with the Cockettes in San Francisco. Tomata du Plenty was part of that group of people. He and Gorilla Rose started the Screamers in L.A., but before that they had a punk band up here called The Tupperwares and they played the first punk show in Seattle with the Telepaths and Meyce. We\u2019d go see bands like the Refuzors and they were maybe four or five years older than we were, but they seemed like they were in a whole other generation. I\u2019d hang out at Rubato Records in Bellevue with the Mr. Epp guys in high school. We all went to Bellevue Christian. The people who worked at Rubato were older and they were in bands that were more new wave, but they pointed us in fantastic directions. They realized that we were curious about stuff, so they would say, \u201cHey, here\u2019s Ornette Coleman and here\u2019s the New York Dolls.\u201d We were like, \u201cOh, okay. Cool.\u201d John and Helena, who owned Rubato Records, invited us to open for their band, Student Nurse. I don\u2019t think they\u2019d even heard us. That was the first show Mr. Epp played.<\/p>\n

\n

“I was like, \u201cYou\u2019re putting us, who are barely known, and Tad and Nirvana, who were unknown at this point, in the Moore Theatre. I was like, \u201cYou\u2019re going to lose your shirt.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh nice. How long was the Mr. Epp first set?<\/strong>
\nFuck if I know. We were making noise at Darren and Todd\u2019s house and when we started talking about playing for the first time, Darren got cold feet because he could actually play and he didn\u2019t want to embarrass himself with a bunch of people that didn\u2019t know what they were doing, so he quit the band for a little while. We got this guy that worked at the record store to drum on the very first show and then Darren was like, \u201cThis is stupid. I can do this. I\u2019m in.\u201d He was like, \u201cWho am I worried about being embarrassed in front of?\u201d Darren went on to play, with the band, Steel Pole Bath Tub. They released a couple of albums on Boner Records, one on Slash and did a split single with the Melvins. This is in the late \u201880s to mid \u201890s.<\/p>\n

Nice. Are you still in touch with any of your friends from Mr. Epp?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m in touch with Smitty. In fact, about two months ago, Steve and I played in this band called the Thrown Ups. The whole premise of that was that you get drunk and write a set list and think up the funniest song titles you could think of and then play the set in front of people. There was no practice.<\/p>\n

Oh right?<\/strong>
\nOur friend, Ed, was the singer in that band. There have been a couple of people who cycled in and out of the Thrown Ups and one of them organized a jam session for everyone and Smitty came out for that. That was great fun. I saw a couple of people that I hadn\u2019t seen in 15 years. We were just in my friend\u2019s basement making noise on the spot.<\/p>\n

After you guys broke up Mr. Epp, what happened?<\/strong>
\nSteve and I wanted to keep doing something, so that\u2019s when we tried to figure out who to play with. Our friend, Alex, played drums so we figured we had a core of a band right there.<\/p>\n

Was Steve on bass then?<\/strong>
\nNo. He was playing guitar. We didn\u2019t know Jeff Ament very well, but we had seen his band, Deranged Diction. He played with a distortion pedal, jumped really high and we figured that he would be great to play with. To get to know him, Steve actually got a job at the same place that Jeff worked. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

No way. Come on.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Yes. Jeff was in a band that was still playing shows, so you couldn\u2019t really say, \u201cHey, man, do you want to quit your band?\u201d<\/p>\n

And come join our band.<\/strong>
\nYeah. He actually hated Mr. Epp. He thought we were horrible, but I think he thought, \u201cWell, they\u2019re obviously motivated and they want to do something.\u201d At that time, other members of Deranged Diction, maybe the drummer would flake out like, \u201cWell, I don\u2019t feel like practicing today.\u201d You know how that kind of shit goes.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s disheartening.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Right after Mr. Epp, my guitar equipment took a crap and I didn\u2019t have any money to get a new amp, so Steve and I started trading off. He played guitar more than I did, but he sang on a couple of songs. That was the very beginning of Green River. A little while later, we added Stone on second guitar. A little while later, Steve quit.<\/p>\n

Why the name Green River?<\/strong>
\nSteve and I both thought of the name on the same day. There was the Green River killer thing going on up here at the time. Steve had just found a Green River Community College track t-shirt at a thrift store. I don\u2019t know how I arrived at it, but later that day we ran into each other and both said, \u201cI think I\u2019ve got a name for the band.\u201d At the same time, we both said, \u201cGreen River.\u201d We said, \u201cOkay, that\u2019s got to be it.\u201d It sounds innocuous, but it was really offensive to people around here at the time.<\/p>\n

Was there any grief because of the whole Green River name?<\/strong>
\nNot really. We played one show opening for the Crucifucks and the Dead Kennedys and someone said that there was a woman\u2019s group outside protesting Green River, but I never saw that. I didn\u2019t see anybody marching around with signs.<\/p>\n

So you had Stone and Jeff and you. Who was the drummer for Green River?<\/strong>
\nAlex. He was a friend I met going to punk rock shows. Steve, Alex and Stone all went to the same high school.<\/p>\n

This was way after high school right?<\/strong>
\nYeah. This was 1984, so it was four years after high school for me. It was maybe a year or two after for Steve, Stone and Alex.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re ready to go attack the world, so why did Steve quit?<\/strong>
\nHe didn\u2019t like the direction the music was taking. We were getting into different stuff. Metallica\u2019s first record had come out and Venom and he thought that shit was just stupid. We were experimenting. Venom is stupid, but they are great and hilarious at the same time. Steve just didn\u2019t see the humor in it. He was super into the Sonics and then he got into Thee Milkshakes and all that Billy Childish stuff. He wanted to play simple bare bones rock n\u2019 roll and we were writing songs that had way too many parts. At that point, I think we were just trying to stretch our abilities. This was around the time we did the first record. There\u2019s one song on it that has probably nine parts and nothing really repeats the same way twice. Steve was like, \u201cI never knew how to play that song. I was just standing in place pretending.\u201d<\/p>\n

I love that. [Laughs] Were you singing in Green River?<\/strong>
\nYeah. Steve quitting was kind of a wake up call. One thing I learned from going through that process was that just because you can do something, doesn\u2019t mean you should. We stripped things back down after Steve left. The initial thing with singing, and this might make it sound better than it was, but I was just barking and hardcore growling. There are demo tapes from that era, before Stone played with us, and those vocals are horrible. I don\u2019t know what I was thinking.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] When Stone came in, did it make you sing better?<\/strong>
\nNo. Not at all. There was just a realization that we were getting out of hardcore and expanding our horizons. We were really getting into Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath, and stuff that I had missed because I was too young or because I didn\u2019t have an older brother. Do you know what I mean?<\/p>\n

I know exactly what you mean. Having an older brother sometimes opens the horizons to a younger brother\u2019s limited view.<\/strong>
\nRight. I mean I can only imagine because I\u2019m an only kid, but a lot of kids were listening to stuff that their older siblings were listening to, and that\u2019s how they found out about it.<\/p>\n

Yes. How long did Green River last?<\/strong>
\nWe broke up in \u201887, so it was three years.<\/p>\n

So you guys were playing gigs, obviously.<\/strong>
\nYeah. The first show was at a party. The second show was at this weird space near Ground Zero Art Gallery and Graven Image Art Gallery that these punk dudes had rented out and built a stage in. There was a Port-A-Potty in it called the Grey Door. It was a totally unlicensed spot, and the Port-A-Potty was never cleaned, but it was in a part of town that no one gave a shit about. Now it\u2019s a total high dollar area. We knew the main punk rock promoter guy pretty well, so he would put us on shows with the Dead Kennedys when they came to town. We got on a show with Black Flag and clearly, Black Flag was their own touring group with Saccharine Trust and Tom Troccoli\u2019s Dog. They probably did not want us added to the bill. [Laughs] We also opened for Sonic Youth the first time they came to town. It was just crazy, weird happenstance stuff.<\/p>\n

Were you nervous playing in front of people when you first started?<\/strong>
\nOh shit yeah. I was.<\/p>\n

Oh good. I was told that when you lose that nerve, you lose that immediate rush, and then it becomes like a job or something. I don\u2019t know. So why did Green River break up?<\/strong>
\nI guess the easy answer is that if you ever heard Mother Love Bone and the first Mudhoney single, that would kind of sum it up. The last tour we did was a West Coast run down to California. I remember playing at the Chatterbox in San Francisco and it was a fuckin\u2019 great show. We did a Tales of Terror cover and we had played with Fang in Seattle, so guys from those bands were there. We finished our set and we got asked to play more, which didn\u2019t usually happen. I screamed way too hard and lost my voice a little bit. I remember Stone suggested that maybe I should take vocal lessons. I was like, \u201cFuck it. I just want to have my own style. I don\u2019t want to learn the right way to do something.\u201d Maybe vocal lessons would have kept me from burning out my throat though.<\/p>\n

Or maybe learn how to breathe.<\/strong>
\nWell, I had already learned that from my mom. She was always telling me to breathe from my diaphragm. That was the one thing that stuck.<\/p>\n

Oh that\u2019s cool. Even in menopause, she gave you good direction. She was breathing from her diaphragm.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Yes. She was like, \u201cI have to breathe from my diaphragm to keep from striking you, young man.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Exactly.<\/strong>
\nThe next night after San Francisco, we went down to L.A. and played this gig at The Scream opening for Junkyard and Jane\u2019s Addiction. At that point, Jane\u2019s Addiction wasn\u2019t that big outside of L.A., but they were definitely big in L.A. I could barely croak out a tune. Stone had already been playing with Andy [Wood] from Malfunkshun. He was just helping Andy because he had an idea of doing something a little bit different than what Malfunkshun was capable of doing. We came back from that tour around Halloween and we all got together for practice and Stone, Jeff and Bruce broke the news to Alex and myself that the band was no longer. I actually felt really relieved.<\/p>\n

Why so?<\/strong>
\nBecause the band was going in a direction that I wasn\u2019t super comfortable with. If you hear the very last Green River record, the production on it had that big giant \u201880s snare sound. I was like, \u201cThat sounds so bad.\u201d At this point in time, everyone agrees that it sounds bad but at the time they didn\u2019t. They were like, \u201cWell, this is what rock records are supposed to sound like nowadays.\u201d I was like, \u201cI hate this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, that\u2019s annoying, when you just want to get your sound across.<\/strong>
\nWell, I never wrote any music in Green River, except the very early stuff that never made it out of the demo stage or the first recording stage, so my input was limited.<\/p>\n

When did you start recording Green River stuff?<\/strong>
\nThe first demo, before Stone, was really early on. We just whipped up a batch of songs and went in and recorded an 8-track with this guy, Chris Hanzsek. Then we whipped up a second batch of songs with Stone on guitar that were a lot more complicated and made Steve feel uncomfortable. We recorded that stuff in \u201885 and we planned on doing a tour in the fall of \u201885 and that\u2019s when Steve was like, \u201cOh crap, they want to go on tour. I don\u2019t want to do this anymore.\u201d [Laughs] That tour was really funny. I remember we each saved up around $700, piled into a car with a U-haul and drove across the country and played seven shows. There\u2019s a shirt that Jeff made with the 20 shows that were supposed to happen and we ended up playing seven shows. One of those was a show we picked up while we were just hanging out in Columbus, Ohio, because we had nowhere to go. We played a show and then hung out a little bit and then Decry came through town and somehow we got on the bill with them.<\/p>\n

Was Green River part of Sub Pop?<\/strong>
\nYeah. The first record was on Homestead. When we came back from our first tour, we wanted to release a single and we asked Bruce Pavitt, \u201cWould you be interested in releasing this?\u201d He had just put out the Sub Pop 100 Compilation and he was like, \u201cI have no money whatsoever right now, but I\u2019ll totally help you guys in guiding you through the process of getting a record pressed and all that stuff. By the time we did our next record, which was a five-song 12-inch, both Bruce and Jonathan at Sub Pop decided to release it. Then they released our last record, the one with the horrible drum sounds. Apparently, we were their flagship band, which ain\u2019t saying much, because there were only two or three bands on the label then. The Fluid was on the label and Soundgarden had just left for SST. We were the band that had actually gone on tour a couple of times, and we came back and the record was about done. Then we broke up. They were like, \u201cGreat. We have a record by a band that doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs] No support tour for that one. So Green River had some success, no?<\/strong>
\nNo, not really. We had some success locally. As far as getting out of town, there were a couple of good shows in Portland and Vancouver and that last show at the Chatterbox in S.F.<\/p>\n

Green River was playing in front of people though. That\u2019s what I mean by success. It\u2019s not like having a Top 40 hit.<\/strong>
\nYeah. We didn\u2019t make any money or anything like that, but we got to play on a lot of great bills. One of the funny things about Seattle bands, at the time, we deferred to bands from out of town. We would open up for them, even if they were less well known than we were. Our take was like, \u201cOh, they\u2019re just coming through. This will give them an opportunity for more people to see them. We play here all the time.\u201d There was this feeling that if that band was from San Francisco maybe that meant more than being from Seattle. We deferred to the Sea Hags when they came through town from the Bay Area, and no one knew who they were. Then we\u2019d go down there and play a show with them down in San Francisco. We were the opening band, so we would play when no one was there. It was like, \u201cOkay, thanks, dudes.\u201d We didn\u2019t realize that\u2019s how things normally worked in other towns.<\/p>\n

Live and learn. So you guys break up and Jeff, Stone and Bruce are going on to do something else and Steve has already split.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Steve was actually going to school up in Bellingham. Instead of practicing that night, I remember going to the OK Hotel and getting fuckin\u2019 hammered and running into Dan Peters in line for the bathroom. I was like, \u201cOh, dude. I have to throw up. Green River broke up.\u201d I was kind of ecstatic about it. He remembers that. He thought I seemed kind of jazzed. I got in the bathroom and vomited. I called Steve the next day up in Bellingham and told him that Green River broke up. I said, \u201cWhat are you doing? Do you want to start another band?\u201d He had actually been playing a little bit with Dan, so that\u2019s how this thing started. Within a month or two, I started playing with Dan and Steve. The Melvins had moved to San Francisco and left Matt behind, so we contacted him. That became our band. I\u2019ve always been lucky. I\u2019ve never been in a band that had to put an ad in the paper looking for people. I\u2019ve always started bands with friends.<\/p>\n

It sounds like there was this incestuous thing going on where these guys were going out and playing with other bands and making other bands with other guys from other bands.<\/strong>
\nYeah. There were all kinds of permutations of different people and different bands, some of which, you\u2019ve heard of and some you haven\u2019t. Somehow this particular combination for this band stuck.<\/p>\n

Right. Where do you think you got your vocal style from?<\/strong>
\nTwo of my favorite singers are Jerry Rosalie and Iggy Pop, so probably a combination of those two.<\/p>\n

What drew you to those two types of vocal styles?<\/strong>
\nI like screaming. [Laughs] Jerry Rosalie does it better than pretty much anyone. There is kind of a range, but also a limitation, with Iggy. On the first Stooges record, he just sounds bored. On Fun House, he\u2019s just screaming and he sounds out of his mind. On Raw Power, he\u2019s goes between the two, back and forth, and by The Idiot, he\u2019s crooning. He has his own voice that\u2019s totally distinguishable.<\/p>\n

Yeah. When you hear Iggy, you know it\u2019s Iggy. When you hear Mark Arm, you know it\u2019s Mark Arm.<\/strong>
\nWell, I do. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

What was your attraction to Alice Cooper?<\/strong>
\nBy the time I got into Alice Cooper, it was after his new wave phase. When I got into early Alice Cooper, it was just purely the music. It had nothing to do with the theater. Terry Pearson, who was Sonic Youth\u2019s sound man on the Daydream Nation tour, moved to Seattle and did a couple of tours with us. I remember talking with him about Alice Cooper. He was older than us, and he was way into Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart in the late \u201860s and early \u201870s and he would buy anything that came out on Straight Records. For him, Alice Cooper was a joke. It\u2019s just a weird matter of perspective. For him, that was like kiddie music, but I\u2008love the Alice albums on Straight, especially Pretties For You.<\/p>\n

If he knew what Zappa was up to, Alice Cooper would be a joke.<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know, man. I\u2019d rather listen to Alice Cooper any day. There is some amazing playing on those Alice Cooper records. Dennis Dunaway is a phenomenal bass player.<\/p>\n

A lot of those cats were great players. It\u2019s almost like you had to be a great player to play in that arena of musicianship.<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know. You had KISS. Peter Criss is probably one of the worst drummers to ever make hit records.<\/p>\n

Yeah, but he could get away with it. I kind of loved New York Groove, but that\u2019s just me.<\/strong>
\nDid he even play on that? Isn\u2019t that an Ace Freehley solo?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know. I just saw a video of KISS doing \u201cNew York Groove.\u201d<\/strong>
\nWell, I don\u2019t know if you went through this, but when I got into punk rock, I got rid of all the records I was listening to before that.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t listen to my old records anymore, but I didn\u2019t get rid of them. I still had Chuck Berry\u2019s \u201cMy Ding-a-Ling\u201d and Sabbath with the purple album cover.<\/strong>
\nMaster of Reality. I couldn\u2019t afford new records, so I sold off a bunch of old records. Then I went back and bought some of them again because I was getting back into that stuff. For the most part, the music that I was listening to before I got into punk rock, didn\u2019t seem to hold up as much at the pre-punk that I was unfamiliar with like Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath. After getting into punk rock, Ted Nugent and KISS sounded a little weak to me. Then you compare Nugent to the MC5\u2019s or the Stooges and it\u2019s like, \u201cHack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steve Jones told me, \u201cI used to love Boston when I was a Sex Pistol.\u201d I was like, \u201cYou\u2019re funny.\u201d Boston? Yeah. He loved Boston. The dichotomy of being a Sex Pistol and loving Boston was so funny.<\/strong>
\nYeah. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

It seems to me, when I realized a little bit about music and then going back and listening to Montrose and those kind of bands that I had to listen to, and I was like, \u201cWow. Those guys can really play their instruments.\u201d They weren\u2019t just a rock n\u2019 roll hack band.<\/strong>
\n\u201cSpace Station #5.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exactly. The guitar on that was amazing.<\/strong>
\nDidn\u2019t Ronnie Montrose, go on to make jazz fusion records?<\/p>\n

Probably. It just seemed like the caliber of musicianship was so hardcore, and if it kept on going that way, without punk rock, I would have never gotten into playing music.<\/strong>
\nThat\u2019s totally the thing. I grew up with this whole idea of classical musicianship. What was considered good music, before I heard punk rock, was all about technique. It was like, \u201cOh, man, the drummer in Rush is one of the best drummers.\u201d All these guys were really fucking playing. It seemed like a Catch 22 to me. It seemed impossible, at the late age of 16, to be in a rock band because I didn\u2019t start playing guitar at age nine.<\/p>\n

It seemed totally out of reach. It was like, \u201cThere is no way that I can just start playing now and become good like these guys that I admire as musicians and songwriters. That\u2019s why I think punk rock is the best thing that ever happened to music.<\/strong>
\nOh, for sure.<\/p>\n

Some people say that punk rock is noise, but punk rock was an opening door to these realizations.<\/strong>
\nListen to the first Damned record. The idea, at the time, was that punks can\u2019t play and that is bullshit. There is some amazing playing on that record.<\/p>\n

Right. Brian James was incredible.<\/strong>
\nIt was so far above and beyond anything. It\u2019s just different.<\/p>\n

Exactly. It was just stripped down. It freaked me out. It was such a turn-on.<\/strong>
\nThere was the criticism that punk bands only played three chords, but it\u2019s like, \u201cYeah, but they played really good chords.\u201d It\u2019s getting to the heart of the matter. You don\u2019t need all the frilly shit that surrounds an Emerson Lake and Palmer song.<\/p>\n

\n

“We all came from the exact same punk scene together, so it was really exciting. Soundgarden was doing really well. Nirvana started happening. Mother Love Bone kind of stalled out and that was kind of a bum deal, but Pearl Jam started up and that was awesome, so they were doing great again.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For me, I was watching Steve Howe from Yes, and I was like, \u201cThere is no way I\u2019m going to learn how to play like that guy in the next three years. This is boring. Let\u2019s go chase some chicks.\u201d The discovery for me was the Ramones and Mink Deville. Those guys were really good players. I was like this is really cool. It was just hopped up \u201850s basic rock n\u2019 roll. I still get excited thinking back about listening to that music for the first time. Punk rock separated you from all the normal people, which is great as a teenager. It\u2019s like, \u201cI\u2019m different from you.\u201d Actually, it was like, \u201cYou suck and I actually have an idea of what\u2019s really going on right now.\u201d<\/strong>
\nYeah. People justify wherever they\u2019re at no matter what. I\u2019m sure there were a lot of people that were like, \u201cYou\u2019re just a fuckin\u2019 weirdo.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was proud to be a weirdo.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Just don\u2019t beat me up.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Okay, let\u2019s go back. Green River has broken up and you\u2019re puking in excitement that the band has disbanded. You talk to Turner and you\u2019re going to start a new project. Is this Mudhoney?<\/strong>
\nYeah. After Steve quit Green River, he\u2019d started playing with the Thrown Ups, the band that I talked about earlier that sort of made up song titles and songs on the spot. I was not a very good drummer, but I could keep a beat. It goes back to that earlier idea that Flipper crystalized in my mind that as long as you had a good beat, you could kind of make up whatever else around it. The Thrown Ups had this drummer who was a much better drummer than I am, but he was easily bored and he would start playing something and everyone would lock in and then he would just switch and start playing something else and lose everyone. I was like, \u201cI can drum with you guys and we\u2019ll at least know where we are.\u201d So that\u2019s how I weaseled into that band. I kept playing with Steve while I was in Green River and we always stayed in touch and were hanging out.<\/p>\n

So he left to go to school because maybe there wasn\u2019t a way to make a living playing rock n\u2019 roll?<\/strong>
\nMaybe there wasn\u2019t. We didn\u2019t even believe that was possible. If you come up through hardcore, it\u2019s different. I don\u2019t know how it is for some bands, but you sometimes hear these musicians say they got into a band to get pussy. I was in a hardcore band and it was just dudes. There was no glamour or anything. No one was saying, \u201cDude, you\u2019re really cool because you play in a hardcore band.\u201d It was just a way to get your fuckin\u2019 rocks off. The music was an end in itself. It wasn\u2019t a way to get something else.<\/p>\n

You were into it because of the music.<\/strong>
\nYeah.<\/p>\n

I never understood the terms of being in a band to get chicks, even though it happens.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It did not happen in Mr. Epp.<\/p>\n

Mr. Epp wasn\u2019t a pussy band?<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] No.<\/p>\n

I was always confused by people that said they just played in a band to get chicks. I was like, \u201cReally? You don\u2019t like playing? You\u2019re just doing this so you can maybe meet a chick?\u201d That was odd to me.<\/strong>
\nI can see that with someone in the mid \u201860s who saw the phenomenon of the Beatles and the Stones and girls just screaming and them thinking, \u201cHey, I want to get some of that kind of action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeah. So in \u201887, Green River disbands and Mudhoney begins.<\/strong>
\nYeah. In late \u201887, Mudhoney started practicing and playing without Matt. The first practice we had with Matt was on New Years Day 1988. He was still living out in Aberdeen, which is about two hours away. He kept living out there for over a year and he would drive into town. He was the only one of us with a car, so he would have to go to all our apartments and pick us up to take us to practice. He would drive for two hours to Seattle and then pick each of us up and then he\u2019d drive us to band practice and then drop everybody off and drive back home.<\/p>\n

Wow. That\u2019s commitment.<\/strong>
\nHe never actually said he was in the band too. He just kept showing up.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Oh really? I love that. He was committed, but just not committing to the band.<\/strong>
\nYeah. He didn\u2019t acknowledge it until he quit in 1998 or \u201899, whenever it was. He was like, \u201cOkay, I can\u2019t do this anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

So you guys start playing and you got a set together. You must have been itching to play it out live.<\/strong>
\nYeah. I was working at Muzak and a bunch of musicians were working there. We weren\u2019t making the music for Muzak. We were just duplicating tapes and shit like that.<\/p>\n

Tell me what Muzak was exactly.<\/strong>
\nIt was a company that provided background music for stores. It was what was called elevator music. They would have Nelson Riddle\u2019s Orchestra do versions of Beatles songs. By this point, they were bought out by a company called Yesco here in Seattle and their whole thing was foreground music instead of background music, so they would actually put hit songs on these tapes. They provided music for Nordstrom’s and Ann Taylor stores. Some accounts had total background music and some accounts wanted pop hits of the day.<\/p>\n

\n

“You could turn up the gain on that thing and it would feedback like crazy, but i felt like I was Jimi Hendrix on live records in the parts between songs when the feedback is just going crazy.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What were you doing at Muzak?<\/strong>
\nThe total entry-level position was cleaning the tape cartridges. They looked like 8-track cassettes, except bigger. It was a proprietary format. The manager had come up with a recycling program to save money, instead of buying new cartridges for $4 every time. We\u2019d clean off the returned cartridges and try to recycle the parts that weren\u2019t broken. We had little sanders, but instead of sandpaper, we had this Brillo pad stuff and we\u2019d spray this chemical that we called Spooge on the top to clean it off. It was really noisy and really dirty. I probably lost most of my hearing in that room. We would also play music, so the music had to be louder than the sanders.<\/p>\n

You were just blasting your ears. Did you learn anything sonically from having to do all that work?<\/strong>
\nNo. It was a dumb job where I could let my mind wander and think about lyrics or musical ideas or whatever. It was perfect, at that time, for what I needed. Bruce Pavitt worked there and I remember bringing in a tape that we had recorded on a boombox at practice. I played the first Mudhoney songs for Bruce at work and it just sounded like noise. The place was so loud and the tape was so loud that he was like, \u201cI can\u2019t tell what this is.\u201d He knew me and Steve very well and he was a fan of the Melvins, so he knew Dan was a great drummer. He was like, \u201cI trust your instincts.\u201d He gave us some money to go and record some songs at Reciprocal with Jack Endino and that\u2019s where the first single came from. As a band, we were very lucky. We were in a place where all these things kind of aligned. We knew a guy who had a record label and he trusted our judgment. We didn\u2019t have to scrounge up money to record. It was probably $250 or something. It wasn\u2019t a lot of money, but none of us had it.<\/p>\n

What was happening in the Seattle scene with all the friends you were playing with in all the bands that were playing there?<\/strong>
\nIn the group of people that I was hanging around in \u201885, if you were still playing straight up hardcore, you were kind of a numb nut. There were a bunch of newer bands like the Butthole Surfers, the\u2008Minutemen, Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth that came up through and around hardcore and they were going off in all different directions and making really creative music. I mean, what\u2019s the point of trying to ape Minor Threat? Even Black Flag, very early on, stopped playing super fast and had more of a Sabbath influence. I loved going to their shows in that era. The audience reaction was just phenomenal to me. Half of the crowd would be totally into it and half of the crowd would be so pissed off and flipping them off until they played \u201cNervous Breakdown\u201d or something. Then they would go crazy. Then they\u2019d play \u201cNothing Left Inside\u201d and they\u2019d be flipping them off and going, \u201cFuck you!\u201d It\u2019s amazing how easily offended punk rock people were. It\u2019s like, \u201cYou grew your hair! Fuck you!\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Right. They were holding on.<\/strong>
\nYeah. I went to the University of Washington with Kim Thayil. We took at Philosophy class together, but I met hin at a T.S.O.L. show. He came up to me and said, \u201cHey, you\u2019re in my class.\u201d He had long hair and a mustache. It was like, \u201cDude, this hippy is talking to me.\u201d [Laughs] We became really good friends and people were just starting to play in bands and slowing shit down a bit. I think the first band to put the brakes on were the Melvins, who were initially the fastest band in the Northwest and then they started going really slow and really heavy. I was like, \u201cFuck. This sounds amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, right? What types of influences were happening to you at that time with Mudhoney?<\/strong>
\nWe were going back to the basics. I was also a huge fan of the Wipers, who were a great band. I had been listening to a lot of Australian stuff like Feedtime and the Scientists, Lubricated Goat, and the Beasts of Bourbon.<\/p>\n

Wow. Not many people know of the Beasts of Bourbon.<\/strong>
\nThey were fantastic.<\/p>\n

I was like, \u201cWhat is this band?\u201d I was listening to that band when I lived in S.F.<\/strong>
\nThere was the Celibate Rifles and Cosmic Psychos. There was a great crop of bands from Australia that released killer records in the mid \u201880s. We always felt like we had one foot in hardcore, but we didn\u2019t want to just ape anybody. That was our point of view. Using that as a filter, we were looking out and finding other things to be inspired by.<\/p>\n

What happened with the first single? Did it get some play?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know. I think it must have gotten some. Initially, I think they pressed 1,000 on colored vinyl and 200 on black vinyl. The idea was that if you sent black vinyl to radio stations, it was less likely to be ripped off. It wasn\u2019t so much of a collector thing. The initial 200 on black vinyl are now worth way more than the colored vinyl, which is kind of funny. I think it got play because we were able to go out on tour. We went on our first U.S. tour and Superfuzz came out right before or halfway through the tour. We did a leg on our own tour from Seattle to the East Coast and back and then met up with Sonic Youth in Seattle and went down the West Coast with them. We went down to L.A. and then over to Texas.<\/p>\n

Were you proud of this music you were making with Mudhoney?<\/strong>
\nOh yeah. We were very excited by it. I think Steve and I both felt like we were in a really great place. I don\u2019t know if we were proud of it like chest-thumping, like we were the greatest thing ever, but it felt right.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I mean. You were proud of it and you could stand behind it.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It felt to me like a lot more of what I was listening to and where I was coming from. It was just more comfortable to me than the later period Green River stuff.<\/p>\n

When you went on tour, did you fund your own tour by just playing the shows?<\/strong>
\nYeah.<\/p>\n

You didn\u2019t have record support did you?<\/strong>
\nNo. What we did have is that Sub Pop bought a van. It was, ostensibly, the label van that any band that was on tour could use, but we probably used it more than anyone else, at that time. That was tour support, but we weren\u2019t getting any money or anything. When we were asked to play with Sonic Youth, they asked us, \u201cHow much do you need per show?\u201d I said, \u201c$100 a night.\u201d They were like, \u201cYou know what? We\u2019ll give you $200.\u201d We were like, \u201cHoly shit!\u201d<\/p>\n

Wow. That is insane. What did you parents think of it now that you were out touring?<\/strong>
\nThey were always sort of confused by it, like, \u201cWe don\u2019t know what it is you\u2019re doing.\u201d I know they were secretly proud. Once we got to Europe and played Germany for the first time, my mom was like, \u201cOh, this is not just like you\u2019re wasting your time here in Seattle not getting a real job.\u201d<\/p>\n

You\u2019re actually traveling and seeing the world through music, which is a beautiful thing in its own right. When did it start to hit for you where you were actually going to be able to pay bills?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know if we thought that would happen. It wasn\u2019t like I thought we were going to go on. I would just ditch my apartment and find a place to live when I got back. In \u201889, we went on this 9-week tour of Europe, the first part of which was in the U.K. with Sonic Youth. At that time, if you had Sonic Youth\u2019s blessing in the U.K., you were golden. Dinosaur Jr. went with them the year before and they blew up over there, which reflected back over here. We went over there and got written about in the weekly papers like the Melody Maker, Sounds and NME and stuff like that. All of a sudden, the writer at the Seattle Times started writing about us. At the time, he was a notorious hack. He wrote concert reviews without ever showing up. I think there was a Jeff Beck concert that ended up being cancelled, but he wrote a review of how great it was and it got published even though Jeff Beck got sick at the last minute and didn\u2019t show up. This guy wasn\u2019t savvy enough to sniff out what was going on in his own hometown until it was written about in the U.K.<\/p>\n

Then he came in on it.<\/strong>
\nYeah. He kind of had to because kids were showing up and things were kind of bubbling up for us. Then a bunch of bands like Mother Love Bone got signed to a major label. Alice in Chains put out a record and they were the first band out of Seattle to have a gold record in late \u201890 or early \u201891, coming out of Seattle. Okay, Queensryche had huge records before that, but they were from a whole different scene.<\/p>\n

\n

“When we were asked to play with Sonic Youth, they asked us, \u201cHow much do you need per show?\u201d I said, \u201c$100 a night.\u201d They were like, \u201cYou know what? We\u2019ll give you $200.\u201d We were like, \u201cHoly shit!”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The focus was on the whole Seattle scene, so you guys were at the right place at the right time again.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It was weird. We had been playing in bands off and on for 10 years and no one paid attention.<\/p>\n

How was that to deal with?<\/strong>
\nThere was a weird phenomenon in the \u201880s at local punk shows. At the most, 200 or 250 people would show up, even for touring bands, except for the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. Then, suddenly, there were 1,200 punks in Seattle. We were like, \u201cWhere are these extra 1,000 people coming from?\u201d They wouldn\u2019t show up again until the next Dead Kennedys or Black Flag show. It was a total head scratcher. After our tour in Europe, Bruce and Jonathan had this idea to book a show at the Moore Theatre, which seats like 1,200. I thought they were fuckin\u2019 nuts. I was like, \u201cYou\u2019re putting us, who are barely known, and Tad and Nirvana, who were unknown, at this point, in the Moore Theatre. I said, \u201cYou\u2019re going to lose your shirt.\u201d And that show sold out.<\/p>\n

How was it playing to a sold out theatre?<\/strong>
\nIt was great.<\/p>\n

It had to be a personal victory. You were selling this place out.<\/strong>
\nRight. The weird thing was that we weren\u2019t around that much in the early \u201890s because we\u2019d tour a fair amount. After that first 9-week European tour, we were like, \u201cWe are never going to do that again.\u201d We\u2019d do short bursts and go to some shows and be like, \u201cWhere are all the people that used to go to local shows?\u201d Most of the original 200 people got put off by all the frat boys and jocks that were coming to the shows now and they were like, \u201cThis music doesn\u2019t speak to me anymore.\u201d If you\u2019re in a band, you can\u2019t complain that more people are coming to see you. That\u2019s just shooting yourself in the foot.<\/p>\n

True. To get some kind of recognition to where you\u2019re selling out a 1,200 seat venue, it\u2019s a subconscious victory. Not in an egotistical way. Just in a hard working, I put in a lot of time, way. You\u2019re just doing it because you love it so much and then, all of a sudden, it happens. That must have been great.<\/strong>
\nYeah. I felt vindicated from a musical perspective because I also DJed at the local college radio station in the mid \u201880s and I played the stuff that I loved. Most of the people were really into the British stuff like the Smiths and the Cure and way lesser bands that you might not even remember like the Mighty Lemon Drops. It was all so wimpy and mopey and it didn\u2019t rock at all. I would play Poison 13 and Red Kross and the Wipers and the Birthday Party. I actually got admonished for playing the Birthday Party in the middle of the day because the hope of the general manager was that stores would play this radio station in the middle of the day and he didn\u2019t want to bum out the people who were shopping. I was like, \u2018Fuck you, man. I\u2019m doing this for free. I\u2019m going to play what I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Right. So you get back to Seattle and you\u2019re doing small jaunts all over the place. What happens when everything starts to explode up there? It was a huge phenomenon. The grunge scene just exploded and it was a huge movement. I was like, \u201cWhoa. What is this?\u201d<\/strong>
\nWhat happened was that people who had been fed on MTV and the radio and stuff were clearly looking for some sort of authenticity and they weren\u2019t getting it in the C&C Music Factory and they weren\u2019t getting it from Poison. I think actually Guns N\u2019 Roses was kind of a bridge band between Poison and Nirvana. They were part of that L.A. glam scene, but they were a little grittier.<\/p>\n

They were a little bit more rock n\u2019 roll.<\/strong>
\nYeah. They kind of paved the way a little bit for a band like Nirvana. It\u2019s kind of funny to me that there was a big feud between the Nirvana and Guns N\u2019 Roses camp. It all seemed so goofy to me. Guns N\u2019 Roses had Duff McKagen who was from Seattle and he was involved in Seattle punk way before Kurt Cobain was.<\/p>\n

Well, the whole focus seemed to be on the scene in Seattle and that\u2019s that. This is what is happening. You guys were part of that whole scene and you were responsible for it, from what I\u2019ve heard.<\/strong>
\nLuckily, for us, I think we kind of escaped the intense focus that some of the other bands received, so we could still go about our daily business without really getting hassled. We kind of had ringside seats to the whole thing. It was happening to friends of ours who we were friends with before all this shit happened.<\/p>\n

What happened with Mudhoney through the whole thing?<\/strong>
\nI think by virtue of the fact that we were part of it, our records started selling more. We released Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and we went on this U.S. tour and Nirvana released Nevermind and went on a U.S. tour and we were going to hook up with them in Portland and Seattle at the end of the tour. When we left a month earlier, the idea was that we would co-headline, and one band would headline in Portland and the other band would headline in Seattle. By the time the tour got back to the Northwest, it was clear that Nirvana was headlining both nights. Their record had just turned gold. I think that caught them off guard.<\/p>\n

Did any of you guys think that would happen?<\/strong>
\nNo. Not to that degree. I remember meeting up for a couple of shows with the Fluid in Europe and we both had advance copies of Bleach, the first Nirvana record. I think both of our bands were pretty blown away by it. We were like, \u201cIn a perfect world. these songs should totally be on the radio. This could be a hit record.\u201d It didn\u2019t happen for that record, but it happened for the next one. We didn\u2019t think that was even a possibility. There was a party at Dan Peters\u2019 house and Krist came in with the just finished mixes of Nevermind and played that. Van Conner from the Screaming Trees was like, \u201cHoly shit. You guys are going to sell 100,000 records!\u201d That was an insane amount of records in our world. That was as big as you could possibly be and play music like we play. I think it caught everyone by surprise.<\/p>\n

That must have been insane. So then what did you guys do?<\/strong>
\nWe kept touring and putting out records and stuff.<\/p>\n

It seems like you guys just love to play and if you can keep playing and doing what you love, outside of society, that\u2019s success.<\/strong>
\nFor sure. I was 26 when Mudhoney started, so I wasn\u2019t some easily swayed 19-year-old kid. I had a full grasp of the history of the bands that I loved and was into and how successful or unsuccessful most of them were. If you looked at my record collection at the time, 90% of it was made up of bands that people in the music biz would consider failures because they didn\u2019t sell a huge amount of records. To me, they were successes because they made amazing records. Just a handful of them like, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Creedence Clearwater and David Bowie had huge hits compared to the MC5, The Stooges or the New York Dolls or the Sonics or the bands that were happening in the \u201880s that we were into.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the point that I was trying to convey. If you can keep doing what you love, that\u2019s a successful thing.<\/strong>
\nI feel like we\u2019re amazingly lucky people.<\/p>\n

Luck does have a little bit to do with it, but it\u2019s also perseverance, hard work and not giving up.<\/strong>
\nYeah. We get to do what we want to do on our own terms. Generally, if we say we\u2019d like to go to Brazil, we just contact a friend down there and go put on some shows.<\/p>\n

After you gained some notoriety with Mudhoney, do you still get nervous before a show? I know I asked this earlier, but how about now?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I get nervous before we play. It usually kind of subsides into the set, but beforehand, I\u2019m just pacing around all over the place.<\/p>\n

What is it that\u2019s making you nervous? You\u2019ve done it so much now.<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know what the root of that feeling is. It could just be that I know my adrenaline is going to be kicking up a couple of notches and it\u2019s that \u2018fight or flight\u2019 thing. I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m nervous that I think we\u2019re going to fuck shit up or forget our songs or anything. I guess it\u2019s because I still fuckin\u2019 care.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a great thing. Do you have any favorite performances that stick out in your mind, that when you got done you were like, \u201cWow. That was pretty insane.\u201d<\/strong>
\nWell, at this point, we have a 25-year history of playing shows, so it\u2019s hard for me to recall. Some of the early shows just totally blur together. One of my favorite recent shows was in Sydney and we got to play with Feedtime. We were doing this traveling festival thing with a bunch of bands and we played a few shows on our own in clubs. To me, those shows are always way more fun than playing a festival, but not nearly as lucrative. We played with Feedtime, which is a band that Steve and I were listening to as Mudhoney was forming. They were a huge influence. By the time we got to Australia, in 1990, they had already broken up. We met the drummer, but we never thought we\u2019d get to see them play, let alone play with them. That\u2019s just the shit that has happened to me, more than it should have. I got to see and play with the Stooges and the Scientists and the Flesh Eaters. I did some touring with the remaining members of the MC5. It\u2019s just stuff that shouldn\u2019t be allowed to happen. It\u2019s kind of a mind fuck. I never thought the Stooges would get back together again and that I would get to see them with Ron Asheton, and I got to play with them a couple of times.<\/p>\n

I have to make a comparison to baseball here. If you\u2019re a baseball player, you\u2019re not going to get to play with Willie Mays, but in music, you do get to do that. It\u2019s an extremely amazingly cool thing to have happen. You got to play on the same stage with the Stooges. That\u2019s just a cool thing. Okay, so now what\u2019s going on with Mudhoney?<\/strong>
\nWe\u2019re getting ready to go down to South America for five shows.<\/p>\n

Imagine that. I can\u2019t believe you\u2019re going down there.<\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s crazy. we didn\u2019t go down there until 2001, and this will be our seventh or eighth time now. The audiences down there are awesome. They are super passionate and super excited. The people down there are phenomenal.<\/p>\n

Where in South America do you get to go?<\/strong>
\nWe\u2019re playing Chile, Argentina and Brazil.<\/p>\n

Unreal. What\u2019s it like coming out on stage as a person that played in Mr. Epp and now going and playing in South America?<\/strong>
\nMy approach is very different. I\u2019m not playing at people and trying to drive them away. [Laughs] At this point, there is no victory in that.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Right. No victory in emptying the place, so the strategy has changed slightly?<\/strong>
\nYeah. [Laughs] Our point of view remains the same though. We do what we want. We\u2019re not going to write songs based on what we think people might want to hear. We don\u2019t care if you don\u2019t like it, but if you do like it, we\u2019re happy to have you along.<\/p>\n

So you\u2019re not looking to take prisoners. You\u2019re just looking to do what you love.<\/strong>
\nYeah. We don\u2019t have any place to put prisoners.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] There\u2019s not a Mudhoney Guantanamo Bay. Do you have future plans to record a new record?<\/strong>
\nThere\u2019s nothing solid. We haven\u2019t even started the process of writing new songs really. I imagine it will happen this year. The way we work, we have jobs and families and stuff, and Guy, our bass player, has the most real job of any of us. After this South America trip, he will have depleted his vacation time for about a year. Last year was really busy for us. In January, we went to Australia for three weeks and we were only going to be gone for ten days. I think Guy was having a little bit of stress at work.<\/p>\n

Did you ever think when you were doing this that it was ever going to turn out like this fairytale?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s a fairytale exactly, but I never thought that we would last as long as we have. When we started out, we thought it might last three years tops because that\u2019s how long the last band lasted.<\/p>\n

Do you work a regular job?<\/strong>
\nYeah. Luckily, it\u2019s at Sub Pop, so I have a lot of leeway. It\u2019s not a job that takes a lot of skill. It just takes a lot of my attention. I manage the warehouse and I ship stuff to stores and distributors. I have a couple of people that know the job well enough to fill in for me when I\u2019m gone.<\/p>\n

Okay. One last question.<\/strong>
\nWait. We haven\u2019t even talked about surfing.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Well, I\u2019m not completely done yet. How did you get into surfing up in the Pacific Northwest?<\/strong>
\nFor some reason, when my parents moved up here, they looked around the area and were like, \u201cWhat\u2019s an activity that our kid can do besides piano lessons?\u201d Boeing had this Friday night ski school, so when I was six, my dad would drive 45 minutes up to the mountain to take me to the beginner hill and I would take classes. After one season of that, he was like, \u201cI\u2019m not just going to sit in the lodge. I\u2019m going to start taking lessons too.\u201d Early on, I had this love of just moving and gliding. When skateboarding came along, I was like, \u201cThis is something I can do in the summertime.\u201d I\u2019d always watch Wide World of Sports and, occasionally, they\u2019d have surfing on there. I was like, \u201cThat\u2019s the third thing. That would make the other stuff that I\u2019m into complete.\u201d I never thought that you could surf up here. I was aware of people that were surfing here, but I just thought they were fucking nuts. Some of my friends were doing it and I just thought they were crazy. I mean, the water here can kill you if you\u2019re just swimming without a wetsuit. It\u2019s so cold that it will kill you in 20 minutes or something. My wife and I started scuba diving and, despite the fact that it was super cold, it was kind of doable around here.<\/p>\n

The development of wetsuits definitely helped.<\/strong>
\nFor sure. We had talked about learning to surf and my wife was like, \u201cOkay, you can\u2019t start yet. I need to get a jump start on this.\u201d She didn\u2019t have the skiing or skateboarding background, although we did snowboard together a lot, so she went down to San Diego and went to Surf Diva camp a couple of times and learned the basics. One time we used frequent flyer miles and went to a surf camp in Brazil. We did that ten years ago and then didn\u2019t go again for another year, when we went to another surf camp. I realized that every time I did it, I was almost starting from scratch, so if I wanted it to be more enjoyable, I had to do it on a more regular basis. A friend of mine runs the Snowboard Connection and they also sell surf gear. He loaned us a couple of wetsuits and we went out to Westport. It was one of those classic coastal Washington days. Everything is just gray and there might have been a drizzle and we were looking at each other like, \u201cThis is going to be fucking horrible.\u201d We put on the wetsuits and went out there anyway and had a great time. That made us get our own boards and our own wetsuits and start doing it. Then three years ago, we both got winter wetsuits and we have been going year-round ever since. The crazy thing is that I think about surfing way too much. It would probably be the same way if it were something that I grew up doing as a kid, but it\u2019s almost like I\u2019m back in eighth grade algebra class reading Skateboarder magazine in the cover of my math textbook and not paying attention and flunking out of class. I guess the word is stoke, right?<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Yes. It sounds as if you\u2019re pretty stoked. Look, the love of surfing is such an amazing thing. I dream of going every day and I\u2019ve been surfing since I was nine years old and I\u2019m 52 now. That\u2019s 43 years of still having that love of it. I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s a very cool thing, so it\u2019s not that weird for you to experience this love of surfing. How is it when you hit the water in Westport? What does that do for you as a person?<\/strong>
\nMuch like before I play a show, I get nervous. [Laughs] Once you\u2019re wading out into the water, that dissipates. Westport is this beach break and if the waves have any power to them, it\u2019s pretty hard to get out sometimes. There is a rip along the jetty, but that is also super hairy because you could get a wave that pushes you into the rocks.<\/p>\n

The rocks are so much scarier than they actually are.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Probably. The line up closest to the jetty is the hot shots. It\u2019s a beach break, so there\u2019s shit going on for miles. We usually paddle over a peak or two and sit there.<\/p>\n

Do you have the waves to yourself?<\/strong>
\nNot at Westport, but there are places around here that you can.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s crowded at Westport?<\/strong>
\nIn the summertime, there might be 20 people around a peak, so there are about 80 people outside on those days. That\u2019s the extreme. It wasn\u2019t that crowded when I went out last December and it was 28 degrees in the air. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

If it was raining, it would have been snowing. How cold is the water?<\/strong>
\nIt ranges in the wintertime in the high 40s. Last summer, it was 63 degrees at times. It\u2019s just like Ventura in the winter. In the summer, you can go out with no booties and gloves and no hood.<\/p>\n

We could almost trunk it in 63 degrees.<\/strong>
\nWell, I saw a dude go out last summer in trunks and he didn\u2019t last very long.<\/p>\n

Oh no?<\/strong>
\nNo. It was on a super hot day.<\/p>\n

How do you compare surfing to performing or playing music?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know. They are totally different feelings. They are both ends in and of themselves. The joy I get out of playing music, that\u2019s what it\u2019s all about. The joy I get out of surfing, that\u2019s what it\u2019s all about. Clearly, there is no way I\u2019m going to get on the world tour or anything like that. So there is no thought that it\u2019s going to take me to another place. It\u2019s all about the thing you\u2019re doing. It\u2019s an end in itself.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really interesting for me to hear your stories. This was totally good.<\/strong>
\nAwesome, Steve. Hopefully, we\u2019ll run into next time we play down there.<\/p>\n

Definitely, If we\u2019re somewhere we can go surfing, we will definitely go surfing.<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m going to San Clemente the first week of June, if you don\u2019t mind hanging out with a kook.<\/p>\n

Bring it. It\u2019s all about surfing. It\u2019s totally fun.<\/strong>
\nDo you mainly surf a shortboard now?<\/p>\n

I have different boards. My brother has been making me surfboards for a long long time, but I have this one board which is my old throwback from the early \u201870s. The shape is based on the Pig that Dewey Weber made.<\/strong>
\nHow big is it?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 7\u20192\u201d. It\u2019s a little thicker, so the paddling is much faster and easier. I have a 6\u20193\u201d and I have a 6\u20192\u201d and longboards. I grew up longboarding as a kid. Our first boards, one guy would carry the nose and one guy would carry the tail because it was so heavy. It was funny. Growing up surfing was insane.<\/strong>
\nWhere did you grow up surfing?<\/p>\n

I was surfing in Huntington Beach and Seal Beach. I lived a little inland from Seal Beach. There was a riverbed that ran all the way to the ocean, so we could get on our bicycles and ride down three or four miles to the beach.<\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s like those L.A. riverbeds that are concrete.<\/p>\n

Exactly. Two of them ran down into one at Long Beach and filtered into this power plant. The waves were amazing. As a kid, you\u2019re just so stoked to be in the water. I was a swimmer in Seattle, in Kenmore, so I was totally into racing and all that.<\/strong>
\nYou were from up here?<\/p>\n

No. When Boeing was happening in the early \u201870s, we were up there for a while, and I have relatives up there. My aunt lives in Bellevue and I saw her when were up there for the EMP thing. I lived up there in third grade. How old are you in third grade? It was probably the late \u201860s.<\/strong>
\nWhen were you born?<\/p>\n

\u201861.<\/strong>
\nI was born in \u201862.<\/p>\n

The transition of learning how to surf when we moved back down, was cool. We were lucky enough to have parents who would drive us to the beach. I was lucky to have an older brother, too. Once he got his license, we would just surf so much. It just happened to be where we were living at the time.<\/strong>
\nWas there ever a time when you didn\u2019t surf at all?<\/p>\n

No. I always surfed. There was a time in punk rock when it wasn\u2019t cool to be a surfer though.<\/strong>
\nI kind of felt that way, but that didn\u2019t happen with Mudhoney.<\/p>\n

Even with skateboarding, it was the same. It was like, \u201cLook at all these idiots here. They don\u2019t even understand.\u201d We still surfed and skated though. It\u2019s in your blood, but you didn\u2019t carry your skateboard to a gig. No one really cared if you were skateboarder or not back then. It was like, \u201cHere\u2019s a group of young kids and they don\u2019t really belong here.\u201d<\/strong>
\nThere was a group of kids here that would carry their skateboards to gigs and, basically, use them as weapons. You never saw them ride their boards. They just carried them around.<\/p>\n

In case of an outbreak. I love surfing. That\u2019s the one thing you can do the rest of your life. There are 80-year olds in Malibu who are still paddling into waves and riding them and and enjoying it.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Unfortunately, the one thing with skateboarding is that it hurts as you get older.<\/p>\n

It hurts, but you can still just roll. Slamming on concrete hurts, but it\u2019s cool. You can figure out how to take the slam a little better even though it hurts more. I don\u2019t know. I can\u2019t even bend my knee right now. It happens, but there\u2019s a really good session tomorrow, which will be good. Down here, a lot of dudes are making backyard pools that are built to skate. It\u2019s happening a lot. These are really good pools. I\u2019m almost 53 and it\u2019s still cool to be able to grind the coping. Right. Right. Hopefully, you\u2019ll remember to call me when you come down. Hit me up when you come down this way. Jay Adams lives down in San Clemente, so I\u2019ll call him and we\u2019ll all go surfing.<\/strong>
\nThat sounds great.<\/p>\n

The waves are coming in today and tomorrow down here.<\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s windy up here.<\/p>\n

When is the best time to surf up there?<\/strong>
\nGenerally, it\u2019s the spring and fall. In the winter, the Strait of Juan de Fuca is a little more protected from the wind and the giant swells kind of dissipate as they come down the Strait. There might be 20 to 30-foot waves on the coast, but it will translate into shoulder high waves down the Strait.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s always comforting. \u201cIt\u2019s 30-feet. Let\u2019s go out.\u201d I don\u2019t know about that one. Okay, Mark, have a great day and thank you so much. This was totally great.<\/strong>
\nSure. This was awesome. Thank you.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEW WITH\u00a0STEVE TURNER<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Steve?<\/strong>
\nOlson.<\/p>\n

Hi, Steve.<\/strong>
\nHow\u2019s it going?<\/p>\n

Super good. How are you?<\/strong>
\nPretty good.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on? [Laughs]<\/strong>
\nI was sitting in the backyard. It\u2019s actually nice out right now.<\/p>\n

Oh it is? Yeah, it\u2019s beautiful down here as well.<\/strong>
\nKiller.<\/p>\n

Super killer. [Laughs] You\u2019re funny. Did you graduate from the University of Washington?<\/strong>
\nNo.\u00a0Mark did. I never got a degree.<\/p>\n

My dad graduated from the University of Washington.<\/strong>
\nOh yeah? Mark went there. Most of my friends went there, but I never did. I went to Western Washington University in Bellingham for a year.<\/p>\n

Cool. What\u2019s your name?<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] My name is Steve Turner.<\/p>\n

Any relationship to Turner Skateboards?<\/strong>
\nNot at all. I\u2019ve never even heard of Turner Skateboards, but it\u2019s a good name for a skateboard company.<\/p>\n

Well, yeah. That\u2019s a bit biased, but they made amazing skateboards. You don\u2019t know the Turner SummerSki? They were so futuristic and they still are futuristic.<\/strong>
\nWhat era was this?<\/p>\n

It was the mid 70\u2019s. You would love them.<\/strong>
\nI want one now. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

You should have one. Okay, where did you grow up, Steve?<\/strong>
\nI grew up in Seattle in a place called Mercer Island.<\/p>\n

When did you get turned on to music?<\/strong>
\nWell, the easy answer is I got into skateboarding and punk rock, but when I was younger, I really liked the Clancy Brothers, the Irish group. I really liked Irish music because my dad had some of that around the house. He had a Lead Belly 10-inch with \u201cGoodnight Irene\u201d on it that I thought was really cool. My brother had ordered a best of \u201860s rock record from K-Tel. It was a three-album box-set that I thought had some stuff that was pretty good. I really liked \u201cPushin\u2019 Too Hard\u201d by the Seeds. I didn\u2019t really get into rock music too much until I was a teenager and I got into skateboarding. Because of you, and people like you, we started listening to Devo and The Clash instead of Ted Nugent.<\/p>\n

It was a transitional period in music and skateboarding.<\/strong>
\nI feel like it happened literally overnight at my friend\u2019s ramp. I liked it. I thought, \u201cThis stuff sounds pretty cool to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I totally agree with you and I back your decision.<\/strong>
\nTotally. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Was your brother older?<\/strong>
\nMy brother was five years older than me.<\/p>\n

Was there was a small influence by the older brother?<\/strong>
\nMaybe there was, just a little bit. I mean, he really wasn\u2019t into rock music. Someone may have given him that K-Tel set. He liked Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli and Broadway show-tunes, which wasn\u2019t much of an influence on me. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s interesting. What kind of stuff did you do as a kid? I\u2019m looking for how influences happened, after the fact.<\/strong>
\nWell, by the time I was six years old, I was really into riding my bike. I had a Stingray.\u00a0I was really into bicycles and I liked playing soccer. I liked skiing and building tree forts. Our neighborhood was near some woods, so we were always building tree forts and stuff.<\/p>\n

You know, we built tree forts when I lived up there in Kenmore for a little amount of time. We built tree forts and went skiing. My older brother built an F Troop tower, like a lookout tower, that stood maybe two floors up, and he convinced me to go up there to tell him what the vantage point was like and then he pushed it over.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] My brother wouldn\u2019t have done that to me. He was nice.<\/p>\n

My brother was nice, but he was also vindictive, occasionally. Well, I was his brother, so I was just annoying I\u2019m sure. Remember when they had those extension chopper forks for Stingray\u2019s where you just bolt them on to the front forks?<\/strong>
\nYeah.<\/p>\n

It really wasn\u2019t the safest design. My brother had pushed me over in the tree fort and then he had built a jump and he put the chopper forks on and he went off the jump and, as he was in mid air, his front tire became disconnected, so he landed on his forks and got a little bit of payback.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Yeah.<\/p>\n

So you\u2019re into Stingray\u2019s, soccer and skiing. Do you think there was a part of you that loved that sense of motion?<\/strong>
\nDefinitely. I was bombing down hills on a Big Wheel as a little kid. Anything where there was a little bit of danger involved, I was all for it.<\/p>\n

When did you first get turned onto skateboards?<\/strong>
\nIt was early in 1975. My dad was an import\/export businessman. Mostly, he did agricultural stuff, but he got into some sporting gear in the mid \u201870s and he brought home six really shitty Asian skateboards along with the second edition of Skateboarder Magazine. It was the one with the blonde kid, barefoot in a pool on the cover. He was like, \u201cSkateboarding is a new thing in California. See if you like it.\u201d Most of those skateboards were the worst because none of them had soft wheels or proper wheels yet. One of them had what seemed like glass wheels. It was unrideable. One had black rubber tires and that was one I rode. It was cool because I could leave skid-marks, just like I could on my bike. That\u2019s a good design, right? I still think kids would buy a skateboard that left marks. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

\n

“In Seattle, people didn’t really know what punk rock was so much. I just remember seeing this hippy guy with a beard and long hair. He was dressed up crazy like a punk rocker and he had a toilet seat around his neck.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh, for sure. [Laughs]<\/strong>
\nSo I had those and, around the same time, some other kids around the neighborhood got into skateboarding. This was when 7-Eleven was selling Continental skateboards, so they were available. In \u201876, I started getting more into bicycling and BMX racing had just started. I raced at the very first organized BMX race in Washington State in \u201876. For the next few years, I did a lot more BMX racing until the end of \u201879, when some kids up the street built a few quarterpipes in their driveway. I went up there and I didn\u2019t really know them, but we got to be friends pretty quickly and I would ride my bike on those ramps and go up and do little airs. I started playing around on their skateboard and it just kind of took over. They were a few years older than me and, after a couple days of just messing around on their boards, I was as good as they were. I think that was the inspiration to get my own board.<\/p>\n

What kind of bicycle were you racing?<\/strong>
\nI had a Mongoose for a while. I think everybody had a Mongoose. I had a Redline. I had two different companies that gave me frames and forks for a little while. One was LRV, which was a really tiny company. I got a free frame and fork from them one year and, a couple years later, I got one from Redline. They flowed it to me. I think they gave me a jersey and that was about it. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Well, yeah, but that\u2019s not bad. That was enough to keep going, right?<\/strong>
\nYeah. It was great.<\/p>\n

Then what happened?<\/strong>
\nI stopped racing after a while because I was really small as a kid and I had stepped up to the 13-15 age division, and I was just so much smaller than they were. I just couldn\u2019t get off the line as fast as they could. There was nothing I could do about it because they outweighed me by 50 pounds. I switched up to the cruiser class in \u201881 and raced a little bit until \u201882.<\/p>\n

Okay, so you get to the quarterpipes, you ride their skateboards and, all of a sudden, you see progression, so you went out and got a skateboard?<\/strong>
\nYeah. One of the older kids had a little basement business where he\u2019d order skate gear. He had a business license and he could get it at cost, so he\u2019d supply us. I ordered a Sims right when boards had gone wide. This is one of the first of the Sims that was 10 inches wide. It was still an outdated design, but it was a beautiful board with the laminated wood. I got that and some Gyro wheels that had the steel core, so I was all set up. Then then neighborhood kids built a halfpipe in their backyard and I started riding it every day after school. I would just go hang out there with them.<\/p>\n

So you\u2019re telling me you were now sucked into it?<\/strong>
\nI was sucked in pretty fast and it was totally concurrent with getting sucked into music the same month.<\/p>\n

What was the correlation between getting sucked into skateboarding and then music?<\/strong>
\nI think it was just reading Skateboarder.<\/p>\n

Oh really? Did it have that big of an influence?<\/strong>
\nBig time. My older friends started playing punk rock and then they built a half pipe in the spring of 1980. I almost got to see Black Flag in April of 1980. They already had their single out and we already had it somehow. We were on it that fast. My mom wouldn\u2019t let me go to that concert, but in August of 1980, I went to my first concert, which was Devo on the Freedom Of Choice tour, which connected to skateboarding because they would show skate videos before they played. There was a skateboard contest that weekend and a bunch of skaters were staying at my house. It was a downhill contest in Bellevue, so we all went out to that, and then we all went to see Devo. A couple of days later was the Black Flag show that we all went to as well, so my first two concerts were Devo and Black Flag. I\u2019d never seen a rock concert before that.<\/p>\n

Oh, you had not?<\/strong>
\nNo. I was not interested in it.<\/p>\n

Oh, right? Did you say Devo was the first one?<\/strong>
\nYep.<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s kind of a different type of rock concert.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It was great and there was a good load of us skaters there. We all had our Rector kneepads down around our ankles, you know?<\/p>\n

Oh, you\u2019re kidding?<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] No. We were there representing Rector Protector, apparently.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Yes! Was there a reason you had your kneepads around your ankles?<\/strong>
\nWell, it was because they still wore their kneepads and it was kind of like a symbol of skateboarding. It made sense to us. [Laughs] We\u2019d been skating the ramp all day too. We literally came from the ramp to the concert, so we had our skate shorts on and our kneepads around our ankles.<\/p>\n

Well that\u2019s a great introduction to live music, I would think.<\/strong>
\nTotally. I got right up to the front of the stage. It was great.<\/p>\n

How many people were attending this concert?<\/strong>
\nIt was sold out, so it was probably about 800 people at The Showbox. They did two shows in the same night and we went to the early one. In Seattle, people didn\u2019t really know what punk rock was so much. I just remember seeing this hippy guy with a beard and long hair. He was dressed up crazy like a punk rocker and he had a toilet seat around his neck. I still remember that guy. That guy was the raddest guy there.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s so amazing. That was his punker necklace.<\/strong>
\nI think he probably had one of those bright orange safety one-piece suits on with a toilet seat around his neck.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s funny. Well, maybe he was paying homage to Marcel Duchamp? But maybe not. Whatever. We\u2019re going to give it to him. So you saw Devo and what did you think?<\/strong>
\nI thought they were awesome. I was totally hooked on going to see shows. That\u2019s why, a couple days later, I went to see Black Flag.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a contrast between Black Flag and Devo though.<\/strong>
\nTotally, but what really struck me at the Black Flag show was there were two, maybe three local opening bands and one of them was called Solger and I looked at them, and they were my age. They were badass punk rock kids and I was still just a suburban guy. I thought, \u201cThey\u2019re my age and they\u2019re in a band. That\u2019s so cool.\u201d It just felt like a totally different world than I had ever seen, so I liked it.<\/p>\n

Was that part of the progression of you getting into playing music? How did you get into actually playing music?<\/strong>
\nThat came the next year. My sister had a boyfriend and he left an electric guitar at the house, so I started playing around with that. I\u2019d already taken folk guitar lessons at school, so I knew how to do all the chords. I didn\u2019t know how to play rock n\u2019 roll or anything, but I could do open chords. I could do E, A, G, C and D. That\u2019s about it. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Yes, but at least you could do those. [Laughs] So you were playing music with your friends?<\/strong>
\nYeah. With a lot of punk rock kids, you kind of start saying you\u2019re a band and then sometimes you actually become a band. We did not, but we said we were a band and we made a bunch of noise in the basement off and on. We didn\u2019t even have a real drum kit, but we would fantasize about being in a band and that went on for a little while. It wasn\u2019t until my last year of high school, in the\u00a0fall of \u201882, that I started going to a private school called Northwest. It was the Northwest School of the Arts, Humanities and Environment. It was there that I met a lot of friends that would remain in my life and in my bands and stuff. I met Stone Gossard there. He was a year younger than me. I met Alex Shumway who became the drummer for Green River with us. He had just moved to Seattle from Sacramento and he was a proper hardcore punk. He had a dyed black mohawk and he wore a kilt over his jeans. He looked like the Circle Jerks cartoon drawing. He had that exact look. We became good friends and during that year we started playing music for real.<\/p>\n

Did you jump onto guitar?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I started playing guitar. I got my own guitar for Christmas in \u201882, so I guess that would have been the real turning point.<\/p>\n

What kind of guitar was it?<\/strong>
\nIt was crappy. I wish I still had it though because it was one of those blonde wood Peavey guitars they made in the late \u201870s that all the country guys really liked.<\/p>\n

It was kind of like a Strat though, yes?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I don\u2019t even know which model it was. I got rid of it really fast. In the summer of \u201883, I sold that and bought a a 1966 baby blue Mustang guitar, which was a hell of a lot better.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] What was the reason for buying the Mustang?<\/strong>
\nMy sister\u2019s boyfriend had a friend at college that was selling it. I got it for $200 and I thought it looked like the coolest guitar I had ever seen, so I was totally down to get rid of the Peavey. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Yes. You had continued to go to gigs, yeah?<\/strong>
\nYeah. The school year of \u201883 ended, so I was out of high school and then I was in a real band. I\u2019d already met Mark Arm in the fall of \u201882 at a P.I.L. or T.S.O.L. show. Alex introduced us. He knew Mark because he lived near the University of Washington where Alex lived. So we all started hanging out. By the summer of \u201883, I was in a proper band with Stone for a second and then I was in another hardcore band just for a split second before I joined Mark\u2019s band Mr. Epp and the Calculations. That was all in the summer of \u201883. The biggest thing that I figured out was that I needed a fuzz box or a distortion box. I did not know anything about playing guitar, but I was talking to this guy at this restaurant I worked at and I was telling him, \u201cI have a guitar and I have an amp, but it doesn\u2019t sound like I want it to.\u201d He asked me what kind of distortion box I was using and I told him I didn\u2019t know what that was. I had a Sun amp that didn\u2019t have any overdrive on it, so the next day at work, he brought his distortion box in and said, \u201cTry plugging this in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes! So then you discovered the fuzz.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Then the angels cried.<\/p>\n

And the clouds parted. All of a sudden, the\u00a0super fuzz was reverberating through your complete being.<\/strong>
\nCompletely. I was like, \u201cOh my god!\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs] I love that discovery. So then you started playing with Mark and Mr. Epp and the Calculations?<\/strong>
\nYeah. It was named after their math teacher, Mr. Epp. That is how nerdy Mr. Epp was. That\u2019s why I loved them so much. I loved Mr. Epp when I first heard their single, \u201cMohawk Man\u201d. They were making fun of a punk rock person for getting a mohawk. It was actually number one on Rodney on the Roq\u2019s list of songs in one of those Flipside magazines. It was a real nerd band. The real punks hated it. It was just a lot of noise played at hardcore speed. We had a really good drummer, but the rest of us couldn\u2019t play. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

As long as the beat is there, it doesn\u2019t sound so bad.<\/strong>
\nExactly. There weren\u2019t a lot of shows in the scene then, but I played two shows with them and then in February 1984 we broke up. Mark and I continued playing in another band called Limp Richerds. I never played a show with them, but they\u2019re pretty legendary. They never released a record, but they were one of the classic gang of freaks in the punk scene. We practiced with them a bunch, but we never played a show and that band kind of imploded. By April or May of 1984, Green River had formed, and we got Jeff Ament. Jeff had moved out to Seattle from Montana with a hardcore band called Deranged Diction, which were really cool. Jeff was super energetic on stage and he still is. He was jumping all over the place and he played distorted base a lot of times in that band. Mark and I said, \u201cWe need to get Jeff in a band with us.\u201d So I got a job working at the same place he worked to try to butter him up.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Did you get that job so you could meet him?<\/strong>
\nWell, I knew him, but I wanted to hang out with him more and convince him slowly that he should be in a band with us, but he wasn\u2019t that interested because he didn\u2019t like Mr. Epp at all. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t a Mr. Epp fan?<\/strong>
\nNot at all. He might have enjoyed it as a spectacle, but he certainly didn\u2019t want to be in a band like Mr. Epp. Let\u2019s put it that way. We thought he would be a rad guy to be in a band with, so we were just trying to convince him that we were more serious now and we wanted to do a real band. Soon he was convinced. Deranged Diction was kind of falling apart. That\u2019s the thing with hardcore. By 1983, it just seemed like it was over. You couldn\u2019t go any faster. Plus, we were already rediscovering some of the \u201870s rock and \u201860s stuff like the Stooges and things like that, so there was a different idea developing. It was happening all over. Hardcore bands had to slow down, eventually, and some went total cock rock. Some went a little softer, I guess, but whatever. You couldn\u2019t stay hardcore forever. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

I guess. I am not familiar with that.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It wasn\u2019t your scene. This was suburban punk rock. There was a uniform. You cut your hair really short and wore a band t-shirt and a flannel shirt. You wore Converse or Vans and carried your skateboard everywhere you went. [Laughs] I was one of those.<\/p>\n

Okay, so Green River started in \u201884?<\/strong>
\nYes. We started up in \u201884 after we convinced Jeff to be in the band. Since we were already kind of known a little bit, it was easy to get shows. I became dissatisfied with it pretty quickly because they were getting more into metal, as the band went the first year. They were really into Venom, Iron Maiden and stuff and I just wasn\u2019t at all. I was discovering more of the \u201860s garage stuff and I was just madly buying every Pebbles compilation and that kind of stuff.<\/p>\n

When did you discover the Sonics?<\/strong>
\nGrowing up in Seattle, there was well-respected \u201860s music scene. It seemed like, as soon as I was going into record stores, I knew about the Sonics. I think that\u2019s also because there were some clerks in the used record stores that would put all that stuff in the punk section, which makes sense. I was joking with a friend of mine, Scott McCaughey, who is a leader of the Young Fresh Fellows and plays guitar with REM and Blast! He worked at this record store and I blame him. He put all the cool \u201860s shit in the punk section and that\u2019s what I would buy. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Right. So you got a little non-complacent with the direction of Green River?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I stuck around for a year and a half, but I quit in August of 1985. We did one record with me that had a couple of good songs on it, but there was just too many things that were just so complex and complicated and weird. I never even learned how to play the songs right, because I still wasn\u2019t very good at guitar. I was getting more into cruder stuff. I discovered Thee Milkshakes and stuff like that too, so my amps were getting smaller. I was playing an old Harmony $25 guitar. The rest of the band was into Iron Maiden, so it was obvious that it wasn\u2019t working out very well. I bailed out after the first record and they got better. They did a really good record after that with another guitar player and then they broke up in \u201887.<\/p>\n

What did you do when you split?<\/strong>
\nI was playing in a noise band called the Thrown Ups.<\/p>\n

That makes me sick.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] It was a punk band. We never practiced. We just got shows and made a bunch of noise, but I liked that. As soon as I started playing with that band, Mark joined the band on drums, so we were still in a band together, even though I had quit Green River. In \u201886, I moved up to Bellingham for a year and I was going to college.<\/p>\n

What were you taking at college, just out of curiosity?<\/strong>
\nI was an anthropology major.<\/p>\n

That makes sense. Just kidding about it making sense. I thought I saw you in Jurassic Park though.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] That was an archeologist.<\/p>\n

Same difference. [Laughs] Kidding. I\u2019m only making jokes. Go on.<\/strong>
\nI was on an anthropology and geology kick up in Bellingham for a year and then Mark called me and said that Green River had broken up and that I should come back down and we should do another band.<\/p>\n

So you just split school?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I was ready to quit anyway. I made a deal with my parents. I said, \u201cGive me two years and I\u2019ll go back.\u201d [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Oh really? That\u2019s a nice deal.<\/strong>
\nYeah, but I didn\u2019t. Actually, I did go back a little bit during Mudhoney, but that\u2019s later and irrelevant.<\/p>\n

So you split and then you came back to Seattle and that\u2019s when you started Mudhoney?<\/strong>
\nYeah. Mark and I had been hanging out a lot and we were really influenced by the same stuff. We were really on point together with what we wanted to do. It was really just taking crude 60\u2019s garage rock and over-amping it. We loved Poison 13 from Texas, Tim Kerr\u2019s band. We loved that record of theirs. I was like, \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I want to do.\u201d Tales of Terror we loved. Green River even covered a Tales of Terror song. We were into the Stooges and 60\u2019s garage rock and we\u2019d just distort the fuck out of it and make really crude \u201877 style punk rock. We\u2019d mix all of the stuff tat I liked the most together into one little sludge bucket.<\/p>\n

\n

“I was at the grocery store with my girlfriend and some grunge fan actually got on his knees in front of me and bowed. It was so embarrassing. I was like, \u201cDude, get up! You\u2019re embarrassing all of us here.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Were all the other members of Mudhoney following suit?<\/strong>
\nYeah. The drummer, Dan, was really familiar with where we were coming from, and he\u2019s a great drummer. We wanted to play with him, but he was in a couple other bands, so he was busy. I think, because Green River had quite a bit of local success and notoriety, the fact that me and Mark were doing another band was kind of a big deal in that little scene. We got Matt Lukin, the bass player who had just been fired from the Melvins. We asked him if he wanted to do it and he was into doing something with us. I don\u2019t think he knew exactly where we were coming from musically, but he was a great bass player and he was open-minded and willing to come play with us.<\/p>\n

Okay, so it\u2019s you, Matt, Dan and Mark? Mudhoney was a four-piece band?<\/strong>
\nYep.<\/p>\n

You were playing guitar. Was Mark playing guitar or only singing?<\/strong>
\nWell, in Green River, Mark was flying around the stage and climbing up on the speakers, but I really liked the way he played guitar. He was kind of a savant on the guitar. He was great, but hadn\u2019t touched a guitar for years. I said to him, \u201cI\u2019ll do another band, but you have to play guitar.\u201d [Laughs] I figured it would kind of ground him as well. It\u2019s not that I wanted two guitars, but he started playing a lot of slide guitar, which was even easier because he really hadn\u2019t touched a guitar for years, at that point.<\/p>\n

How many guitars were in Green River? Twelve? [Laughs] Just kidding.<\/strong>
\nWell, there were four, if you count Mark playing guitar in the early days. When Green River started, Mark was going to play guitar on some songs and sing on some and I was going sing on some and play guitar on some and it quickly got defined as him being the singer. He was a much better singer and frontman than I would have been. It quickly settled down to where I was the guitar player and then we added Stone on second guitar. He wasn\u2019t in the band at the very beginning. He came in a few months later. After I left, they replaced me with Bruce [Fairweather] on guitar. When Green River does shows nowadays, we have three guitars. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

There was some success to Green River, and you toured a little bit too, no?<\/strong>
\nWell, there are three Green River records and they did a little bit of touring, but I never toured with them. That was what made me realize that I needed to quit. They were going to go on tour and I really didn\u2019t want to go on tour and play that music. I was like, \u201cI gotta quit.\u201d I knew exactly who should replace me. It was our friend, Bruce, who looked like he was a member of the band. They\u2019d all grown their hair out and they were being all glam. I had short hair and was dressing up like a mod, so I looked all wrong. Bruce looked prefect for the part and he was living with Jeff at the time. He had been in Deranged Diction with Jeff, so he was part of the clan.<\/p>\n

Okay, so you guys have your lineup for Mudhoney and you\u2019re veterans with playing shows and playing in bands, no?<\/strong>
\nTotally. It was kind of a big deal in Seattle.<\/p>\n

Was this \u201888?<\/strong>
\nThis was 1988. We started playing shows in March or April. We got really good shows right off the bat, so that was the start of Mudhoney.<\/p>\n

What happens\u00a0with Mudhoney once you start playing out?<\/strong>
\nIt took off really well, right off the bat. It sounded good immediately.\u00a0It was crude and really distorted, but we did pretty simple songs and it was good. We were on the right path of what we wanted to do. We got good shows and recorded with our friends. Bruce Pavitt had officially made Sub Pop Records a real label and he paid for us to do a demo in March. We hadn\u2019t even played a show yet and we had a label, essentially. It happened fast. By the summer of \u201888, we had a single out and we did a U.S. tour with Sonic Youth that the fall. We were playing really big shows and getting a lot of press.<\/p>\n

\n

“I discovered Thee Milkshakes and stuff like that too so my amps were getting smaller. I was playing an old Harmony $25 guitar. The rest of the band was into Iron Maiden, so it was obvious that it wasn’t working out very well.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hip me to what you mean by a big show?<\/strong>
\nSonic Youth was playing for 500 to 1,000 people. For 1988 underground Seattle, those were big shows. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

I\u2019m just asking so I have an idea of what was going on. I was thinking maybe you were opening for Guns N\u2019 Roses.<\/strong>
\nNo, no, no. We were playing with bands that were on SST and that kind of stuff.<\/p>\n

Okay. You guys had Mudhoney while Jeff and Stone had gone and started Pearl Jam?<\/strong>
\nWell, Jeff and Stone started Mother Love Bone first. Green River split up, so that, obviously, ended in tragedy and frustration. When Mudhoney started to tour, we toured a lot. The first three years, we were gone half the year, and then the whole Seattle thing really took off. The whole fuckin\u2019 thing went ballistic.<\/p>\n

Right. You\u2019re touring and everyone has played in bands together. Mark was telling me that you guys were on the road with Mudhoney, and Nirvana was on the road and then you were both supposed to come back to Seattle and Portland and co-headline a couple of shows.<\/strong>
\nYeah. [Laughs] It happened fast, but it was exciting because we knew all of these people. We all came from the exact same punk scene together, so it was really exciting. Soundgarden was doing really well. Nirvana started happening. Mother Love Bone kind of stalled out and that was kind of a bum deal, but Pearl Jam started up and that was awesome, so they were doing great again. It seemed like everybody was. We were on tour all the time, so we didn\u2019t really see each other much during those years. We were all out there making things happen. I literally did not see Jeff or Stone, except rarely and casually, for a number of years.<\/p>\n

Everyone was working. What did your parents think of all of this?<\/strong>
\nMy parents were into it, but they still wanted me to go back to school. They had no interest in going to see our shows or anything like that. In fact, they didn\u2019t see Mudhoney until 1995. We did an outdoor thing at the Seattle Center and they finally came and begrudgingly stayed at the very back and watched a few songs. [Laughs] My parents are great, so they were really open-minded and down to support me and my endeavors.<\/p>\n

What about your brother?<\/strong>
\nHe thinks it great. He comes to shows all the time and it\u2019s not music that he likes. I know he\u2019s just coming because it\u2019s me.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s great. What happens with Mudhoney when the grunge explosion happened? You guys were the whole nucleus that was responsible for this whole thing, indirectly or not, whether or not you want to admit it.<\/strong>
\nYeah. I can trace it back. I saw some review once that Stone and I loved because it said that me and Stone becoming friends in high school is what started grunge because he was a metal kid and I was a punk kid. [Laughs] I really liked that article. I was like, \u201cOkay, I\u2019ll live with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes! You\u2019re the godfather of grunge, babe. Take me to the one. Actually, I\u2019m going to start a new band called Take Me To The Grunge and you\u2019re going to get fined if you miss a note, buddy.<\/strong>
\nOh shit. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

So take me through the rest. Everyone is touring and everything is huge.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It was stupid huge. It was comical and totally exciting, but we were pretty over it. By the time \u201891 came around, we had cut our hair and made a record that was more garage rock than grunge. That was Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and it was a totally different aesthetic. We had cartoon drawings on the cover. We were definitely over the cliche grunge sound, but it was great to see so many people doing so well. Our friends were doing great with music, but it was a joke at the same time, so we just kept our heads down and kept doing what we do. We moved to a major label and that worked out great for a few years.<\/p>\n

How was that making the move to a major?<\/strong>
\nWell, Sub Pop was having troubles. Honestly, if Nirvana had hit big six months earlier, we wouldn\u2019t have left Sub Pop, because then they would have had the cash flow they needed. They were really struggling for a while there as indie labels do, but once they hit big, they were fine. It was just that little time in between. It was fine going to a major label because we were still in charge of what we did. We still recorded cheaply, low-fi in a friend\u2019s basement, so nothing changed. We were such a well-oiled machine by that point that we didn\u2019t need any tour help or anything like that. We didn\u2019t take very much money from them, so they left us alone because they also didn\u2019t know why this music was suddenly popular. Grunge and Nirvana, in particular, definitely caught the music industry off guard.<\/p>\n

Why do you think that was?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know. It was one of those things. Nirvana was so good and it just really captured so many people\u2019s imaginations, more than the music that the major labels were trying to sell to people.\u00a0It\u2019s just one of those lucky instances where the band came out of nowhere and completely confused everybody. People say it killed off hair metal instantly because it was way gnarlier music without the hairspray. It made the hair metal bands irrelevant almost overnight.<\/p>\n

Then was there Guns N\u2019 Roses versus Nirvana deal going on?<\/strong>
\nYeah, There was a little bit of that, but Guns N\u2019 Roses was the coolest band of those bands. They had some roots. Duff McKagan is a Seattle punk rocker. They had their roots and they were better. I still think that Guns N Roses is a different breed than most of that hair metal stuff. Axl Rose is a clown, but that first record is good. [Laughs] Axl did get into some heated moments with Kurt Cobain from what I recall. I think it was more like Poison and Warrant and those bands that really just got left behind.<\/p>\n

Okay, so every thing has exploded. How does it feel to go from being outcasts to popular? It\u2019s a serious question.<\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s a good question. It was weird to kind of be on the winning team.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Well, I\u2019m not saying that you were losers, but there was a stigma to that whole scene before grunge hit big.<\/strong>
\nYes, there was. The fully ironic thing was that Sub Pop played up the whole loser thing. We had t-shirts that just said \u201cLoser\u201d on the front and that was the biggest selling Sub Pop t-shirt in the early days.<\/p>\n

Really?<\/strong>
\nYeah. It was definitely unexpected because when Green River was happening and Stone and Jeff told me that they wanted to make music their career, I never had that ambition myself. On top of that, I just thought there was no chance in hell it was going to happen for us or for them either. Honestly, I thought they were absolutely out of their minds and deluded. Clearly, I was wrong. [Laughs] I just thought, \u201cReally? How is that even possible? That doesn\u2019t happen. We live in Seattle and we play in a crappy punk rock band.\u201d It was definitely weird. We were in a strange position where we were successful on one level, but we didn\u2019t go mega crazy like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden. I think our feet were a little bit more firmly on the ground as far as what it meant to us. Our friends are totally living their fantasy lives and that\u2019s awesome. We kind of were too, but it was on a different level. At times, it was uncomfortable, like I was at the grocery store with my girlfriend and some grunge fan actually got on his knees in front of me and bowed. It was so embarrassing. I was like, \u201cDude, get up! You\u2019re embarrassing all of us here.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs]<\/strong>
\nI was really glad that we didn\u2019t go mega huge crazy, because I was like, \u201cOkay, this is already way beyond my comfort zone.\u201d I was happy where we were.<\/p>\n

What was the comfort zone that you\u2019re talking about?<\/strong>
\nWell, it wasn\u2019t that kind of fame. It was never any fantasy of mine to be a rock star or anything because like I said growing up rock and roll wasn\u2019t even part of my world really. Once we started making a living from music that was enough of a head scratcher for me, but we didn\u2019t try to get bigger than we did. There were things we could have done. We could have capitalized on things better. Years later, we were joking about how many times we shot ourselves in the foot on purpose to kind of keep us where we were. We kind of regret a few of them at this point. [Laughs] So many years later it was like, \u201cFuck, we maybe should have tried to do something with this, you know?\u201d [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Give me an example of how you shot yourself in the foot?<\/strong>
\nWell, we could have done what everyone suggested, which in music biz parlance was to sweeten up the guitar sounds and spend more money recording and stay on the road longer. After the first few years, we decided that we didn\u2019t want to be on the road all the time, so we dialed that down. We just played the music we played. When people ask if we are surprised that we didn\u2019t get as big as Nirvana, I say, \u201cHave you heard our records?\u201d They\u2019re not commercial records. We knew exactly where it was going to go. We would also do really stupid shit like piss off the people who were paying us. One of the best things that we made money doing in the early 90\u2019s was doing songs for movie soundtracks. If you get a song on a movie soundtrack, they paid you $25,000 or $30,000 per song up front, and we totally fucked that one up. We had this really great little surfy instrumental song and they wanted it. They even showed us the scene of this movie. It was some movie with Brendan Fraser and it was him jogging like he was supposed to be a college-aged jock. He\u2019s jogging through campus in the snow and they had that horrible EMF song, \u201cYou\u2019re Unbelievable, Baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs] I love that song. Why do you hate that song?<\/strong>
\nUh, it\u2019s probably because it was everywhere for those few months.<\/p>\n

Okay, let\u2019s take it out of that context, and it wasn\u2019t played everywhere.<\/strong>
\nWell, I like shitty music. I like a lot of shitty music. I wouldn\u2019t have liked that song regardless because I don\u2019t really like dance rock, I guess.<\/p>\n

I thought it had a little bit of a \u201860s thing to it, that\u2019s all.<\/strong>
\nThere\u2019s a little bit I guess. I just hated his voice. I remember the voice. It was all breathy.<\/p>\n

I get it.<\/strong>
\nI feel you. I know.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not feeling me. Don\u2019t do that to me. I love you. [Laughs]<\/strong>
\nWell, they wanted something like that song, because it looked like the opening scene for Rocky or something. They wanted some real anthemic thing. We thought the surf thing was really cool, so we had this really great little surf riff, so here\u2019s what we did. Mark is a crafty little fucker and he came up with the lyrics. We figured that if we put the worst lyrics possible to this music, they would then choose the instrumental version, so it became a song called \u201cRun, Shithead, Run.\u201d\u00a0They used it, but they didn\u2019t use it in that scene. They buried it someplace else in the movie and the movie talent agent was so mad. He actually said, \u201cYou will never be on another soundtrack again.\u201d We had a publishing agent at the time and we really pissed the publishing agent off and the movie people were just fucking livid with us. They actually said, \u201cYou will never have another song in a movie again.\u201d We pretty much haven\u2019t. That was literally the end of that really great gravy train. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Ouch. Whatever.<\/strong>
\nYeah. I know. The song is great. The song stands up. It\u2019s one of my favorite Mudhoney songs. [Laughs] We never play it, but we should.<\/p>\n

What about touring? You went from playing little venues and halls that you would rent out to, all of a sudden, playing giant places, no?<\/strong>
\nWell, we didn\u2019t play giant places unless we were opening for Pearl Jam or Nirvana or something.<\/p>\n

Did you ever open for Pearl Jam or Nirvana?<\/strong>
\nYeah. We started that in \u201893. That was when the great reawakening of the Pearl Jam and Mudhoney friendship happened and we went on tour with them in early \u201894. That\u2019s when we realized that we had a real affinity and friendship with them, so we\u2019ve been doing shows with them off and on ever since. We just did the Big Day Out in Southern Australia with them. We did Canada with them last November. That\u2019s where it started again. For our shows, we never really got past the 800 to 1,000 capacity show. That\u2019s a big club, you know? We did that for a few years and we did really well.<\/p>\n

\n

“I’m talking to these teenage heroes of mine and you guys are all older than me and you\u2019re still skating, so I’m like, \u201cFuck. Why am I not skating?”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, I\u2019m talking about a bigger venue with real PA\u2019s where you can have a really clear and amazing sound coming off the stage and out into the audience.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Well, we toured the right way. We toured cheaply in a van, but we always had a really good sound man with us and a good PA. [Laughs] Make it sound good please.<\/p>\n

Yes. Mark said that you guys had a really good sound man.<\/strong>
\nOh yeah. We\u2019ve always had great sound people with us. We\u2019re very lucky in that regard.<\/p>\n

You guys were totally into having a good sound come across, as though you were hearing it in your head, right?<\/strong>
\nYeah. Totally. That\u2019s what I tell young bands too. If you can afford to bring anybody on tour with you, make it a sound man. That\u2019s the most important thing to have with you. You can sell merch yourself after the gig from the stage. Don\u2019t get a merch person first. Get a sound guy. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Right. What happened to Mudhoney after everything was going strong? Did you break up for a minute?<\/strong>
\nNo. We didn\u2019t break up, but our bass player finally quit. He just didn\u2019t want to play music anymore. Matt was just over it. The last record we did was 1998 with Warner Brothers and then, after that tour, it just wasn\u2019t going very well. He was not into it at all and we could tell. He finally just said, \u201cI\u2019m done. I\u2019m really sorry guys. I want you guys to continue, but I\u2019m over it.\u201d [Laughs] And he was. He hasn\u2019t played music since. After that, we took a year off.<\/p>\n

Oh you did?<\/strong>
\nYeah. We\u2019d always said that Mudhoney was going to be the same four people. The way we work, we\u2019re not so much passive aggressive. We\u2019re just kind of passive, so I thought the best thing was, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we just not even talk about breaking up right now. Let\u2019s just not do anything. Let\u2019s just stop.\u201d That\u2019s when the Monkey Wrench got together again. In 1990, we had gotten together with Tim Kerr and done our first release then in 2000, we did our second record and did all that touring. 2000 and 2001 were the Monkey Wrench years. After that little bit of a break, the three of us reconvened and wanted to play music together still. We were seriously considering continuing Mudhoney with just the three of us and changing our name and then we thought that would just be the stupidest idea. That\u2019s really shooting ourselves in the foot. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

Yeah. Well, considering it can be a good thing sometimes.<\/strong>
\nYeah. The break was good and we realized, since we weren\u2019t touring, it wasn\u2019t our job anymore, so we were all looking for other work, but music seemed to be getting more and more important. We realized we wanted to play music, so we were like, \u201cFuck it. Let\u2019s just do it.\u201d That\u2019s when we got a good friend of ours, Guy Madison, to play bass with us. He\u2019d already been in another band, Bloodloss with Mark, so he was the perfect fit. We met him back in 1989, so we had known him a long time and it worked out really great. He was really into it. It\u2019s not his job either, so it\u2019s like this really real cool thing that we get to do.<\/p>\n

So you guys started playing again?<\/strong>
\nYeah. In 2000, the three of us had gotten together to record one song that Wayne Kramer wanted for a compilation. Wayne came up to Seattle to see what we had and we were in the rehearsal room in Mark\u2019s house and we just went into the song. I was playing guitar, as was Mark, and Wayne asked, \u201cWho\u2019s going to play bass?\u201d I said, \u201cWell, we don\u2019t have a bass player right now, so I was just going to play both bass and guitar.\u201d He said, \u201cWell, do you mind if I just play along right now?\u201d [Laughs] So Wayne Kramer picked up the bass. [Laughs] It was awesome.<\/p>\n

You weren\u2019t like, \u201cNo. Wait. Wayne Kramer can\u2019t play with Mudhoney. Put that bass down. You\u2019re just here to listen, buddy.\u201d<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] That would have been great, but it made me realize something immediately. As soon as he started playing bass, I realized that I wouldn\u2019t have played what he was playing. It was better than anything I would have come up with, so it made me realize that I couldn\u2019t play bass and guitar in Mudhoney. I was like, \u201cThat will just suck because I won\u2019t be good at either of them probably.\u201d Basically, we needed a bass player. It made me think, \u201cOkay, this plan will not work where I play bass and guitar for recording and stuff.\u201d It was eye opening.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s happening with Mudhoney nowadays?<\/strong>
\nWe do what we can. We have jobs and families and we tour a very limited amount of time through the year, so we make it count. We go where we want to go the most and we get to go to different places. We\u2019re going to Brazil in a couple weeks. We plan things out like pretty much a year in advance because our bass player, Guy, is a nurse and his schedule is written in stone. So nine months out, we need to know what we\u2019re doing. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

You also started doing your own folk stuff?<\/strong>
\nThat was during the down time when I wasn\u2019t sure what was going on. I was just kind of thinking philosophically that I like to play music. I want to keep playing music the rest of my life, so how can I do that? I can do that by figuring out how to sing and play guitar at the same time on an acoustic level. I love folk music. I love singer\/songwriter stuff and I always have. My roots were Irish folk music. It\u2019s really the first music that ever stirred me, so it was a fun thing I started trying to do.<\/p>\n

Did you have to teach yourself how to play and sing at the same time?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I had really never done that in my life and it seemed impossible to me. It\u2019s like being a drummer. You have to separate two different things and I had never really tried to do it. This was in 2001, when I was working as a landscaper. I\u2019d go to work at 7 A.M., so I would get up at 5:30 A.M. and I would play guitar for one hour every morning before going to work. I was living by myself and I didn\u2019t have a girlfriend at the time. I was just a total working dude and I would get up and play guitar for one hour and, on a schedule like that, I figured out how to do it really fast. It was really fun because I could actually see progress. With punk rock and Mudhoney, I continue to argue that skill is a hindrance to a good punk rock guitarist. You don\u2019t get better. You get worse, generally. I never wanted to get better on the guitar, so that was never an issue. With the acoustic stuff, I could actually trace my progress. I was getting better at something, so it kind of fed on itself. I just kept doing it religiously every morning.<\/p>\n

How long did it take you to figure it out to where you could play and sing and feel confident on both levels of performance?<\/strong>
\nI did it for about a year and then I recorded some demos with my friend, Johnny Sangster, who had done some Mudhoney recordings. He was the first person that ever heard it. The next person I let hear it was Stone and he was really encouraging. He owns a recording studio, a nice one in Seattle, and he said I could come record for free and he\u2019d play bass. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good deal.<\/strong>
\nYeah. That was a big deal. That was the first record and then, somewhere in there, I started playing shows, which was terrifying, but pretty exciting because it was different.<\/p>\n

It was new again.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It seemed like an easy way to go. I could just hop in the car and go on tour with it. Even if it wasn\u2019t making a lot of money, I could still justify doing it just for the shits and giggles.<\/p>\n

Nice. Have you overcome the nerve factor when you\u2019re going on stage?<\/strong>
\nPretty much. The solo gigs are still the most nerve racking. I\u2019m opening for Buzz from the Melvins for a couple of shows in June, so those are going to be big shows for this stuff, you know?<\/p>\n

When you say big, what do you mean?<\/strong>
\nI think we\u2019re playing about 800 capacity places. Buzz and the Melvins sell out everything they do. They have quite a following.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m nervous for you. I\u2019m just kidding.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Right? For a while, I had my friend, Johnny Sangster, playing second guitar with me and then the folk stuff has slowly became more rockin\u2019. I did three records and the last one was called New Wave Punk Asshole, so it wasn\u2019t very folky.<\/p>\n

No. That\u2019s maybe not such a folk title.<\/strong>
\nNo. That one is not so much a folk record. [Laughs] I had a full band on that and it was much more garage rock.<\/p>\n

So Mudhoney is back and you guys go and do these short tours?<\/strong>
\nYeah. We do stuff all the time. We were really busy this last year. We put out a record. Last year was our 25th anniversary. It was Sub Pop\u2019s 25th anniversary, so we did a lot of touring and this Brazilian trip was kind of the last thing for a little while again.<\/p>\n

Do you love playing with Mudhoney still?<\/strong>
\nTotally. That\u2019s why we do it. It\u2019s not our job anymore and it\u2019s really hard sometimes to get all four of our schedules to work out, but we all really value it and like doing it, so we just make it work. No one gets upset if somebody has to say no to something, because we all have to say no to things.<\/p>\n

When you go touring, do you ever bring your skateboard along?<\/strong>
\nTotally. I mean, not always because the way we tour, we play everyday. There are no days off. In Australia, it was the Big Day Out festivals and there are only two shows a week. We added a few shows of our own on that trip, but they didn\u2019t want us to play everyday because they were trying to sell tickets to the Big Day Out. Pearl Jam was on there, so I had my skateboard and Jeff had his skateboard and we managed to get out and go skate several times. We went to the Bondi Bowl. Have you skated that thing?<\/p>\n

No, I\u2019ve never been to Australia. I\u2019m not allowed to leave the US.<\/strong>
\nOh.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m kidding.<\/strong>
\nI know you leave the U.S. [Laughs] Bondi is awesome, but it\u2019s a fucking gnarly pit though. The waterfall is like five feet and almost vert. It\u2019s the steepest\u00a0waterfall I\u2019ve ever seen in a bowl. It\u2019s just a gnarly slippery steep pit. It\u2019s eleven feet deep and tight. It\u2019s fun, but it was not what I expected because I had seen videos of people ripping the thing apart. I was like, \u201cOh, I can\u2019t rip this thing apart.\u201d [Laughs]<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your favorite place to skate? Also, we need to touch on the fact that there\u2019s a huge amount of available skate terrain up in your neck of the woods.<\/strong>
\nYes, there is. I live in Portland. I don\u2019t live in Seattle. Wait. Can I tell you a story because this is funny. I was thinking about this as I was going to pick up Milo from school. Basically, I can indirectly credit you for me getting into punk rock.<\/p>\n

Good enough.<\/strong>
\nMy point of view is that it was you showing up at that awards show all punked out that got everybody else stoked on the punk rock thing, so I wouldn\u2019t have heard punk rock at all without being a skateboarder already and without you doing that.<\/p>\n

Yeah. Maybe. Whatever, but yeah. [Laughs]<\/strong>
\nI can also credit you directly and a few other people with me getting back into skateboarding.<\/p>\n

Well, let\u2019s forget them and just talk about me.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Okay, well, I work at that EMP Museum right?<\/p>\n

Yes. I know. I\u2019m only kidding.<\/strong>
\nWell, this is why I got the job. They showed me what they had for this exhibit that they were putting together and they were saying it was Dogtown that got all the skaters into punk rock. I was like, \u201cNo. That\u2019s not the story.\u201d I wrote this other version of it and they went with what I was dishing out and they hired me to do it. I wasn\u2019t even trying to get the job. I was just saying, \u201cDo you know this is wrong? You guys need to talk to Steve Olson.\u201d<\/p>\n

As my manager, I know you need your percentage. [Laughs]<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Yeah.<\/p>\n

That EMP deal was really quite a fun experience.<\/strong>
\nIt was great. I think we did a pretty good job on it, but I hadn\u2019t really thought about skateboarding in like five years or something at that point and then I had to start thinking about it and the first person I met was Duane. I met him in \u201898. We hit it off and became friends. I knew that I was going to come down to California and interview all of you guys, so I figured I\u2019d better get a skateboard again. [Laughs] Plus, there\u2019s a skatepark now at the Seattle Center, so all these old guys I used to skate with back in 1981 were getting boards together and meeting there early in the morning.<\/p>\n

That sounds like fun.<\/strong>
\nYeah. I was kind of over riding halfpipes, but that\u2019s all we had in the 80\u2019s up here, so I drifted away during that time. I didn\u2019t even like the way most of that stuff was looking. All the different handplants and stuff wasn\u2019t that exciting to me.<\/p>\n

I agree.<\/strong>
\nThat\u2019s why I drifted away from it, but it was really fun to get back into it because I met all you guys. I\u2019m talking to these teenage heroes of mine and you guys are all older than me and you\u2019re still skating, so I\u2019m like, \u201cFuck Why am I not skating?\u201d[Laughs]<\/p>\n

This is true. That was fun. Okay, so you have two children now?<\/strong>
\nI have two boys. I\u2019ve got Aldous Huxley. He\u2019s thirteen and Milo is nine.<\/p>\n

I think I met Milo.<\/strong>
\nYeah. He was really young when you met him. He was about three or something.<\/p>\n

I remember him well.<\/strong>
\nYep. He\u2019s wild. He\u2019s the one who always skates. Wait. I never told you where my favorite places to skate are.<\/p>\n

Oh, relax. I got side tracked. You guys have great skateparks.<\/strong>
\nWe have amazing stuff up here. I think one of my favorite parks and Milo\u2019s favorite park is in Seattle. It\u2019s the Eldridge Park. It\u2019s a Grindline Park. It\u2019s got an egg bowl and street stuff. It\u2019s got a flow bowl. It\u2019s got everything for everybody and it\u2019s really good. That would be one of my top picks for sure. In Portland, I really like Glen Haven, and Tigard is cool. Lincoln City is a little bit out of the way, so I don\u2019t get out there as often as I would like, but that thing\u2019s rad. Pier Park is the one with the full pipe.<\/p>\n

I know Pier Park.<\/strong>
\nThat bowl feels big to me now though. [Laughs] That thing is a beast. In Seattle, The West Seattle bowl, was really where I skated so much when I lived there. The Butter bowl is right next to it and it\u2019s a little bit smaller and less gnarly. That was my favorite bowl.<\/p>\n

That big bowl was gnarly.<\/strong>
\nThe big one is so gnarly. We rode it some, but not that often. They always joked that if you wanted to ride the Butter Bowl, you had to be able to drop into the big gnarly bowl first, which I did, but they never held me to it. They were such cool guys. All the Grindline dudes, like Monk, Mike Swim and Jay are all very nice guys.<\/p>\n

Yeah, and they build great parks. I love all those cats that build those parks. They\u2019re amazing.<\/strong>
\nYes. I don\u2019t know Red very well, but I\u2019ve met him.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s an excellent human being.<\/strong>
\nHe seems like it. He seems really wild. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

He\u2019s fucking fantastic.<\/strong>
\nI love Jeff\u2019s bowl too by the way.<\/p>\n

Oh, yes. I really like his outdoor bowl.<\/strong>
\nI like them both. I think they\u2019re both really fun.<\/p>\n

Right, but he needs some coke to wash that inside bowl.<\/strong>
\nIs it slippery?<\/p>\n

Well, it was that one time. It didn\u2019t matter. Lance Mountain was doing everyone\u2019s signature moves on all the boards. That was really funny. He was like, \u201cI got an Alva board. Oh okay. Light the coping on fire and I\u2019m going to go and do a frontside air.\u201d<\/strong>
\nRight. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

It was great. He was like, \u201cOkay. I got a Miller board. I\u2019m going to do a Miller flip.\u201d\u00a0[Laughs] It was funny. Anyway, why weren\u2019t you there?<\/strong>
\nBecause I was on tour.<\/p>\n

That answers that.<\/strong>
\nEvery time there\u2019s a total fun thing out at Jeff\u2019s house, I can\u2019t go. Somehow the timing is always wrong. One of my skate dudes and I spent a week out there, a year and a half ago. Mudhoney went out to do one show with Pearl Jam there, so we stayed at Jeff\u2019s house for the week and skated all day, everyday. It was amazing. Kim Peterson, the Montana girl, was there everyday. It was a fun session.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s from Missoula?<\/strong>
\nYeah. I met her out in Seattle before several times.<\/p>\n

How do you feel about skateboarding being so popular now?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know. It goes through weird phases. I can say that I love the way the young people are skating now and I wouldn\u2019t have said that ten years ago. I think all these parks are everywhere, so kids have all learned how to do everything now and they just blow my mind. The local kids here in Portland are so much better and more inventive at skateboarding than any generation ever. They\u2019re killing it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s so true.<\/strong>
\nYou have Ben Raybourn, and people like that. They crack me up. They\u2019re so good. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

It\u2019s mind blowing.<\/strong>
\nTotally. The street stuff I see people do now is so insane and it seems like it has more of a roots to old skateboarding than there was ten years ago, you know? It\u2019s like it\u2019s on steroids.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s amazing. I love it.<\/strong>
\nYeah. Me too. I can still do a frontside grind pretty great.<\/p>\n

Oh, stop it.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Oh, I wanted to tell you that I read an interview with your son, recently, which was awesome, so good work there.<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah. He\u2019s doing his thing.<\/strong>
\nTotally. It was a great interview. That\u2019s rad.<\/p>\n

He does his own thing, which is totally great. He takes piano lessons and he likes electronica. He loves all of that shit. He has his own radio show too. He does a little bit of everything, you know what I mean?<\/strong>
\nYeah. He turned out great.<\/p>\n

You know what? I went to see him in New York for his birthday and he has his radio show and he spins funky weird disco stuff that\u2019s not so popular and he was like, \u201cDo you want to come do the radio show with me?\u201d I was like, \u201cYeah. Why not? For sure.\u201d He\u2019s like, \u201cHere, just pick stuff off of YouTube and they can broadcast it that way.\u201d It was so fun because he was like, \u201cWould you talk into the mic?\u201d I was like, \u201cI\u2019m not here to talk into the mic. I\u2019m here to get music for the listeners.\u201d He was like, \u201cYeah, well, maybe you should talk into the mic and I\u2019ll take care of the music.\u201d I was like, \u201cUh, no.\u201d I would play something like Sister Sledge and he\u2019d be like, \u201cYou\u2019re old.\u201d It was so funny.<\/strong>
\n[Laughs] Well, I remember meeting him when he was a teenager at those EMP shows and he was hilarious back then.<\/p>\n

Yeah. He developed into his own person, which is so fun and great to see as a dad. Your kid, Aldous, is coming to that age soon.<\/strong>
\nYeah. He\u2019s fourteen and he\u2019s totally into music. He\u2019s got hair down to his butt. He\u2019s as tall as I am. He\u2019s six feet tall already and he\u2019s really into loud music. He plays bass and he\u2019s totally great. He\u2019s really, really, really smart and really into music and video games, of course, like all kids are.<\/p>\n

\n

“I was bombing down hills on a Big Wheel as a little kid. Anything where there was a little bit of danger involved, I was all for it.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I think video games are fine.<\/strong>
\nI do too. Milo is totally into Minecraft, which I think is actually a really creative, weird, weird game. I\u2019m not into video games, but I don\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n

Exactly. Neither was I, but I was totally like, \u201cOkay, yeah, for sure you can play video games. Why wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d It\u2019s such amazing hand eye coordination.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It\u2019s just part of the world now. It\u2019s a big part of their world. The only video game I\u2019ve touched recently was a Wi machine. You know that Tony Hawk game with the board that you stand on?<\/p>\n

Oh right.<\/strong>
\nAldous has never\u00a0been into skateboarding or anything like that, but I played it for the first time and he was like, \u201cOh my god, you\u2019re actually pretty good at that.\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cOh, I kind of am. That\u2019s weird.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Yes!<\/strong>
\nIt doesn\u2019t feel like it matters if you skateboard or not. It\u2019s like that Rock Band game with guitars. I play guitar and I can\u2019t do anything on that. It\u2019s so against the way I play guitar. I can\u2019t figure that thing out at all. I thought that it would be the same with the skateboard game, but I actually figured that out. That\u2019s the only place I\u2019ll ever do a kickflip.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] That\u2019s a perfect ending to this excellent interview.<\/strong>
\nOkay. It was nice talking to you. Later on.<\/p>\n

FOR THE REST OF THE STORY, ORDER ISSUE #72 BY CLICKING HERE\u2026<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Mudhoney\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MUDHONEY INTERVIEW & INTRODUCTION by STEVE OLSON PHOTO BY NIFFER CALDERWOOD MARK ARM:\u00a0When does it sound right? When you know it is… Scream when you sing. Love what it is that you do. Do it for what you need it to be. Never make exceptions, or try not to. Making it is making what it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4027,4028,4034],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-interviews","category-music-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MUDHONEY72-1-2.jpg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55447"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92318,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55447\/revisions\/92318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}