The single was delayed until August so Pavitt could fulfill his dream of pressing the record on turd-brown vinyl. More important, it was released in a limited edition (of eight hundred), an idea they borrowed from Amphetamine Reptile. Limiting supply, Pavitt and Poneman reasoned, would increase demand; that and their customized inner labels, colored vinyl, and bold artwork would automatically make Sub Pop releases collectible fetish objects. Lo and behold, the pressings sold out and then shops would put the records on display for exorbitant prices, providing invaluable validation for the bands, the label, and the nascent Seattle scene in general. When that first pressing of “Touch Me I’m Sick” sold out almost immediately, Sub Pop did a reissue of three thousand copies, getting around the limited edition tag by using a different shade of vinyl, also ensuring that a certain percentage of collectors would buy the single again just for the new color. The scam would be copied by countless other indie labels in the years to come.
MUDHONEY CLOWNING AT THEIR FIRST PHOTO SHOOT. LEFT TO RIGHT: MATT LUKIN, STEVE TURNER, DANNY PETERS, MARK ARM.
MICHAEL LAVINE
The second run of the “Touch Me I’m Sick” single also contained a key piece of image making. At some expense, Sub Pop flew out photographer Michael Lavine, one of Pavitt’s old Evergreen buddies, from New York for Mudhoney’s first photo shoot. As with so many Seattle bands, beer loomed large in the Mudhoney mythos, and the shoot had them piling on top of each other, shirtless, longhaired, and clutching cans of Rainier beer (the official Seattle rocker beer at the time simply because it was the cheapest). The images compiled what would become Sub Pop archetypes: male bonding, shaggy locks, and beer.
The members of Mudhoney were quite optimistic about their future—Arm and Peters vowed they’d never work again and quit their day jobs (Arm at Muzak, Peters as a messenger) solely because they had a single out. Turner could always come back to his job as an usher at a performance art space; Lukin could do his carpentry part-time.
Then Sonic Youth entered the picture. They’d kept in touch with Pavitt ever since that first visit to Seattle, and musical knowledge had passed freely between the two camps. Bob Whittaker recalls working at Sub Pop one day and reading a note from Moore on the bulletin board: “Hey you guys, check out this all-girl group from L.A. called Hole.” “And everyone was given the heads-up,” says Whittaker. “There was constant communication between everyone.”
Before the Mudhoney single had even been released, Pavitt sent Sonic Youth the Mudhoney five-song tape for their comment and immediately Sonic Youth proposed a split single, with each band playing a song by the other. The single, with Sonic Youth doing “Touch Me I’m Sick” and Mudhoney doing “Halloween,” was released in December ’88.
Early on, Minneapolis and New York were Sub Pop’s biggest fans. Minneapolitans got it because the loud, heavy music and beery nonchalance was clearly descended from what they’d already been enjoying for several years. But New Yorkers cottoned to Sub Pop because Sonic Youth had talked up its bands so much. “We owe, and the music scene of this city owes, a lot to Sonic Youth, because Sonic Youth spent years touring around the country, making records, and cultivating a real grassroots independent movement. It served them well to reinvest their interests and their endorsements into the various scenes across the country,” says Poneman. “They developed this influence and this clout and they shared it. It’s a very inclusive movement.”
Then came a great stroke of luck. In July ’88 Pavitt and Poneman attended the New Music Seminar in New York and bumped into their friend Reinhardt Holstein, who ran a German label called Glitterhouse. Holstein told them they should get in touch with a friend of his who was putting together a government-sponsored music convention in East Berlin called Berlin Independence Days. And somehow, even though the band was barely seven months old and very obscure, Pavitt and Poneman managed to get Mudhoney a show at the convention in October. “And they went over there,” says Pavitt, “and blew people away.”
“Hi! Hi! It’s great to be here! Hi! We’re from America! Howdy!” an excited Arm told the crowd before the band started playing. Later in the set he instructed the crowd to “pull down your pants if you like us.” No one did. A mock-dejected Arm quipped, “No one likes us.” But a number of key promoters did and soon a big European tour was arranged. It wasn’t just a big break for Mudhoney; it was a big break for Sub Pop. Suddenly the label was literally all over the map.
Mere days after they returned, Pavitt and Poneman having cleaned out their personal bank accounts in order to buy the group a van, Mudhoney was off on their first American tour. Along for the ride was their new buddy Bob Whittaker.
Whittaker had known Pavitt and Poneman from the Seattle punk rock circuit. One day he’d sat down to lunch with them and listened to them complain about not getting paid by distributors. “You guys should hire me—I’ll strong-arm those bastards,” Whittaker joked. “And they kind of looked at each other,” says Whittaker, “and went, ‘OK!’ ” And so, along with Charles Peterson and Steve Turner, Whittaker worked at Sub Pop, dunning delinquent distributors, pestering radio stations and record stores, packing up boxes of records, and serving as “refreshments coordinator” at Sub Pop parties; he’d get paid in lunches, records, and, occasionally, some cash.
A party animal par excellence, Whittaker was a loudmouth with a heart of gold, a master of uproariously buffoonish humor, and very bright to boot. So Mudhoney invited him to tour with them. “We didn’t have anything for him to do,” says Turner. “We didn’t have T-shirts, he didn’t know how to run sound, he didn’t know how to change a guitar string. He just came along largely as entertainment.” Pavitt and Poneman begged Whittaker not to leave the office for such a long time, but he went anyway, enduring Lukin’s Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes for the sake of seeing America with a rock & roll band.
Unfortunately, Mudhoney was touring on the strength of one single and were quite unknown; posters for the shows resorted to noting “ex-Melvins” or “ex–Green River,” which really wasn’t much of a hook. Attendance, needless to say, was light—usually no more than a few dozen people. “We’d show up and there’d be the odd, really excited couple of kids that worked at the college radio station,” recalls Whittaker.
And in best indie tradition, their van was a nightmare. “You’d shift and the linkage would drop out,” Whittaker says. “You’d have to send somebody running down the freeway to get parts of it.” To make matters worse, the heating ducts had been pulled out, so air blew into the van with gale force. Even after stuffing coats and rags into the holes, the two people sitting up front would have to stuff themselves into sleeping bags and wear funny Norwegian hats with ear flaps. Exhaust streamed into the back of the van so that, as Turner puts it, whoever was in the loft bunk “would get very sleepy.”
Whittaker refused basic touring responsibilities like carrying amps. “Basically all he was doing was finding us places to stay, going out in the crowd and finding the weakest one in the pack and convincing them to let us stay at their house by promising them a fun party,” says Turner. “It was fun for the first two weeks, but after that we were just grumpy and exhausted.” Then it became a nightly battle over who got to sleep in the van instead of putting up with the raging party at the house.
The first show of the tour, in Salt Lake City, was a disaster—they’d driven for hours through pouring rain, sat through something like eight local bands, and then played terribly. To top it off, Whittaker got so drunk that he started pouring beer on Arm and Turner while they played.
But the tour’s low point was a show in Lexington, Kentucky, where they played to virtually nobody. The guitarists actually set up on the floor of the club and slam-danced with the handful of kids who showed up. The club could only afford to pay the band $14, two packs of cigarettes, and a six-pack of Sprite. Mudhoney never returned to Lexington.
In Kansas City they played a show at a YMCA for perhaps twenty-five people, then went to a party some hardcore kids were throwing dow
n the street. The band arrived to find a basement full of skinheads who had wrapped themselves in big cardboard boxes and were happily bashing each other around the room. “People were inventing their own scenes because there was nothing else going on,” says Turner, adding that by the time of their next U.S. tour, regional variations in things like slam dancing had gotten erased by MTV. “It went from each town having its own little story to it being kind of the same group of people in every town.”
Just to break up the boredom, Whittaker picked up a long blond wig, a fake mustache, and some greasepaint. A few shows into the tour, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when depression and monotony were already beginning to set in, he put on the disguise, along with a blacked-out tooth. Soon, a drunken older woman, also with a missing tooth, took a shine to this tall blond stranger and attached herself to him. “I love this band!” she shrieked over and over throughout the set, and proceeded to write lyrics for the band on napkins all night long.
When they reached Maxwell’s in Hoboken, writer R. J. Smith did a piece on the band for the Village Voice. A piece in the Voice was a big deal for a fledgling label like Sub Pop. “That tour really put Seattle on the map because prior to that, nobody cared about Seattle, there weren’t any bands from Seattle touring that anybody cared about,” says Pavitt. “Mudhoney went out in that crappy van and blew people away.”
All things considered, the going was far easier than on the early Green River tours. “There was all this groundwork that had been done before,” says Arm. “By the time Mudhoney was up and going, there was a complete network of local promoters all over the country. Even though our first tour was $100 shows, we were able to do these shows, whereas Green River just a few years earlier didn’t have anything out and didn’t have a booking agent; we just spent a lot of our own money calling up various venues and trying to get in and watch that fall through as we’re driving to the places that we think we’re playing.”
And things started to click, especially when the Superfuzz Bigmuff EP came out halfway through the tour, in October ’88. (The title came from the fact that Turner played the Big Muff distortion pedal and Arm played one called the Superfuzz—both were long out of production and considered uncool, antiquated technology; you could only find them in junk stores. But Arm says the attraction was obvious: “It was like, ‘This is cheap, let’s buy it!’ ”) The record was wall-to-wall garage blues; tough stop-and-start riffs punctuate Arm’s abraded yowlings, strafed by Turner’s leering slide guitar chords. “In ’n’ Out of Grace” features a minute-long bass-and-drum solo followed by a full-fledged wah-wah guitar freak-out. The hell-for-leather garage attack was tempered by beery sing-along choruses—one critic described the sound as “the Banana Splits meet the MC5,” which was hilariously on target.
Contrary to the band’s rowdy wiseguy image, Arm’s lyrics were filled with dark imagery—of damaged lovers, emotional suffocation, self-hatred, alienation, and tons of guilt. But Arm steadfastly denies any heavy meaning. “They’re just observations or experiences,” says Arm. “Nothing’s straight, though—I mean, why let the truth get in the way of a good story? Not that I think any of the stories are particularly good. They’re just there to fill in the space between guitar solos and drum breaks.” But Arm’s denials of any particular import to his lyrics were at odds with the paint-peeling vitriol of their content and delivery. (Many of Arm’s songs somehow mentioned either dogs or sickness, but he never did quite put it all together: “We kept hoping he’d come in with a song about a sick dog.” says Turner drily, “but he never did.”)
Arm’s vocals leaped between a snide whine, an anguished holler, and a caustic shriek that could singe eyelashes at fifty paces; as even he acknowledged, he didn’t sing so much as “howl and stuff.” Arm’s and Turner’s guitars combined to make a caustic, distorted grind; Lukin provided an innard-rattling low-end throb; and Peters—the band’s secret weapon—barked out spectacular, speedy rolls that seemed to shoot the songs’ rhythms out of a cannon.
The band readily acknowledged that they borrowed ideas rather than making up their own. “That’s all you can do today,” Turner explained. “I think you’re kinda fooling yourself as a rock band if you think you’re doing something really original.” The band veered widely between parodying primal forms like Sixties garage and biker rock and reveling in them—they seemingly couldn’t decide if they were a joke or not. “There is room for real emotion in music,” Turner said, “but I don’t know if that’s what we are. I don’t really care.” But there was no denying their chemistry, especially live. When Mudhoney set aside their self-consciousness and just put their heads down and rocked, they could be one of the best rock & roll bands on the planet.
The nation’s fanzines seemed to agree and gave Superfuzz Bigmuff a rousing thumbs-up. A Flipside review enthused, “The children born during the Summer of Love are getting drunk in dingy bars, peace man. Take a trip to get this record. Tune in, turn it up.”
They returned to Seattle barely long enough to catch their breath before heading out for a tour of the West Coast and Southwest with Sonic Youth.
Superfuzz was now in stores and winning consistent raves in the fanzines, there were many more people in the front row singing along to the songs, and the general buzz on the band was strong. But the band was still a bit nervous about performing, and Arm and Turner would work off the tension by cutting up onstage—tossing their guitars to each other across the stage midsong, striking silly ballet poses, making absurd between-song banter, or just rolling on the floor—then launch right into another dark and fuzzy musical psychodrama.
Sonic Youth did more than provide an influential endorsement. Mudhoney needed $150 a night to stay on the road, and Sonic Youth would always make up the difference if Mudhoney fell short some nights. And even better, Sonic Youth invited Mudhoney on their upcoming tour of England, which was a godsend—Mudhoney had lined up a European tour, but the U.K. remained notoriously difficult for American underground bands to crack.
The two-week tour with Sonic Youth kicked off at the end of March ’89. Blast First had recently released the Sonic Youth/Mudhoney split single in the U.K., and very smartly included an itinerary for the tour with every record. Even better, ultra-influential BBC DJ John Peel was now raving about Sub Pop and Mudhoney in particular and played “Touch Me I’m Sick” constantly; the English music weeklies were also enthralled by the band and rarely wasted an opportunity to use variations on the phrase “Touch Me I’m Sick” for headlines. Superfuzz Bigmuff sold about five thousand copies in Europe and wound up staying on the U.K. indie charts for a year, virtually unheard of for an American label.
The first show of the tour was in Newcastle. The crowd had been hyped into a frenzy by the advance publicity and the Sonic Youth endorsement—many surely recalled Dinosaur Jr, the last band Sonic Youth got behind. The first thing Arm did was wade into the audience, where he was promptly swarmed by fans. Then Thurston Moore stage-dived right after him. “The crowd is fucking going apeshit,” recalls Turner. “It was the greatest reception we’ve ever gotten. And it was because nobody’d seen us yet.”
In Manchester some of the audience starting spitting on Mudhoney, apparently thinking the old punk custom still prevailed in the States. Arm deadpanned into the mike that although gobbing was not a Seattle thing, it was very much appreciated in Sonic Youth’s hometown of New York. The hail of saliva stopped, then resumed tenfold when Sonic Youth hit the stage. By one report, Thurston Moore’s hair was matted with spit and he would periodically have to flick the spew off his hands.
The somewhat older, relatively straitlaced members of Sonic Youth were practically aghast at Mudhoney’s behavior. “It was almost like they were on a trail of carnage,” recalls Lee Ranaldo. “They were completely living out the life of the kind of the rock & rollers they were supposed to be. They were constantly fucked up, constantly on the edge of chaos and collapse and all that stuff…. Mudhoney were just real heavy dopers and boozers, and they would go
at it until literally they were not able to be conscious anymore…. They would polish off a couple of cases of beer before getting onstage.” Ranaldo says his quintessential Mudhoney memory is of Matt Lukin standing on a chair at one after-show party, completely drunk, stripped down to his undershorts, his body covered with felt-pen drawings of penises. “They were really living it to the bone,” says Ranaldo. “We were all astounded.”
A DEFINITIVE CHARLES PETERSON PHOTO OF MUDHONEY LIVE AT THE BACKSTAGE, SEATTLE, 1991.
CHARLES PETERSON
Throughout the tour Mudhoney joined Sonic Youth for the encores, jamming on the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”; Lukin would invariably show up with tambourine in hand and pants around ankles. “He discovered his body and suddenly started dropping his pants and getting completely naked,” Turner says, with more wonderment than scorn.
“Matt became a cartoon one day,” he adds. “And stayed that way for a good while.”
Afterward Mudhoney went on to do six more weeks in Europe, where they were virtually unknown. The German dates went well because of Sub Pop’s licensing deal there, as well as the buzz from the first Berlin show. But the rest of the Continent was a different story, and they played tiny venues and dirt-floor basement squats for little or no money. In France “we played for, like, twenty people in some kind of government-funded youth camp,” Turner recalled. “There was no stage; we just played in the corner of the room. After we finished our twelve songs or whatever, they actually locked arms and said, ‘You cannot leave this corner.’ So we had to play some of the songs again.”
“Then they made us eat casserole,” Arm grumbled.
About three weeks into the tour, Turner somehow managed to slice his hand open on a broken car antenna in Hamburg. By the time he was discharged from the hospital, it was touch and go as to whether they’d make it in time for their show with Sonic Youth in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, that night. Their driver floored it to the show, with Arm, Lukin, and Peters all slugging vodka in the back of the van the whole way, distressed about Turner’s hand, which was now encased in a huge wad of gauze. They arrived at the venue ten minutes before show time.
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