Original subtitles

- Any time you're playing music

for the crowd instead of yourself,

you're fucked.

["I'm Now" by Mudhoney playing]

♪ Well, I still see that look in her eyes

♪ Passing through security, waving goodbye

♪ I had no idea that would be the last time

♪ I had no idea about that look in her eyes

♪ No

♪ Aw, that look in her eyes

♪ That look in her eyes

♪ Well, the black light was my baby

♪ And the strobe light was my mind

♪ The past made no sense, the future looks tense

♪ The past made no sense, the future looks tense

♪ I'm now

- [Voiceover] You turned 21 this year.

- [Voiceover] It's not a matter of referencing the past,

although you can, and there's certainly

things you can draw from.

It's not a matter of trying to be the future,

'cause you don't know what the future is.

You know, their point is, we do it now.

We do it our way, and we continually do it now,

day after day after day,

which is why they've survived.

♪ I'm now

["Touch Me I'm Sick" by Mudhoney]

♪ I've been bad

♪ I've been worse

♪ I'm a creep

♪ Yeah, I'm a jerk

♪ C'mon

♪ Touch me, I'm sick

- You know, I'm grateful this whole thing

didn't peter out 15 years ago,

that, you know, people still give a shit about us

and that we can go virtually wherever we want,

you know, when we want to,

and people are happy to have us.

I mean, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do that.

- I mean, we're pretty much outside of

any kind of cultural existence.

We exist in the past in a lot of people's minds, you know?

So there's a certain amount of nostalgia and stuff to it,

but I mean, you can't get away from that, really.

If it's valuable to other people,

if they like it, that's great,

but I think we would do it regardless. [laughing]

We would still play in the basement sometimes, I think,

you know, no matter what, so...

Ah, can I get a beer?

[crowd cheering]

- People oftentimes believe

that if they have heard of a band,

that the people in that band are well-to-do

and that they have a super glamorous lifestyle

and life is easy

and it's not always that, especially with independent bands.

So the funny thing is when we send out our packages,

it's actually listed as Mark Arm,

as the person having sent the package to anybody,

so this is to record stores who receive our records,

these are to mail-order customers who get our stuff.

Mark Arm sends all of our shit to everybody

in the world, basically.

- It's unbelievable that a legend

have to work a normal work to live in,

they can't live only doing the rock and roll.

Some people think that making rock and roll

as a second work, as a hobby,

helps to stay pure to the spirit.

- That's a working man's aesthetic.

I'm gonna certainly make sure that whatever I'm sending out

is gonna go to the right address on time

to the person that it's addressed to.

You know, in a way, that's what a great rock band does.

You know, they go in, they write their songs,

and they go out and play them

and they address them to the people they wanna reach,

and they do it directly, and they do it with no bullshit.

- Right, OK, I'm here backstage at the [mumbling] Theaters

[laughing] with Mudhoney,

and we're just going over some of the

finer parts of their European tour.

- So, night after night, another motel room,

another backstage, are you getting tired

of the rock and roll life at all, Mr. Mudhoney People?

[rock playing]

- Here's a fuckin' band that got it right.

It was like the coolest thing I've heard

since like Fun House, as far as that kinda rock goes.

I mean, Steve and Mark's fuzzy guitars together

fuckin' sounded awesome.

Their ability to kind of connect the 60s

to 80s punk rock, and they're a very 60s-sounding band.

They don't get a lot of credit for that.

- There's a certain amount of chaos happening

because Steve's guitar tone is so distorted,

but in a beautiful way, just the perfect way.

A distorted guitar that was like a jagged knife

ripping through like a whale's belly,

and then the guts come out

with Mark's voice when he's screaming.

[screaming]

- I remember when they first started,

sort of being a little puzzled and going,

"Are you sure you want the guitars to be this dirty?"

I think was probably the only comment I made

at the beginning of the session, like,

"Boy, that's pretty dirty, guys."

Of course, the word, the adjective "grungy"

had not occurred to any of us, I think, at that point.

[laughing]

But it's pretty goddamn grungy.

[laughing]

- The Seattle scene was theirs.

Being with them was being chauffeured

through town by the mayors.

The parties were all fantastic,

and it was just a great moment in time.

- The critics said, "Well, Mudhoney's this"

and, "Blah ba dee blah,"

and, "They're unsuccessful because

"they didn't have the success of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam,"

and it's like, "Fuck you!"

That's a fucking amazing band!

- They were the powder keg.

They were the first great Seattle

quote unquote "grunge band."

[rock music]

- No pretensions, no big egos,

no hassle, just

having a good time all the time.

- They are the people who would be watching them.

That's what makes them an incredibly honest band.

- They got nice pants.

- Amazing vintage guitars.

- Yeah, good equipment, good hairdos.

- Amazing songs.

And they love to drink.

- They would just pour beer and fill up everybody's glasses

and you'd have the funnest fucking time

you could ever imagine.

- Everybody was welcome, actually,

in the dressing room to party.

We had like seven crates of beer

and four bowls of strong liquor,

and it would be gone before they would go.

♪ Revolution

- [Voiceover] So you feel that you can communicate

to the public regardless of any language barriers.

- Well, I think the penis is international.

- Dealing with those guys, you always kinda knew

that you would get them aboard of an idea,

but then they would take the idea

and do it completely their own way,

so there was a cheesy soundtrack that was coming out.

It's a scene where a guy is running

through a college campus,

so they wrote a song called, "Run Shithead Run,"

and then they sent it off to the filmmaker.

♪ Run, run

♪ Run

♪ Run, shithead, run

- So that song is on the soundtrack

and every once in awhile we get these nice little

50-cent royalty checks for a song called "Run Shithead Run."

- That was the last soundtrack we did. [laughing]

[rock music]

- They also were certainly leaders in

sort of sculpting Seattle rock and roll history,

from fashion to the music.

- Take away Mudhoney, nothing would've happened. Nothing.

I honestly believe that, because they got people

from beyond the Pacific Northwest interested.

[rock music]

- They were, like, kind of inspired us to play harder.

Going on after them was so hard all the time

because they had so much energy.

- I mean, it was these two guys with these shitty guitars

rocking, just rocking out.

[rock music]

- [Voiceover] They'd throw out a trampoline.

The set would start and they'd jump around

and flail their guitars about.

- I'd see Mark bend all the way backwards

to where he was on his knees and all the way back

and then he'd come back up,

and they're flying around the stage

like a bunch of marionettes.

- They reach a kind of apotheosis

where everybody in the crowd had like an epiphanic moment

where the future of music was revealed, just for a moment.

[rock music]

- They really motivated a lot of musicians

and photographers and producers

and you name it, they were just a motivational force.

- Even in Seattle, where you had this gold rush

for two, three, four years,

this intense attention of media,

record companies, business,

the guys in Mudhoney were kind of seen as stable,

as guys who actually had their shit together.

- I've worked with a lot of other bands.

They get together for sound check.

When it's done, they all go their separate ways,

and then they come back together for the show.

The Mudhoney guys, except for the odd occasion

where someone's got a friend in town or something like that,

and a reason to go off on their own,

they all just basically stick together,

and I think that they're some of the best of friends.

I guess put it that way.

♪ I'm a creep, yeah

♪ And I'm a jerk

♪ C'mon, touch me, I'm sick

♪ I'm diseased

♪ And I don't mind

♪ Gonna make you love me

♪ 'Til the day we die

♪ Oh

♪ Touch me, I'm sick

♪ Come on

♪ Touch me, I'm sick

♪ Come on, baby, now come with me

♪ If you don't come

♪ If you don't come

♪ If you don't come

♪ You'll die alone

[crowd cheering]

- [Voiceover] Mark Arm, you just played Pukkelpop.

What next?

- I wanna get high!

[rock music]

I think my voice is basically genetic.

I moved here when I was four years old.

Before that, I'd been living in Germany

on an air force base.

I just, I guess, felt like kind of an outsider,

a foreigner, strange.

Yeah, music was always around.

My mom was an opera singer whose career

got kind of cut off because of the Second World War.

She was in Germany and, you know, kind of at the time

that her career would've been taking off,

that's when the war broke out.

You know, I gravitated towards rock and roll.

It was music that was kind of forbidden in my household,

so that was like another kind of thing

that was another attraction to it,

and my parents had a Volkswagen,

and the great thing about Volkswagen Bugs in those days

was you could just go into them

and turn on the radio and it would work,

so I would listen to the top 40 radio station at the time

and hope to hear, you know, the kind of more rocking songs.

As a kid getting into punk rock,

I kept reading about and hearing about

this band The Stooges.

The third album, "Raw Power," you could find as a cutout.

It was like three dollars or something like that,

but the first two records were impossible to find.

I finally found them in a small record store in Oregon.

I bought the first one, listened to it a ton,

and then like a week or two later,

when I had enough money again, I bought "Fun House,"

and it was like, "Holy crap."

You know, like, "This is it."

Mr. Epp had been kind of an imaginary band in high school,

named after a math teacher.

The full name of the band was Mr. Epp and the Calculations.

At some point it kind of turned into a real band

where we actually bought instruments.

We would just get feedback and think we were Jimi Hendrix.

You know, like the part in live Jimi Hendrix records

between the songs. [laughing]

[rock scream]

To kind of promote Mr. Epp,

I wrote a letter to the editor

from the point of view of someone

who had gone to see Mr. Epp and thought they were crap.

I think I said something like,

"They're pure shit, pure grunge."

You know, that's not the first use

of the word "grunge" to describe music.

In Australia, in the early 80s,

there was like The Scientists and The Beasts of Bourbon.

Those bands were called grunge

by the press down there.

Tex Perkins at one point was

called the high priest of grunge,

which apparently caused Tex to punch that guy in the face.

- [Voiceover] But what we've all heard about

is the so-called "grunge rock" from Seattle.

Grunge is not a term Seattleites are particularly fond of.

- You know, when all that shit was going on,

I said, "Yeah, it's your fault,

"you fucking invented grunge."

- You didn't label the genre by just describing the sound.

From there, so and so,

"Oh, that's the genre reference we'll use."

At the time, no one accepted it.

Everyone thought, "What?"

- Grunge is stuff that gets on your dishes

that you try to scrub off.

♪ Losing myself again

- If he coined the word, God bless him,

he should be getting royalties.

If he didn't, I think he should consider himself lucky,

because it's a nasty word, and I think it actually

became kind of an epithet.

It was a way to very briskly, conveniently,

and almost dismissively describe

a style of music that I think had

much deeper roots in discontent.

- You know, people, when they think of grunge,

they think of, like, heavy,

like a lot of trees and a lot of rain, and,

I was gonna say mud. [laughing]

- [Voiceover] I mean, it was just, essentially,

a different way of saying "punk rock," I guess.

- Just because you're nerd rock

doesn't mean you're smarter than us.

- Well, look, see these glasses?

- [Voiceover] Steve invented kind of being a hip nerd.

Back in the 80s, 90s, it was not cool to be a nerd,

but Steve was like an intellectual.

- [Voiceover] Steve Turner was called

"the Eric Clapton of Grunge" in Rolling Stone Magazine.

- "The Eric Clapton of grunge." [laughing]

- The next records, still to this day,

kind of like goes against the guitar solo whenever you can.

- A lot of his old solos were almost like

lampooning the idea of a guitar solo.

They were anti-solos.

[rock music]

- My brother had an acoustic guitar

and then he had the Beatles songbooks

and the Eagles.

Learned how to sing and play "Rocky Raccoon"

and "Desperado" in eighth grade,

and then I didn't touch a guitar again

'til a couple years later,

after I'd gotten into punk rock a little bit.

Black Flag and Devo kind of showed up at the same time.

That summer, they came to Seattle

and that was my first rock concert I got to go see,

and that was huge, because they used

skaters in their videos.

All the skateboarders around Seattle went to it,

so it was this huge thing.

That's why my parents figured they could allow me to go,

because they figured a group of tin skaters

couldn't possibly get into any trouble. [laughing]

The punk scene was just so different

from what I thought it was gonna be like, you know?

And they seemed so much smarter

and cooler to me than any other group I'd seen so far

as far as at gatherings, social gatherings.

- Steve and I early on had a kind of musical kinship.

He was one of the few people who,

when he met me, said he actually liked Mr. Epp. [laughing]

- I joined a band called Spluii Numa,

and I left that after just a couple practices

'cause they told me I had to get all new gear.

The guitar player was a real tech guy.

He looked at my amp, said, "Nope,"

looked at my guitar, said, "Nope,

"none of this is good enough."

So then, right after that, that summer,

I joined Mr. Epp with Mark.

- The first time I met Mark Arm, I saw Green River,

and it was a pretty awesome show.

It was at the Central.

I remember walking up to him and saying,

"Man, that was a great show, dude.

"I got some pot, you wanna go smoke some?"

[rock music]

- At the time, the Green River Killer

was in all the headlines.

I think it was just trying to be

as provocative as we could be,

and it retrospect it's regrettable.

It's what you do when you're 20 years old and obnoxious.

- I remember the first time I saw them,

I was like, "Holy cow, what is Mark doing?"

He really was able to sort of express himself

and let out his angst.

- They went from being folks that I had seen around town

and that I'd do shifts with

to being like rock heroes.

There was a lot of stuff that went in

to what made Green River who they were.

Some of the components were

this kind of glammy metal.

- He definitely took that stage persona

through into Mudhoney,

sort of minus the sequin pants.

[laughing]

- I do remember going to check out

the early Green River shows

and being, really, kind of blown away by them.

Steve Turner was in Green River at the time.

- We didn't really know Jeff Ament that well,

but we'd seen him play with Deranged Diction,

who we thought were cool,

and he jumped really high and played through distortion.

Seemed very important to us at the time,

so Steve kind of went on this campaign

to get to know Jeff by getting a job

at the same espresso place that he worked at. [laughing]

- I could tell that Mark and Steve were

into music and into kind of making something happen,

so I went to a couple practices.

- That's how Green River started.

[rock music]

- The "Rehab Doll" album by Green River

was the first record that Jonathan and I

put out on Sub Pop in spring of '88.

We emptied our coffers of about, I think, $5000,

which was like

a massive fortune for us at the time.

♪ Now I wouldn't mind

♪ If you swallowed my pride

- And, unfortunately, as soon as the band

handed us a master tape, they told us they were breaking up,

so that was kind of our grand opening release

and we realized we were probably gonna

go out of business within a month.

- [Voiceover] We're down in L.A., opening up for

Jane's Addiction and Junkyard.

- I remember Stone and I were up on the side of the stage

watching Jane's Addiction, just going like,

"Oh my god, this is incredible."

And I remember Mark and Bruce coming up at different times,

saying how lame they thought it was,

and I remember thinking, "Wow."

I think any hope that I had

that I thought that Green River could be

as good as Jane's Addiction,

because Mark didn't like Jane's Addiction,

for me, that felt like there was a big chasm there.

I remember just being kind of bummed.

- Whether people say Jane's Addiction split them up,

it was just a moment in time

where it sort of became more evident.

- And then when they split into

Mother Love Bone and Mudhoney,

there was no doubt that we were going to work with Mudhoney.

- The separation that sort of launched Mudhoney,

which is fantastic from a marketing point of view,

it's like, you know, the two sellouts went one direction

and the purists-- [laughing]

the purists went the other, and we've got the purists,

and they had a fantastic band, you know,

I mean, Mudhoney was fantastic.

We saluted them as soon as we saw them.

We were like, "Wow, that's so much better

"than Green River was."

[rock music]

[rock scream]

- Green River broke up, I was like,

"What am I gonna do now?"

The first thought that occurred to me

was, "Maybe I should call Steve."

He was going to school up in Bellingham at the time,

and I called him and I was like,

"Hey, Green River broke up.

"Why don't you drop out of school?" [laughing]

[orchestra playing "Auld Lang Syne"]

[rock music]

That is the day, New Year's Day, 1988,

that we mark as the beginning of the band.

That's like the band's birthday.

- The night before, everybody was

kind of converging on the Seattle [mumbling]

to go to the Coliseum to see Motorhead

open up for Alice Cooper.

Matt was coming into town for that show, so we figured,

"OK, we'll get together the next day with Matt."

- It was really not a whole lot of thought.

We weren't, like, auditioning. [laughing]

There was very little thought.

It came together really easily.

- I was 20 at this point, so I couldn't buy beer.

I walk into the store with Matt,

and just kind of meeting him,

and I'm like, "Hey, wanna buy me some beer?

"I'll give you some money,"

and he was like, "Yeah," and I give him some money,

and he grabs himself a half-case of beer,

he's like, "Well, I got mine,"

and I'm like, "Whoo, he's got his,"

and it was like a half-case of beer,

and I'm like, "Well, can you get me one too?"

- I knew of him, just from the bands he was in,

but I never really personally met him

until I was in a car with him, being taken to practice,

and he steps in the backseat with me.

"Hey, nice to meet you!"

He was wearing a beret. [laughing]

That's another thing I forgot about until just now.

He was wearing a beret, and I'm like,

"Oh, what's up with this drummer?" [laughing]

But I fell in love with him. [laughing]

- [Voiceover] Mudhoney can influence your very life.

A rewarding experience that you shall never forget.

- Steve and I were very into B-movies,

psychotronic movies.

One of those directors that we really liked was Russ Meyer.

- [Voiceover] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to sex.

You have just witnessed some scenes

from Russ Meyer's sadistically sensual motion picture

"Mudhoney," a taste of evil.

- I thought, "You know, that's a pretty cool name,"

and kind of stored it, you know,

like, "If I ever have another band,

"that might be a really good name to use."

- You better get your hands outta there!

You're gonna get in trouble!

[maniacal laughing]

- I haven't seen it for so long.

It's the one with the preacher talking in black and white

and spouting off all sorts of Biblical nonsense,

and there's a buxom blonde white trash kind of lady

running around the swamps, right?

- There's a preacher.

I don't know, it's boobs.

[laughing]

- [Voiceover] Steeped with the flavor of evil.

- I don't remember much of it other than that.

[laughing] Seriously!

- [Voiceover] For a taste of evil, see Mudhoney.

- I remember Mark saying that he introduced himself,

I think, to Dan Peters,

and told him he should join Mudhoney,

while pushing in front of him at some Seattle Club

in the queue for the toilet so he could vomit.

It was like, "We're starting a new band!

"It's called Mudhoney!" [vomiting]

Like that, you know.

- Dan Peters, greatest fucking drummer in the world.

[rock music]

- Nobody sounds like Dan Peters.

You can hear drumming on anything,

even if he's like on a Mark Lanegan record or whatever,

sessions he's done, you can always tell

in about two seconds, "That's Dan Peters on the drums.

"I recognize that feel, I recognize that drum fill,

"I can totally tell by the way he's hitting the snare drum."

Danny is completely unique.

[rock music]

- My mom was a lounge singer.

She had bands

and sang six, seven nights a week.

I got my first pair of drumsticks at a fairly early age.

I used to sit around and, you know,

act like I had a drum set in front of me.

My uncle was in a band,

and the singer of that band told me

he had an extra drum set.

A band like Gang of Four really changed

the way I thought of music and listened to music.

X. Dead Kennedys.

My math teacher knew that I had listened to punk rock,

so [mumbling] this weird guy.

He asked me to bring in some punk rock

to play for the class, I'm like,

"Ah, all right, I'll do that,"

and I made a cassette tape of a Dead Kennedys song.

So the whole class is sitting down, getting ready,

they're like, "Dan's gonna play you some punk rock,"

I'm like, "Yeah, this is gonna be good."

So I press play. The song starts up.

["Forward to Death" by Dead Kennedys]

Like the lyrics are like, "I don't need this fucking world,

"I don't need this fucking world,

"This world gets me down,"

and he's like, "OK, Dan, stop!" [laughing]

Kinda like, "Ah, well, you wanted to hear it."

♪ I don't need this fucking world

♪ This world brings you down

- [Voiceover] One beer down, and he's fucking gonna snap.

- What? - [Voiceover] Nothing.

- Look at this, I got a disease last night.

- [Voiceover] Where'd you get that at?

- [Voiceover] I don't know, I had a bunch of

open sores on my hand and I was rolling around on my floor.

I passed out, and [mumbling] somebody diseased me!

- [Voiceover] Matt Lukin was the mud in the honey.

- The guy had a brilliant and surreal sense of humor.

He was a work of art.

- I woke up at about 11:00 in the morning and came down,

and he was sitting in front of the TV, smoking,

taking hits out of a bong, and watching an AC/DC video,

and I thought, "This is exactly what I would imagine,"

almost too much so, like he staged it,

but he was serious, he wasn't joking.

That's what he did.

- His whole family said, "Don't go into the music business.

"Don't do it. Get a job, become a carpenter."

So pretty soon he was like,

"Yeah, they didn't want me to be a musician,

"but I'm the first fucking Lukin who ever made it to Europe,

"to Japan, to Australia, whatever."

So he was the first Lukin going around the world,

being a rock star.

This is Matt Lukin, right there for you.

[laughing] So crazy guy!

Amazing guy.

- As a young kid, I remember playing singles

of like Black Sabbath and shit like that,

but it scared me at the same time. [laughing]

But when I got older, I was like,

"Yeah, this is the stuff." [laughing]

I didn't really get into guitar until I was about 13 or 14.

Then I got one and I'd sit there and pluck away.

We were just friends or whatever, hanging out.

The guy who played bass was the cousin of the drummer

but he would rarely show up, but he had a bass and an amp,

and I'd be there with my guitar, but it's like,

"Well, there's no one here to play bass.

"Why don't you play bass?"

[rock song]

Buzz's girlfriend played bass and she replaced me,

so that was pretty much,

since I didn't have a pussy [laughing]

I was no longer needed in the band.

He found a bass player that had a pussy and would fuck him.

[laughing]

[bass riff]

Then when I joined Mudhoney, I was like,

"This stuff's fucking great.

"It's just good rock and roll,"

which is all anybody wants anyway, isn't it?

It's just good rock.

- I was working at a Japanese restaurant,

and this chef there seemed like

he'd already been through the punk wars

and, you know, had gone pop, sort of

and was into kind of synthpop stuff.

I was talking about guitar and I was like,

"I just can't really get it to sound the way I want it to,"

and he asked me what distortion box I was using,

and I didn't know what that was.

I was like, "Huh?"

He just kind of smiled and the next day,

he handed me a Super Fuzz, said, "Here, try this."

[rock music]

It was a serious revelation,

because it's not just a distortion box,

it's fuzz, you know.

It's like really, really deep, thick fuzz.

And so that just blew my mind.

[rock music]

By the time that Mudhoney started,

I was playing the Big Muff because it had

more of that sustain, kind of like

Blue Cheer, Stooges kind of thing going.

And so Mark used the Super Fuzz.

♪ Sweet young thing ain't sweet no more

♪ Sweet young thing ain't sweet no more

♪ Sweet young thing ain't sweet no more ♪

- [Voiceover] So here's the original 8-track reel.

Inside is what passes for a track sheet

at that point in my career.

I think I'd only been a recording engineer

for maybe a year and a half.

- When we did that single, we really wanted

to put, like, our best foot forward.

This is our chance to make a statement,

and we didn't really know if we were going to do

anything more than that first single,

so we were like, "We're gonna put our two best songs on it

"and that'll be it," and that could be

the only document that this band would ever have.

- You know, here's the initial salvo.

It's kind of the opening salvo of grunge, in a lot of ways.

I think people would look at it that way now.

[rock music]

- What you're going to hear about today

is nothing short of a miracle.

It's dramatically new.

["Touch Me I'm Sick" by Mudhoney]

♪ I've been bad

♪ And I've been worse

- [Voiceover] That's the apotheosis

of what rock and roll should sound like.

♪ Yeah, I'm a jerk

- "Touch me, I'm sick"

is a pretty extraordinary thing to say.

♪ Touch me, I'm sick

You think, there are eight million ways to say

"I love you" or "I don't love you" in rock and roll.

"Touch me, I'm sick," that was one I hadn't heard before.

- It was exciting and vital.

It sounded really punk as fuck, too.

♪ Touch me, I'm sick

- That record was so in demand that they flew out the door.

One of those classic singles that captured the time.

♪ If you don't come

♪ You'll die alone

- It did not get on radio in any kind of widespread way.

There was something that the insiders,

the know-it-alls knew,

but it really had a strong viral effect

to the point now that it is in its own way a hit.

[rock music]

♪ Sweet young ain't sweet no more

♪ Sweet young ain't sweet no more ♪

- As a label, we really tried

to work the collector's market,

doing colored vinyl editions of all the 45s.

- We worked with Erika Records for weeks

getting samples of a good shit brown,

and they'd send us kind of like a veiny purple,

a baby shit brown, and we were like,

"No, no, no, no, this has gotta be

"a firm, adult, dog shit brown."

They finally got it.

- Here's a little-known fact.

I remember Jonathan and Steve and I went out to lunch

and the whole idea for the Sub Pop Singles Club came out

during a conversation about record collecting

and how we could sell more records,

and Steve was probably the deepest record collector

of anybody in the band.

- I mean, I remember the first record I bought.

When I was in first or second grade,

I bought an Elvis Presley record

for 25 cents at a garage sale.

I still have that record.

Yeah, the two things that have kind of remained with me,

it's pretty easy, I love punk rock, I love folk music.

One of my all-time heroes, Roky Erickson.

Monochrome set, "He's Frank."

Live version of "Hospital" by Jonathan Richman.

Tumwater, these are beer ads from the 70s,

like little tiny snippets, little songs about beer.

[laughing]

First Mudhoney single, the super limited.

Just a handful of weird colors made,

because they were trying to make up

for the fact that they were so late

and they kept fucking up all the orders.

The saddest thing about all these singles?

The sleeve that they put them in

stained them, made this horrible staining.

I don't know if you can see that anyway.

It's a crime against a record, though.

Somehow, like, they chemically don't mix

with the vinyl, the sleeves.

Very sad.

So they're all downgraded, unfortunately,

from mint minus to [mumbling] plus.

[laughing]

- We were just kind of hobbling along.

We had run out of cash.

That summer, Jonathan and I went to

the New Music Seminar,

which is a big conference in New York City.

Spent the last few cents we had going to that conference.

Amazingly, we met up with a German promoter.

- And the next thing you know,

Mudhoney, Bruce and myself were given tickets

to go to Berlin at the end of October.

- [Voiceover] Hey, we're Mudhoney, we're from Seattle!

- That was really exciting,

'cause, you know, we hadn't been anywhere, really.

We just got flown in to play one show to Berlin.

To us it seemed like a complete joke,

like, "Who's paying for this and why?" [laughing]

- [Voiceover] Playing that show was a huge break

for Mudhoney and also a huge break for Sub Pop.

- It was fucking surreal, man, on every level.

People got it.

I mean, in many ways, they got it much more

than people outside of Seattle did.

[rock music]

- I was driving up to Seattle.

There was a show that night.

A band called Mudhoney were playing.

I was just minding my own business.

I was behind this chick that had a skeleton thing

hanging from her rear view mirror.

I remember thinking, "Ooh, an alternative chick.

"Maybe's she's cute."

Pulled up alongside of her and it was Matt Lukin.

[dramatic music]

- I would say that Bob Whittaker, their manager,

was kind of like the fifth member of Mudhoney.

He was an integral part to the whole Mudhoney vibe.

- We'd be playing shows and there'd be some kind of ruckus,

you know, like some drunk guy in the corner

doing something that he shouldn't be doing.

"Who the hell is that guy?"

"That guy? Well, that's our manager.

[laughing] "You're gonna be paying him later."

- Everything Mudhoney did was kind of casual,

kind of non-industry-oriented.

Bob was their manager, and I think

that they split everything evenly with him,

like he was a band member,

which is not your traditional industry practice.

They kind of bucked the system, so to speak.

- [Voiceover] French franc.

- 'Ello. Behind me is ze White Cliffs of Dover.

[rock music]

- They were the first band I ever met

where the manager's more out of control than the band.

- Yeah, he would definitely throw gasoline

on all kinds of fires.

[yelling]

- Bob's crazy, thoroughly crazy.

- [mumbling] fuck is going on in here?

- Uh, nothing.

- When we went on our first U.S. tour,

we brought him along kind of as entertainment,

and more often that not, he would get shit-faced

and heckle us from the crowd.

[rock music]

- [Bob] Matt Lukin's doing what he does best,

you fucking dick.

- You may not have even seen him,

even though it's hard to miss him,

'cause he's kind of like the punk rock Big Bird.

- [Bob] I was the butt rocker with bad corkscrew hair.

It was such a great opportunity for me,

college dropout, go see the world.

- He was drafted in to be our roadie.

The joke is if you asked him to help carry an amp,

he's like, "Carry it yourself!" [laughing]

"It's not mine!"

- No, no, no, Bob didn't lift a finger moving anything.

- He'd just look at you and go,

"Fuck you, you got two legs, you go do it."

Like, "Dude, I need to add someone to the guest list,"

"Fuck you, go to the front door and do it yourself."

It's like, "No, man, you work for us!

"You're supposed to do it!"

"Ah, fuck you, you do it."

But he was really great at finding a place to stay,

'cause, like, back when you can't afford hotels,

the best place to stay is to find college girls

living in a house that her parents are paying for

that's really nice or whatever.

He was really good at finding those kind of people

that had a lot of room and a really nice house,

as opposed to finding the punk rock house

that's just full of piss and cockroaches to stay in.

- I think the band and myself mutually

had contempt for a lot of the industry standards.

I can remember it on a flight one time,

I just said, "Hey, you guys, managers are creepy.

"Let me be your creepy manager."

But I just said, "I think I can shoulder this load

"without screwing things up too much.

"I can be your point guy."

- [Steve] You know, he kind of grew with us

as the machine kind of grew and slowly took on

more and more responsibilities.

And he took it real seriously, really.

He was learning as we were going, too, as we all were.

- I was a good candidate, 'cause I'm

relatively articulate and I'm ultimately

very concerned about the band and their credibility

and not talk them into something they don't want,

and so it was a pretty comfortable transition.

- For me, part of what makes a record great

is how it captures the time in which it's presented.

- This is our B-side to our #1 hit in England

called "Superfuzz Bigmuff."

[crowd cheering]

- It almost immediately entered the indie charts in England,

which was something that never happened.

American records never made the indie charts in England.

It was very rare, and it stayed there for over a year.

- It instantly became the party record.

To this day, I think it's the greatest EP

that we've ever put out.

- I had been, you know, a professional recording engineer

for less than two years at that point.

Now, what it is, you know, 23 years I've been doing this.

I've made like 350-some albums

in 10 countries or whatever,

and this shit keeps coming back! [laughing]

♪ Give me love laced with lies

♪ There ain't much I haven't tried

♪ Give me love laced with lies

♪ There ain't much, baby, I haven't tried ♪

- You see Mark just hurling towards the camera

with their hair flowing,

and then it looked like "Mudhoney"

written in amazing Magic Marker

and "Superfuzz Bigmuff" written underneath.

I challenge anyone to sit down

and make "Superfuzz" a better record than it is.

The only way you can do it

is to just make it longer somehow.

♪ Sliding in and out of grace

- You think of some of the greatest lines in rock and roll,

that line, that fucking "Oh god, how I love to hate."

Fuck. I wish I wrote that.

That's the coolest fucking line.

"Oh god, how I love to hate."

♪ Oh god, how I love to hate

♪ Sliding in and out of grace

- They were tapping into these reference points,

B-movies, there's this kind of

kitschy, trashy thing going on.

It's kind of a bit shit.

Those films are a bit shit.

People who act in them are a bit shit,

because they're the cheapest actors they could get,

but there is this sort of quality to it,

and I feel like a lot of what Mudhoney were doing

was tapping into that, like they weren't shit,

but they were tapping into these reference points.

- [Voiceover] That's a Lenny Kravitz song.

- "There's a Tractor in My Balls"

is Lenny Kravitz's new hit.

- But we know Sonic Youth.

[laughing]

- Has anybody vomited yet?

- [Voiceover] Mark did!

- We asked them to play with us

when we were coming out to do a West Coast tour,

never having seen them or really anything.

- You know, with the Sonic Youth stamp of approval,

at that time, it was a big thing.

- And they were always happy.

They were always just kind of like eating and drinking

and smoking cigarettes and just, like,

rolling up to the sound check

and just spilling out of the van

and wrestling on the pavement.

Their whole thing was like,

"Let's just have a really good time."

So it was kind of an interesting pairing,

you know, because we were kind of a little older,

and we were sort of like egghead book collectors.

- Yeah, didn't they make fun of, like,

they said something once about us

just reading in the van all the time or something.

- Right. - "What book are you reading?"

- When they'd come offstage,

we'd be in the dressing room, all drunk,

entertaining them with whatever,

just being degenerates.

I think they needed to probably drink a bit more

and party a bit more to make it more fun for them.

They seemed to be into buying books and stuff.

[laughing] Good people, though.

[rock music]

- One of the most famous Mudhoney gigs in London

was the gig at the School of Oriental African Studies.

Mudhoney were headlining,

and they were supported by Soundgarden.

- All of the British press at that show,

so there were like at least 200 people,

press people, on the guest list.

- We played first, played a great set.

I loved the set.

I remember the songs that we played

and the sequence in which we played them

and it was really strong.

- There's nowhere else in our history

that we ever could have had Soundgarden open for us.

[laughing] That was like the one day.

[laughing]

Kind of weird.

- We get up there, and there's just this

weird energy in the air.

You could definitely sense there's a lot of anticipation.

- Sometimes you need a collective of people

to be in the same room together to realize

how they all feel about it and to be excited

about how they all feel about it,

because up until then, you know,

people had been hearing this stuff on the radio,

people had been buying the records,

but until you actually saw the band live,

you never really get a sense of how you'll feel about it

and how exciting and empowering that can be.

[rock music]

- Mark Arm always had these

cynical, wiseass jokes.

He decided to ask, "I would like

"to invite everybody on stage."

They did.

♪ I've been so close to no way out ♪

- We called it the friendly riot.

You know, this was the arrival of grunge mania.

- An out-of-control good time.

[rock music]

- But the next day, all you heard about

in the press was how great Mudhoney was.

I was bummed that we were a footnote in the review.

- That really established Sub Pop in Seattle

and Mudhoney in Europe.

- That started the whole thing, especially in England.

- The basic feeling was

we were still cruising under the radar

and nobody really knew, except for us,

just how big the scene had gotten,

so it was with that intention that we said,

"We're gonna do a show in the Moore.

"And not only are we gonna do a show in the Moore,

"we're gonna sell it out."

- I just thought they were crazy.

Nirvana, at that point, was barely known.

TAD had something out.

- The bands had all been playing these little clubs.

The Rainbow Tavern, the Central.

There's a club around the corner called the Ditto.

These are all rooms that held a couple hundred people.

Playing the Moore at that time,

not opening for somebody

but actually headlining at the Moore,

that was seen to be a pretty big accomplishment.

We knew how popular these bands had become in town,

and we wanted to strut our stuff a little bit.

Wake people up.

[crowd cheering, rock music]

- Needless to say, the venue sold out.

People went crazy.

It was total mayhem.

["No One Has" by Mudhoney]

♪ I've been so close to no way out ♪

- Now it was no longer these people

in this core group of musicians and fans

that was always the Seattle scene.

It's now reaching out to the suburbs.

♪ I don't lock the door no more ♪

- That really got the attention of the main writers

for the local papers.

We couldn't be ignored after that show.

[singing]

- After the show, word on the street was

that Seattle was just blowing up.

[rock music]

They had a relentless release schedule.

Now, our whole strategy of attack

was to just keep putting something out,

and it built to the album, and the album did great.

- The thing that I remember the most?

We work radio right before records come out.

It came in as a CMJ #1 added record,

and that we had a #1 record at CMJ

was a huge, huge fucking deal.

- That was at the height of hair metal.

It was at the height of so many things

that were considered to be

the cultural rule,

and yet what they were doing up there

was like, "Fuck it,

"whatever you're doing out there

"has nothing to do with what we're doing in here."

- We ramped up our marketing efforts, did some videos.

It was, like, a grown-up

independent rock record marketing spree.

["Here Comes Sickness" by Mudhoney]

♪ Here comes sickness

♪ Walking down my street

- I was quickly kind of

underwhelmed by it after it was done.

- It was kind of more of the same as "Superfuzz,"

maybe without the urgency.

There's some really good songs on there, I think.

"Superfuzz," being a six-song EP,

is really concise and to the point.

There's no filler on it.

You know, we don't write an album and go,

"This song is filler," but, you know,

after a while you kind of can step back

and go, "Maybe that song isn't quite as good as this one."

- OK, well, that was, you know, the sophomore slump.

We didn't raise the bar any.

♪ At you

- Is it true you want to break up now?

Why, I mean, what's going to be the future

for grunge rock and things?

- I don't know, Steve's going back to school

and Dan's going to play drums for Nirvana,

so me and Mark are just gonna,

I don't know, something might come along.

There'll be other bands in Seattle still.

There are still good bands there.

- I'm sure I'll play music of some sort for all my life,

but I've never wanted to be like a rock star

or like a professional musician, really.

I just always played in bad punk rock bands,

and that's what I intend to keep doing.

We're not really saying we're breaking up,

'cause you never know,

we might be back together at some point.

- [Voiceover] You know, at the time when the band was,

you know, doing really, really well,

Steve decided that he wanted to go back to school.

- You know, when the band started, I mean,

our initial thing was like,

"We're gonna be lucky to get a single out."

We accomplished that.

At the time, it seemed like most bands

had three good years in them.

Steve was, more than anybody else,

kind of really married to that idea.

And so I think he probably just thought,

"Well, this is the thing I'm doing

"at this point in my life

"and I'm gonna eventually go back to school

"and get that anthropology degree

"and go become a professor somewhere or something."

I don't know.

- I still could not imagine music being, you know, a living.

I don't think I wanted it, really,

and I think I was in denial that it could have been.

I know I didn't like the record very much.

Just wanted distance ourselves

from what was becoming known as the grunge thing in Seattle.

[rock music]

- I had run into the girlfriends

of Kurt and Krist at a show,

and they had told me Nirvana was looking for a new drummer.

Chad wasn't gonna be in the band anymore.

I'm like, "Well, you know,

"I'm not gonna be doing anything for awhile."

Let them know that I'd like to play with them

if they were interested.

[rock music]

I had played a show with them

at the Motorsports International Garage.

It was a big show for them in town.

There was supposed to be a photo shoot

the next day after that show for

the cover of Sounds Magazine.

I went to Tacoma and did the photo shoot,

and then they took off and went to talk to labels.

When they got back from that, Kurt gave me a call

and he's like, "Looks like we're gonna sign to Geffen,"

and I'm like, "Eh, all right."

I'm like, "So what's happened with that English tour?"

He's like, "Oh, yeah, that's why I'm calling.

"We got another drummer."

I'm like, "Oh."

Turned out to be, of course, Dave,

who was at the show that I played,

who was at the photo session that I did with those guys.

They all knew full well at the time

that I was not gonna be in the band,

but didn't say anything.

The great thing that happened

after the Nirvana thing didn't work out

was I ended up playing drums for the Screaming Trees

for almost a year or half a year or something,

and that was great.

- You know, we were still practicing and writing songs.

- I'm like, "Steve, what the fuck's going on?

"What do you got? What's, you know...

"The Trees wanna go and record a new record

"and they wanna continue touring and stuff.

"What's up?"

And he was like, "Uhhh, I think we should tour."

And I'm like, "All right."

So, I mean, that was an easy choice for me

to go back to Mudhoney.

The energy and the vibe and stuff,

you couldn't beat it.

I stopped playing with the Trees,

and, of course, they went on to make

one of their most successful records of all time as well.

[laughing]

Apparently if I join a band but don't play on their record,

they're gonna go off and maybe have some good success.

- Well, for Sub Pop, 1991 was

the make or break year,

and I believe it was

the early summer of '91

that Jon and I basically laid off everybody.

We'd come in the office and pack up a box of records

to ship to Japan and maybe get a couple hundred dollars,

and we were really on our last legs

when "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge" came out.

If it wasn't for that release,

there's a very good chance

that we would have folded the company.

Sub Pop has always been very grateful to Mudhoney

for staying with us like they did.

♪ Whatever happens

♪ Never thought for a second

♪ That I'd let go

♪ Uh-huh

- "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge," to me,

may be the defining work that Mudhoney has released,

and I know I'm not alone in that thought.

That record married their wit, their songwriting skills,

but there is a level of sophistication,

but equal parts sophistication

and dinge.

That's another word for grunge.

And just fucking great jams.

- At that time, selling 100,000 albums

on an indie label, that didn't happen too often.

That was like going platinum,

and we were very proud of the record

because it was such an awesome disc.

♪ They can make it sound so nice

♪ Everybody's got a price

♪ Ho, ho, ho, ho

- I think it's a really good record,

and it was a good change of direction.

You know, at that time I was doing a lot more dope,

and I think Steve definitely picked up the slack

and kind of drove that record.

[rock music]

- I guess it kind of gets tagged

more of a garage punk kind of record.

We'd stripped things down

and simplified things a little bit.

Also, 'cause it was a pretty crude

8-track studio at the time.

If Mark had the Farfisa on the song,

there couldn't be a second guitar. [laughing]

♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey

♪ Who you driving

♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey

♪ Who you driving now

♪ Now

- [Voiceover] But it wasn't enough

for the company to be in the black.

- They had an enormous amount of patience with us,

because even though we knew what we were doing

or what we were trying to do,

those guys didn't sign on

to uphold that.

You know, they were our friends

and they believed in us and they believed in

the vision of the label to a certain degree,

but, you know, they had their own interests

to manage and maintain.

- You know, leaving Sub Pop was rough.

It wasn't something that I'm proud of

or happy about doing.

It just seemed really unloyal to me to leave.

- It was getting uncomfortable,

and we started worrying that they were going to

go out of business owing us 75,000 bucks or something,

and it was really gonna destroy any kind of friendships.

I think us leaving kind of ruined the friendships anyway,

kind of, but I don't think there was any way around it.

[rock music]

- What ended up happening was,

it got the company to a point

where it could survive just a little bit longer,

and then "Nevermind" happened,

and it ended up being "Nevermind"

that kind of pushed the company, really,

into a better financial place,

where they could kind of regroup

and figure out what the plan was.

- If we had known that Sub Pop was gonna be

kept afloat by Nirvana signing to a major label,

I don't think we would have left the label.

You know, we probably would have just

kind of like weathered the storm

and waited 'til that happened,

but, of course, we didn't know that was gonna happen.

Sub Pop was distributed at the time by a record label

in New York called Caroline Records,

so we thought, "Well,

"maybe we'll just cut out the middleman."

President of the label came out,

his name was Keith something or other.

I wish I could totally remember the name,

just because people like this need to have their names,

they need to be called out, right?

He took us to a nice lunch,

started telling us what we could and could not do

if we signed to Caroline.

He said we would have to tour

for nine months out of the year.

That's what Smashing Pumpkins were doing

and it was really helping them,

and it's like, "Why are you

"even comparing us to Smashing Pumpkins?

"Come on."

- Talked about how, "You need to polish up

"those guitar stands and stuff."

- And how, like, we needed to do a few more records

before we could become a major label band.

We needed to work on sweetening up our sound

[laughing] and shit like that.

- That's all we've got.

It's our guitar sound, you know?

You want us to totally lose, like, our identity?

♪ You stupid asshole

So we thought, if this is what an independent label

is gonna throw at us, we might as well

meet with major labels and see what they have to say.

♪ One, two, I'm looking at you

- Major labels basically had to admit

they had no idea what was gonna be popular

with the youngsters anymore.

They had lost complete control.

When Nirvana hit big, you know,

that just changed everything.

Like, they went, "Oh, we don't know why this is popular.

"We have no idea what's going on now."

- All the majors said the same thing.

"Oh, we're gonna come out with guns blazing.

"We're gonna have all these advertisements.

"You're gonna get the most support," blah blah blah.

The Mudhoney guys are all very savvy dudes,

and they're a very quick read to personalities.

- You just kind of knew immediately, like,

this is not gonna work.

[laughing]

- We're trying to capture audience's interest

and soften them up so that the salesmen

can sock 'em with a good old hard sell.

- We were not looking to start a bidding war

because we didn't want to get into kind of a trap

where we, like, owed somebody a shitload of money,

and we went with David Katznelson at Reprise

because both the label and he seemed like

the most reasonable people out there that we'd met with.

- [Voiceover] Yeah, Dave just seemed to be cooler

and outgoing and a fun guy.

- I was really, really nervous.

I was still at a period of time in my career

where whenever I would talk to a band

I was always the younger person.

I was always the fan,

and I was always the person who was like,

"I really, should I even be here?

"Who am I to be talking to these guys?"

First person I met was Bob Whittaker,

and Bob was a larger-than-life figure.

He would take me to his place

and, you know, sit me in this huge dentist chair that he had

and start throwing all these records

of what was going on in the scene

while plying me with alcohol

and then, while we were doing that,

trying to talk business with me at the same time,

and I was doing everything I could,

everything I could possibly do to keep focused

and keep attempting to keep on target

of what I was out there trying to do.

- When we met with Warner Brothers,

I was really concerned 'cause, you know,

the Replacements and Husker Du had both signed

[mumbling] Warner Brothers,

and all of a sudden, once they got onto the major label,

their records sounded way slicker.

- I think the band itself was really worried

about having to go to a major label.

The typical stuff, going to a major label,

being changed, and these are all things

that were on their minds when they were talking to me.

- I asked Lenny Waronker, who was the president at the time,

"Why did you do this to these bands?"

and he was like, "We didn't do anything to these bands.

"They just did what they wanted to do."

And I'm sure the bands probably thought,

"Well, if we record a slicker record,

"then it's more likely to get radio airplay

"and stuff like this,"

so we intentionally went to the exact same basement studio

that we did our previous record,

to kind of prove a point that, you know,

just because we're on a major label

we're not gonna, like, compromise our sound.

- There was so much excitement

about the movement that they were a part of

and them themselves that it was really unstoppable.

["Blinding Sun" by Mudhoney]

♪ We fell asleep on the riverbank one sunny afternoon

♪ We fell asleep on the riverbank ♪

- Once we were on a major label

and the contracts were signed, we realized

we had these budgets for every record.

We found out that what we didn't use

of the recording budget in the studio,

we actually got to keep.

- Rather than going to the Bahamas

and recording at Compass Point

or whatever you're supposed to do with your $200,000,

their thing was to keep the money

and just use some of it to record with.

- And then we would spend 20 of it or whatever

recording the record, you know,

and then you could pocket the rest. [laughing]

[cash register dings]

- We're punks! We're rebels! [laughing]

♪ Everybody loves us

♪ Everybody loves our town

♪ That's why I'm thinking lately

♪ Time for leaving is now

♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey

- Mark's ode to the Seattle scene at the time.

♪ It's so overblown

- It was recorded for $62,

or $162, I can't remember which.

Our attorney at the time told me

not to let the label find out how much we paid

for the recording of that song

that was on the platinum soundtrack for singles.

"Don't let them find out that you're paying

"$162 for that recording," because, you know,

we got a check for a lot more.

- Well, it's always good to get money. [laughing]

♪ I'll just sit and grin

♪ The money will roll right in

- I'll get money out of my famous name, one way or another.

- [Voiceover] You know, that allowed all of us

to eventually make down payments on houses.

- So that's kind of how we tried to operate each time.

- All musicians know what it's like to struggle.

They bought roofs over their heads,

which actually shows what a good

survivalist instinct they have.

- Some of them had stock and stuff like that.

♪ It's fun to be a star

♪ It's nice to have a car

♪ Yeah, you'll have to admit

♪ That I'll be rich as shit

♪ And I'll just sit and grin

♪ The money will roll right in

- The title "Piece of Cake" kind of says it all to me.

I mean, it's like, things have come so easy to this band.

We do one single, we're going to Europe.

Oh, we're going out there with Sonic Youth.

We're getting attention straightaway.

Our whole approach was kind of like,

"We can do that. That's a piece of cake.

"Yeah, sure."

Do another record? "Piece of cake."

And that kind of became our attitude,

and that was the title that we chose for that record.

It was like, "Yeah, it's no big deal.

"We're doing this. It's easy."

And it shouldn't be.

- I felt with those guys, when they hit the major label,

they just wanted to self-sabotage.

And if you listen to "Piece of Cake,"

I mean it starts off with that little techno blip

that were just annoying,

and I think they deliberately did that

because it was sort of like a "Fuck you"

to being on a major label.

Even Nirvana, who obviously were a very good band,

but they wrote big hooks and big monsters anthems,

and Mudhoney never tried to do that,

to their own probably financial detriment.

- With Mudhoney, they came out of the box

and they were the #1 sale-sheeted band of the week,

and they ended up selling 150,000 records.

The label, I think, was peachy about that.

- [Voiceover] Do you like it, Dave?

- I do. I love it.

- The deal that we did with Mudhoney

was not the biggest of the offers they got, either.

It was a deal that was designed to recoup faster.

I think the point structure was a little bit better,

and their freedoms were a little bit better,

so selling 150,000 records right off the bat

was pretty damn good.

- My favorite comment on "Piece of Cake"

was from Bruce Pavitt.

His thing was, "You know, the record's only as good

"as its best song, basically.

"If it's got that one good song on it,

"then it's a good record."

♪ Can't breathe 'til I

♪ Suck you dry

- I think "Suck You Dry" was a rousing success,

and I think some other stuff on there was really half-baked.

I think Mark likes to take the bulk of

the credit for that.

- Yeah, I was really fucked up a lot of times.

I was really fucked up a lot in that period.

I was drinking a lot, doing a lot of drugs.

That recording session more than any other one,

I was probably showing up, like,

an hour, two hours late every day

because I was waiting to get drugs

before I could go over there.

- I had seven junkies on my roster at one point,

which makes life move very slow for you,

because when you're talking to somebody on the phone

who is doing heroin, if you have like

three things that you wanna talk to them about,

you might get one of those things through

and it'll take seven hours or five hours

or whatever it might be.

I would be on the phone with Mark a lot

where he would pretty much go to sleep on me

or something like that,

and it was happening since before I got involved with him.

- [Voiceover] Hey, Marty. Here.

Lookee here.

- What's that?

- H. - H?

What's H?

- Shh, not so loud.

It's heroin.

- I hate the way in music documentaries,

like Behind the Music or something,

the way people talk about

their drug use or whatever.

Like the music gets all kind of sappy

and things sort of slow down, and,

you know, it's like this big pivotal point

in this musician's career or whatever.

To me, when bands like Aerosmith or whatever,

they'll, like, just talk about their deep addiction

and they'll kind of glorify it,

you know, like their "Toxic Twins" T-shirts

with Joe Perry and Steve Tyler,

and they're all like, "We did mountains of Peruvian blow

"and did a lot of heroin and partied like crazy,"

and then they go, "But don't do that, kids.

"It's really bad."

To me, it's kind of embarrassing.

I was a total cliche.

I was a rock guy strung out on heroin,

and actually, for awhile in there,

was going out with a stripper.

[laughing]

How did this happen to me? [laughing]

Of course, I walked through all those doors myself.

- When he started doing hard drugs,

a couple of his friends told me I had to

do something about it or talk to him,

and I was like, "Well, I don't think that's my place."

I'm all for personal freedom

to fuck yourself up if you want.

He's a smart guy.

So we never really talked about it much.

- I think the first time

anyone in Mudhoney caught wind of it

that I might be doing it, there was a rumor

that I went into the emergency for a drug overdose,

and I don't know how that got out,

but I OD'd several times.

Went to the Harborview Emergency.

Those guys had heard that and I was just like,

"What? No way. That's not me."

[laughing]

- People do drugs 'cause they're fun.

It's not always, like, can be explained away

like, oh, they're self-medicating

or they have some kind of painful something,

it's like, well, it's kind of fun,

and then the fun factor gets pushed away

because it's an addiction too,

and chemically, you're getting more and more fucked up.

- It really got boring after awhile.

I was able to go through this period with heroin

and come out relatively unscathed.

I didn't die, I didn't get AIDS.

I did get Hepatitis C,

which I didn't find out about until many years later.

That was the only thing that was like,

"Wow, this shit actually bit me on the ass."

After I stopped doing heroin,

I was playing in this band, Bloodloss,

and one of the members of the band

was doing heroin at the time.

I remember people would ask me,

"Man, isn't it really hard to be in a band with this guy,

"just after what you've gone through?"

And it was like, "No, it's a reminder

"of what I don't wanna be."

It wasn't like I saw him and was like,

"Man, I'd really like to be like that."

It's like, "I am so glad I am not that way anymore."

And actually, that was a real

important part of the process for me.

- Hi, I'm Kurt Loder with an MTV News

special report on a very sad day.

Kurt Cobain, the leader of one of rock's

most gifted and promising bands, Nirvana, is dead.

- It was a real kick in the pants

to the entire grunge scene, Seattle scene.

- No one wanted to know anything more about Seattle and us,

because it was such a sad tale.

The only bands from Seattle

that were doing well that year was, like, The Presidents.

♪ Moving to the country

♪ I'm gonna eat a lot of peaches ♪

They wanted happy music now.

[laughing] They didn't want more of us.

["Judgment, Rage, Retribution and Time" by Mudhoney]

♪ When I look in the mirror

- We were back working with Jack for the record.

Almost seemed like a restatement of what our sound was.

It was grunge, damn it.

♪ Well, it's 1995, my friend

♪ Now we're closing in on the end

♪ Another year for you and me

- [Voiceover] There were health issues

that had been resolved.

There was a whole bunch of new songs

that were well rehearsed

and seemed well arranged and ready to go.

- And there was one song on there

that Courtney Love thought was about her,

so she called the CEO of our company,

who had worked with Kurt before and knew Courtney.

- We did a record at Reprise.

We would go down there.

There was always kind of a courtesy meeting

with the president.

- The band was in the building,

was at Warner Brothers in Burbank on that day,

and it was Mark Arm's birthday on that day.

The cake was being brought to Mark with the candles on it

when I get a call from the CEO.

I pick up the phone, he has no idea that Mudhoney's in town.

He's like, "You know those Mudhoney guys?"

And I'm like, "Um, yeah."

And he's like, "I never wanna see those guys again.

"I mean, we're putting the record out,

"I hope it does great,

"but I never wanna talk to those guys again."

And I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

- David was trying to arrange the meeting with him.

He heard back that there was no way in hell

that he was gonna meet with us,

because of the song "Into Yer Shtik."

- "I never wanna meet those guys,

"I never wanna shake their hand,

"I never wanna have my picture taken with them."

And Dave told us that, and I'm like,

"Really?" I go, "That bums me out, man,

"because that's all I've ever wanted to do,

"was have my picture taken

"with whatever the fuck his name is."

Who gives a fuck if you wanna meet us or not?

Fucking asshole!

[laughing]

Thanks for the bottle of wine

you might've bought me at a dinner sometime,

but still, fuck you.

- And he's basically saying,

"I got a call from Courtney

"and she's going back into therapy

"because they made a song about her on this record."

♪ Why don't you

♪ Blow your brains out too

- Many people think it's directed

strictly at Courtney Love.

It's a much broader shot than that,

but she definitely fits.

Of course, this was a year after Kurt Cobain killed himself.

I was pretty angry with how that whole thing went down.

♪ All of you make

♪ Me sick

♪ You're so

♪ Into yer shtik

- The line is so much more

about the industry.

It's so much more about all those people

who take art and try to push it so hard

through the financial filter.

- The thing that kind of frustrated me the most

about that whole time period

was, like, we did this two-week tour with Nirvana

and just seeing the way that they had organized themselves.

A lot of the people that they had hired to

work for the band were really gross.

Didn't seem like they had

anyone in the band's best interests at heart,

they just wanted the band to keep going

so more money could be made,

and we had a couple of shows with Pearl Jam

booked about a month later,

and at the time, the perception was

Nirvana was the underground band that came up from Sub Pop

and Pearl Jam was the major label band or whatever,

and we were just like,

"God, can you imagine how bad it's gonna be

"in the Pearl Jam camp if it's this bad in Nirvana?"

We went out with Pearl Jam

and it was just the fucking exact opposite.

Every person was super cool, friendly, helpful.

There were people in the Nirvana camp

who were just, like, thumping their chests

at how proud they were to be working with Nirvana

and there was nothing like that

happening over in Pearl Jam world.

It was like, oh, you can be at this level

and run things in a smart way

and you don't have to hire a bunch of dicks.

- As soon as they were out playing that first show with us

and we were interacting, really,

for the first time in a few years, in a real way,

I remember thinking, "Wow, this is a really good thing."

And then when Kurt died, I think it was really important

that we were all together at that time.

I think it was a wake-up call for us,

to have Mark and Steve and those guys

there at that time, because it told us

that we could stop at any time and take a break.

[speaking in foreign language]

- Mr. Steve Turner!

[crowd cheering]

And Mr. Mark Arm!

[crowd cheering]

- Right now!

Right now, Sao Paulo!

[crowd cheering]

It's time to

kick out the jams, motherfuckers!

["Kick Out the Jams" by Mudhoney]

♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah

♪ I gotta kick 'em out

♪ Well, I feel pretty good

♪ And I guess that I could get crazy now, baby ♪

♪ 'Cause we all got in tune

♪ When the dressing room got hazy now, baby

♪ I know how you like it, child

♪ Hot, quick and tight

♪ The girls can't stand it when you're doing it right

♪ Let me up on the stand

♪ And let me kick out the jams

♪ Yeah, kick out the jams

♪ I gotta kick 'em out

- It was very obvious it was gonna be

the last one for Warner Brothers.

Everybody at Reprise was gone, basically.

One of the new guys at Warner's

wanted to hear demos and didn't hear a hit,

and all that kind of shit,

which we'd never had to deal with before.

We'd always just delivered the finished product to them

and they did what they could with it.

- He wanted to drop Mudhoney right when he got there,

but he was gonna wait to hear the demos,

and he was actually impressed with what they had done.

I'm like, "Hey, whoop-de-doo for you, right?"

- He knew that we weren't gonna make him any more money.

And I don't think Reprise had had a radio hit

since Alanis Morissette,

which was three or fours before,

which in major label time is forever.

He was brought in because he had produced

the breakthrough Sugar Ray album.

They brought him in because they figured

since he produced a crappy breakthrough record

that he could get more made. [laughing]

- I remember there was one song, "Oblivion,"

which, you know, that was the song

that the boss thought was the single.

♪ Oblivion

He had all these little detailed mix ideas

that he had to throw in there.

- He'd had some other hits,

so these record people get cocky

and they think, "I can hear a hit now.

"I've got the golden ear."

- We probably went into the studio

to mix "Oblivion" five, six, seven, eight,

I don't know how many times.

- It shows exactly why the record industry is dying.

[laughing] 'Cause they just throw money

at bullshit for no reason.

♪ Woke up this morning

♪ I had a laugh

Each record you do for a record label,

the advance grows,

and we were selling less and less records.

- I think they got keen to us as well.

They knew that we would take our money

and record cheaply and pocket the rest.

- So if we didn't spend it recording,

we weren't gonna get it anyway,

why don't we actually hire a producer

and spend some money and see what that's like?

Obviously no one's gonna give us that money again.

- It was a great record on so many different levels,

produced by the legendary Jim Dickinson.

["Poisoned Water" by Mudhoney]

♪ Like stacks and stacks of rats on rafts

♪ Clutchin' anything we can

♪ Stacks and stacks of rats on rafts

♪ Weight of the world crushin' our backs

♪ Tooth for a tooth

♪ Eye for an eye

- You know, released into major obscurity.

- It was one of the first records

that they put out at a higher price.

- Once the record came out, they just sort of

did nothing with it.

They wanted it to disappear.

- You know, there was that time

that we had to drop them,

and the conversation was almost like, "Who cares?

"They'll go on and do their thing."

Nobody was surprised, and the relationship ended

in a really good way, where it was like,

I think we all agreed that even if

Reprise wanted to keep them on,

it probably wasn't the right place for them to be.

The music industry had completely changed.

- It was fairly brutal.

The shows were getting really small.

It was definitely the lowest point

as far as playing live shows.

In the States, it was like, fuck, man,

150 people in some shitty Florida town.

- It must have been a pretty discouraging

situation for them to be in.

And, of course, subsequently, Matt Lukin left,

which was a factor in what was going on as well, I believe.

[crowd cheering]

[imitates machine gun]

- It seemed like a pretty good time to quit.

The touring wasn't going to make us any money anymore.

- I think he might have even stuck around as long as he did

because he thought he was gonna

let the rest of us down if he quit,

and that was a tough blow.

- The last three or four years of the band,

I was hoping that somebody else would quit

or somebody else would make a move so I didn't have to,

'cause I hate to be the one quitting.

I hate to let people down.

I was just kind of sick of music

and pop culture in general, altogether.

I just hated everything to do with it

and anybody who felt it was important.

I was working as a carpenter during my off time.

It was kind of like going back to the beginning,

back when I was like 18, 19 again.

I'd work during the week and go play

Melvins gigs on the weekend.

It was kind of like having to go back to that.

I didn't wanna do that.

- [Voiceover] There's some drinking and smoking to do!

[crowd cheering]

- We have always kind of had this idea

of Mudhoney being Mark, Steve, Matt, and Dan,

and if one of us was not in the picture

that we would not be a band.

I don't know if that's some kind of

idealistic Three Musketeers or whatever.

I guess there's four. [laughing]

So when Matt quit, my whole thing was,

"Well, the idea of getting another bass player

"is not something that I'm into at all."

- Dan didn't wanna do it without Matt.

They were kind of like the two partners to me and Mark.

They roomed together and all that kind of stuff.

♪ I've been thinking

♪ I could find some meaning

♪ I could start believing

♪ Instead of killing time

♪ I've been thinking

♪ Your love could give me meaning

♪ I could start believing

♪ Instead of killing time

♪ I think I could love, if you could show me

♪ What your lovin' is

- These guys wanted to start an Internet record label

and they hired to me to produce an album.

Mudhoney came up in the conversation

as being a band that just gets better as time goes on,

and so we got a hold of them

and they said they'd be interested in talking about it.

- It's probably been about a year, so we got together.

- [Voiceover] Started working on some things,

and it felt good.

There's a chemistry that we have.

- So I went up there and met the guys

and I made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

[rock music]

Money talks. [laughing]

♪ Let me in

♪ Let me in

♪ It takes an inside job to make it easy when it's hard ♪

- And that song ended up

kind of starting off our next record.

That's kind of how we got that ball rolling again.

- I am a registered nurse,

and I work at the main trauma center

at Harborview Hospital here in Seattle.

The elements of my job are working on

specific things in the emergency room,

what are called trauma codes,

where someone has a trauma injury of some sort,

gunshot, knife, motor vehicle,

fell off a cliff, whatever.

People have some preconceived and prejudiced ideas

about what being in a band is.

You're a philanderer or a drug addict

or a person with low responsibility.

But it's come out, obviously.

It's hard to conceal in this town that you're in Mudhoney,

'cause you've got pictures in the press and stuff like that.

When Mudhoney first started,

they came to Australia very early,

and my band went to America around the same time, '88, '89,

and we became friends.

As a teenager, I'd been obsessed with punk rock.

I'd sort of mucked around with some friends at high school,

just in the garage or in the back room or whatever,

and I actually started off wanting to be

the singer of the band,

but as it turned out we could not find a bass player,

and I couldn't play bass and sing at the same time,

so I became a bass player,

but I had a bass guitar and I was interested in.

- I had already been playing with Guy in Bloodloss,

and I was like, if Matt doesn't want to do this anymore,

Guy would be perfect for the band.

He's a good friend already and he's a great bass player.

He's got lots of really, really cool ideas.

- [Guy] It was a little strange, though,

because I've been a fan of the band,

and so I always considered the band to be

the four-piece that it originally was with Matt on bass.

Learning the songs and fitting in wasn't that difficult.

I started off just by going over to Steve's place in Seattle

and sitting out on his porch

and just doing my songs with an acoustic guitar.

- The first practice we had with Guy,

at this point I was still kind of,

"OK, getting a new bass player."

He comes in and starts playing,

and then and there I knew this was gonna be cool.

He was a great bass player.

- [Steve] That was really great to get

a fourth person in the room

that was fully engaged again,

like Matt had been at the beginning.

- Definitely Guy brought some new energy to the band.

Spent a couple months teaching him our catalog

and finally started to move forward and write new songs.

- He's got a different style,

but he's a very, very good player.

Excellent choice to play bass in Mudhoney.

I was actually thrilled to pieces

when I found out that he was gonna join the band.

- And they're still great friends with Matt too,

so it works out.

I mean, Matt comes to the occasional Mudhoney show

and sits out back and drinks all their beer,

so it still works out, you know?

He does the same thing he was doing before,

he just doesn't get on stage, basically, you know?

[laughing]

[electronic music]

- Mudhoney would never have left Sub Pop

if it wasn't for the fact that Sub Pop

was going through huge, huge growing pains

during the time that Mudhoney was having

the most success in the early days.

I think they would never have left,

so it makes sense.

And as a music fan, you always love

seeing that kind of stuff.

You know, if a record collector,

you're looking at the back of the record,

"Oh, man! In that era, they went back!

"Wow, I wanna hear that record!

"I don't wanna hear that major label crap!

"I wanna hear that one!"

- Seemed like I ran into Jonathan at some show.

I walked by him, I'm like, "Hey, Jonathan, how you doing?"

And he's like, "So when we gonna get

"the next Mudhoney record?"

I was kind of taken aback.

I'm like, "You wanna put out another Mudhoney record?"

He's like, "Of course!"

And to me, that was just kind of, "Well, that's cool."

- There are few joys greater

than the joy of knowing that Mudhoney was going to

come back to Sub Pop when the time came,

and it was something that we all felt really excited about,

and it was something that made us feel super proud,

was kind of for them just to come home,

because that's still the way we saw it.

It didn't feel even like the good old days.

It felt better than that.

It really felt like a homecoming.

- [Voiceover] Sub Pop was no longer

the flying by the seat of its pants,

making it up as they were going along.

We were both learning at the same time.

They were learning how to be a record label,

and we were learning how to be a band.

They learned from their mistakes,

and I can't imagine being on a better label.

- People who come to work here, you know,

the early days are mythical.

So now, Mark is in the office all the time,

and there's a certain earthbound quality

which I think, frankly, suits Mark better.

I don't think he necessarily wants to be a rock god,

but there was this real feeling,

the prodigal son, this whole idea of

the band that built Sub Pop is coming back.

[rock music]

[rock scream, echoing]

- The whole end of the 90s kind of energized us.

After we weren't getting paid for any of it,

we were playing a lot more music.

Collectively and individually, we were doing

a crapload more music than we'd done in years.

[rock music]

- [Voiceover] Mudhoney's style is not mainstream.

They never wanted it to be mainstream,

and I'm very glad they never made the compromises

some of the other bands tried to make.

- It's a big "Fuck you guys!"

[rock music]

- [Voiceover] In a world where

The White Stripes and The Dirtbombs

are getting national attention,

Mudhoney made a lot more sense.

[crowd chattering]

- And for the reason that Mudhoney became popular again

was because they were almost a direct link

to that time and to that place,

and to Nirvana, for kids who'd never seen Nirvana.

For them, this was like a living, tangible link

to that whole scene.

[rock music]

- [Voiceover] As great as those early records are,

they're better now.

[rock music]

- We recorded that and "Under a Billion Suns"

kind of in similar manners,

where we would just go for a long weekend

with one engineer and a studio

and put down three or four songs

and then mix those and then do the same thing

with someone else when we had

three or four more songs written.

To me, both those two records seem kind of of a pair.

♪ It's our patriotic duty

♪ To make sweet love tonight

♪ Come on, little girl

♪ I've become a dirty old man

♪ With a hard on for war

- Oh, yeah, sure.

We as Mudhoney would like to show our appreciation

for the good people of Japan.

- Who appreciate us.

- [Steve] Who appreciate us.

- And the rest of you who don't appreciate us?

[laughing]

- I really like the record a lot.

The songs are more stripped down and simple

and easy to understand, right off the bat.

I never like all of our songs,

and I never like all of our recordings.

This one came closer.

- We did it all in one weekend.

We'd done most of the tracking by Friday evening,

and then I started doing the vocals

and finished most of the vocals,

I think, by Saturday evening.

Basically, I'm now at,

it was the first completed take.

I remember coming to the end of the song

and I had to kind of throw up my hands

so Dan knew that this was like the end,

and that was the take.

It was like, wow, it's not gonna get any better than that.

♪ If this is what it means to be saved ♪

- [Voiceover] They've been able to withstand a lot

because they not just stuck together,

but they never lost sight of

who they were as friends.

They always say, "Don't go into business with your friends."

Well, sometimes your friends are all you got.

- They're all total music nerds.

You could go out, sit down to dinner,

and inevitably it turns into,

"No, that band was not punk rock, they were post punk rock!"

- They've always played by their own rules,

and they have a very high level of integrity,

and they really understand what it takes to rock.

- Nowadays, the tours are short,

around work schedules, around kids,

around whatever, around various different things,

so typically a block of time is picked

and then it's just filled.

That's what it comes down to.

- It adds a bit of a sort of vacation vibe

to things for us, because we don't go out all the time,

and when we do go out once or twice a year,

it's kind of special for us.

We go places we wanna go.

We get to hang out.

- I'm grateful that we get to tour at all.

I'm grateful that there are people out there

who give a shit, who wanna see us,

and who will bring us over to Japan

or bring us down to Brazil

or do a show with us someplace in Europe.

Unfortunately, we can't tour the way

we used to be able to tour,

'cause everyone works or has commitments with their family,

so when we do tour, we tend to pack a lot of stuff

into a short period of time,

which may not be the smartest way

to go about doing things,

but it's the only way we can.

- It's fun for us. It's low-key.

We're not trying to sell records, necessarily.

There's no pressure for us to get out there

and work the record.

It's a cool space right now.

- I am glad that we are not in a position

where music is our only thing

and that we have to worry about catering to a certain crowd.

I think we're really lucky that we get to do

whatever the fuck we want, despite the crowds.

There's a lot of people think of music

as a way to get something else.

To me, and I think the rest of the band,

music is an end in and of itself.

It's not like a way to get fame and fortune

and pussy and drugs or whatever.

Thinking about music like that just kind of creeps me out.

And I think that might be the result of

kind of the music that we came up through,

which if you were a kid playing hardcore

in like 1981 and '82,

the idea that you were gonna make money

or have fame or get laid or,

well, maybe you might get drugs,

you might get laid,

but it wasn't like anybody was clamoring

to hear this kind of music except for

a handful of other kids your own age.

There wasn't any idea that there was like

a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

We were doing this just to amuse ourselves,

and I still am.

[crowd cheering]

[rock music]

- May this be the official document.

As long as those guys wanna make records,

I'm gonna put 'em out.

Hopefully they're not gonna wanna make

too many of them too quickly,

or else we'll all end up

back in the straits that we were in 20 years ago.

[rock music]

[crowd cheering]

[rock music]

- I mean, I just think a lot of it's luck

and, you know, just sheer talent.

Blistering licks and, you know, hot, hot, hot drum fills.

[laughing]

Well, really, that's what it is.

We're just a fucking great band, really.

It's a proven fact, isn't it?

- It got universal praise and universal play.

The only person, quite ironically,

who gave it a bad review, is Grant Alden.

I'm calling you out right here, motherfucker.

- [laughing] White shoes!

Wearing the big old white shoes.

There's a lot of pictures and videos of me

wearing big old white shoes, and I'm like,

"Damn, why didn't I have a little more

"fashion sense back then?"

- It was in the hotel lobby where we were staying,

and Lukin was walking by, and I said,

"Hey, Matt, say hi to my girlfriend."

I handed him the phone.

He'd never met my girlfriend, didn't know who she was,

and I had just kind of met the band.

This was the first time we toured with them.

"Hey, Matt, say hi to my girlfriend."

And so he grabbed the phone and says,

"How big's your pussy?" [laughing]

First words out of his mouth!

[rock music]

♪ I'm now

♪ Yeah, I'm now