READ MORE: Dinosaur Jr – Sweep It Into Space Review: J Mascis and Kurt Vile is a partnership we want to see more of From DJr’s breakthrough 1988 Bug album (with stone classic 7-inch Freak Scene) through the 90s, Mascis has proved himself an exceptional player who can rip screechingly discordant punk solos but also occasionally drop the melodic nous of one of his unlikely heroes, Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore. Joseph ‘J’ Mascis’s ‘offhand-slacker’ persona occasionally had him painted as something of a wastrel in the media, but that is so wrong. I could get them for $150.” You can keep your Floyd Rose locking trems and scalloped fretboards, Mr Widdle… a new/old way of thinking had begun. That was my ultimate guitar back when I was a kid, but it was pooh-poohed when I finally got one. Turner says the grunge aesthetic was: “Garage punk, and punk rock in general – a lot of it was made with cheap gear, and a lot of it was reclaiming gear that guitarists had kind of dismissed as garbage. Following EP, Superfuzz BigMuff, was even named after their favourite stomps. That “fried out” sound was down to an EHX Big Muff pedal maxed-out, and Mudhoney soon became synonymous with the art of fuzz. … I think it had more to do with the actual electromagnetic chemistry of what was going through our amps that day. It was just a really gnarly, gnarly guitar sound. “I don’t know if it was the guitars or the recording. “There’s something special about that first single, we were never quite able to recapture that sound,” Mark Arm later recalled.
It was a two-and-a-half-minute Stooges-alike blast.
Mudhoney formed in 1988, releasing their debut single Touch Me I’m Sick just three months later. Mudhoney’s early photographer was a just-graduated Seattle local, Charles Peterson, future imager-in-chief for a slew of bands… Whenever there’s a discussion about grunge’s gnarly family tree, Mudhoney appear to be the trunk. Drummer Dan Peters would briefly moonlight for Nirvana, pre Dave Grohl. Mark Arm (vox/guitar) and Steve Turner (lead guitar) formed Mudhoney from the ashes of another cult punk outfit, Green River (who also featured Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament). They were name-checked by many of their Seattle peers from the start – Kurt Cobain was particularly enthusiastic – but the reality of their ongoing career is that they’ve only ever had one album even chart in the US’s Billboard 200. There’s an argument that Mudhoney are the true unsung heroes of grunge, the flannel brigade’s prophets without honour. Many of those bands – and sadly, some band-members – have since left us but forgive us some nostalgia as we revisit the artists, records and instruments that saw grunge, 30 years ago, in bloom… Mudhoney Mudhoney thrashing California’s Castaic Lake Natural Amphitheatre in September 1992. Even if only a select few would become megastars, all had their impact on what would come afterward, leading to a family tree that stretches further and wider than anyone could have anticipated. It was a ‘movement’ of often strange bedfellows united by little more than geography or the desire to do something different with guitar than what had gone before. But in our enthusiasm to canonise, and in some cases pigeonhole a genre, it’s all too easy to focus on the big bands and forget that another important facet of grunge was its diversity.
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