Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [62]
MARK ARM Steve and Dan and I had been working things out as early as November. But the first practice with Matt is when we marked the birth of the band: New Year’s Day of 1988.
MATT LUKIN I got a call from Mark Arm, asking if I wanted to come over and jam. I’d never met Dan Peters before the first Mudhoney practice. We just drank a lot of beer, jammed, hung out, had a good time. Something I’d learned was that you can’t drink beer and play Melvins stuff. It just isn’t going to work out. What was so great about the first Mudhoney practice was that I downed a 12-pack and was still able to play through the songs. I’m like, Oh, this is easy! Although it wasn’t as easy as I thought, because I remember at one point Mark was complaining, “How can you and Dan not get this? It’s the simplest thing, and you both come from bands that play intricate stuff.”
MARK ARM When I was in Green River, the Neptune movie house did a night of Russ Meyer movies. The first one was Up, the second was Mudhoney, and the third was, of course, Faster, Pussycat. I decided to get something to eat when Mudhoney was playing but thought, Mudhoney, that’s a really good name, and tucked that away.
DAN PETERS I found out we were called Mudhoney when I read something in The Rocket saying this band was forming with such-and-such people in it, and they’re called Mudhoney.
MARK ARM I was working with Bruce Pavitt at Muzak, and I brought in a recording of one of Mudhoney’s practices. I said, “Hey, Bruce, this is what we sound like.” It was recorded on a boom box, so it sounded muffled and staticky; it was just an indistinguishable roar. So he’s like, “I can’t tell what’s going on. Why don’t you just go in to record with Jack Endino? We’ll pay for it.”
BRUCE PAVITT Obviously it was an extremely ironic situation that the break room at Muzak would become kind of the testing grounds for underground Seattle music. Bands would come in with their demos, play them, and we’d all critique them. Mark Arm and Chris Pugh worked there. Tom from Feast and Chris from the Walkabouts. That’s where I first heard Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick.” It’s where I first heard the Nirvana demo that Jack Endino had passed on to Jon Poneman.
RON RUDZITIS I worked with Tad at Muzak, and he gives me credit for getting Bruce to put out his first single. Tad had gone into Reciprocal to record some of his songs. He did all the instruments. He played me the cassette in the cart room, and I go, “I’ve never heard such a good drum sound on a recording out of Seattle.” Tad still really didn’t know Bruce that well. I marched right out of the room and said, “Hey, Bruce, you gotta listen to this. This is Tad’s—you know, cart room Tad—and I think you would like it.” So he listens to it, and that’s how Tad got going with Sub Pop.
TAD DOYLE (TAD singer/guitarist; Bundle of Hiss guitarist/drummer; H-Hour drummer) We were playing my demo in the department where I worked, and Bruce walked in and says, “What is this?” He was really excited about it and he asks, “Is this the new Butthole Surfers?” And I just started grinning from ear to ear.
BRUCE PAVITT April 1, 1988, is when we quit our day jobs and moved into our tiny, original office, in the Terminal Sales Building downtown. It’s the first day of Sub Pop, with a big asterisk next to it: Except for the previous eight years.
MARK ARM I think they got a good deal on it because the elevator stopped at the 10th floor. They were on the 11th floor, so you had to take an extra set of steps to get up there. It was a pauper’s penthouse.
CHARLES PETERSON I was office boy for quite a while in the early days. Prior to that I was working evenings developing film for Auto Trader, the little news magazine for used cars and trucks. I was filching film from Auto Trader to shoot Sub Pop bands. But that got tiresome, so Bruce and Jon offered me a job, essentially as an office manager.
The “warehouse” was the toilet, so you literally had to slide sideways through these stacks of record boxes, like Green River’s Dry as a Bone, to take a leak. Since