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Mudhoney.
 If you can imagine this, when Mudhoney first toured Australia in February 1990 it was still a world in which Nirvana's 'Nevermind' was yet to be released, record stores didn't have sections called "alternative" and "grunge" did not yet exist as an adjective. Mudhoney were the hot band out of Seattle. They put on a wildly energetic performance at their Adelaide gig which concluded with the band kicking over their amps and singer and guitarist Mark Arm diving into the crowd. Arm laughs when I recount this to him. "Well," he says, "we won't be having any of those antics anymore. Fifteen years ago when you saw us we were just starting out, we were kinda getting known, and then a year or later the whole thing got... kinda big."
"Kinda big" is quite an understatement when one considers the impact Mudhoney and their fellow Seattle bands Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Nirvana had on music in the '90s. Arm points out that there was always an expectation on a local level that Mudhoney would amount to something, combining as they did ex-members of Green River and the Melvins, both of whom were well known and well regarded bands.
"Locally, people were anticipating what we would come up with. By 'people', I mean like 20 to 50 people," he adds with a laugh.
However, among those people were the founders of Sub Pop Records, the Seattle label which brought grunge to the world, and the label owners were early fans of Mudhoney.
"For some reason they took us to an independent music conference happening in Berlin and they just did this deal with a German label and we were elected to be the band that represented both labels. They flew us out there before we had even done a tour of the US."
With his insider's perspective on the emergence of grunge, does Arm understand how a group of bands from the Seattle area gave rise to not just a musical movement, but what became a pop cultural event?
Arm pauses. "I don't understand it," he says. "It was kind of weird."
During the time Mudhoney have been around, since the late '80s, countless other bands have emerged and broken up, so how does Arm account for the longevity of his band?
"A couple of things, one being that we didn't have any goals and we didn't give a shit about becoming rock stars or popular or anything like that. By the time we started in '88, after the whole punk thing, we knew that chances are the music that we loved and what we do is not going to go anywhere near the charts, it's not going to be played on radio, except maybe college radio. It's not going to be anything that's going to give us fame and fortune and that's not what we're in it for. So, we had fairly realistic expectations - lowered expectations, if you will. Unlike some of our predecessors, we never feel like we've been cheated because we weren't huge."
The other reason for the band's long existence was "just sort of by accident. At the beginning we decided to credit everyone equally for the songs and divide everything up equally and looking back on it I think that was a really smart idea. We're not a touring band now; everyone's got their lives and if we can squeeze in Mudhoney stuff, we will."
Arm says that at times the public has the wrong idea about what the lives of people in bands is like, saying that there seems to be a perception that, for example, the way Eminem is portrayed on MTV is akin to the lifestyle experienced by most musicians.
"Some people get freaked out when I tell them I have a job," he says. "They are, like, 'Why do you work?'. They think I collect huge royalty cheques and just sit around and smoke pot and make music. And probably get blowjobs at the same time."
Yet during the time they have been in Mudhoney, Arm and his band mates have continued living regular, un-rock'n'roll lives: "...having a job, living in a house, paying your mortgage, eating food", as he says. Guitarist Steve Turner even found the time to study at university.
"He never ended up getting a degree," says Arm. "He's nothing if not a failure and a disappointment to his parents, and everyone in the band and everyone he knows. We hope someday he'll get his ass back to school and get his shit together."
Paul Champion
 | Mudhoney play at the Enigma Bar on Wed 2 March. |
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