Back to Work With Mudhoney

Mudhoney told everyone how they made their sound with the title of their first EP back in 1988. Those of us who did not know the names of guitar pedals were left to absorb and enjoy the Stooges vibes blaring in all that muffed and fuzzy hot noise. The Seattle band has found consistent work for 25 years because that wild Funhouse energy rubs hard against other influences: that Devo drillbit guitar in “Sliding In and Out of Grace,” that joyful impossibility of Lou Reed grinding with the beach rhythms that flop out that perfect groove of “One More Time” (as someone who must’ve lost his head on multiple occasions, I have to stop and give props to Mark Arm’s lyrics in that song). Or that twisted dank blues on “Hard on For War” – the best anti-war tune of the past twenty war-filled years. More recently, the 2018 record Digital Garbage was the rock album to most poignantly point out the thoughts of thick black cock rampant in the prosperity gospel zealotry of the president’s shoelickers. Blistering satire and screeds of words and sound all over that badass album. 

They also still rattle the rafters and all the souls live. 

Steve Turner makes much of that noise with his guitars and pedals, and no less than Rolling Stone (when it still covered music – does anyone know what they cover now?) called him “the Eric Clapton of grunge.” They definitely meant Turner was a revered guitar player and not a racist knob. He’s not, and we know because we read his autobiography Mud Ride – out soon via Chronicle Books . Therein, we learned that when he bought his first house with money from when Mudhoney was on a major record label, he bought one with enough room for touring bands to have their own area to crash. I don’t think Clapton would let some guy who’s been wearing the same pants for two weeks stay at his house, but all that is to say that the Rolling Stone quote makes no sense on any level. The book features tales that start more than 50 years back, and gets to rockin’ once Turner wore Rector knee pads at a Devo gig in 1980. After touring for 35 years and surviving the media frenzy that tried to eat his city, of course the garage rock-loving record collector has many cool experiences to share.

He was kind enough to talk to us about Mudhoney’s 11th album Plastic Eternity, which has a vocal cameo by the weather itself, and even – gasp – the band’s first love song. 

Jamison Floyd: I saw you and talked to you at the last show you played before the pandemic lockdown, out near Joshua Tree at Pappy and Harriet’s, two weeks before live music stopped. I was that beer-full fool who joked about playing “Here Comes Sickness” at a time that made the chorus literal. It was a killer show –  and then there were no more. How did you maintain after that abrupt shift?

Steve Turner – The Mudhoney guys, we didn’t see each other for over a year and a half. We didn’t get together until we had, I think, two shots in us. 

Then it was weird. It was such a disconnection to the world. I would have Zoom meetings with the Mudhoney guys, fairly often. 

[He talks about getting through the lockdown with family here in a way that makes it seem like a strong supportive network, and mentions the benefit that his 18 and 23 year old kids – he called them kids with a laugh – who live with him like each other.]

JF: When did the new album come about? Were you writing during those lockdown days? 

ST: We’re not a band that sends each other demos and stuff online. We need to be in the room together to write songs. We come up with riffs and song ideas and we all, all four of us, contributed to this record. Dan [Peters, drummer] actually wrote quite a bit of music for the first time and showed it to us. The next song that’s coming out, “Little Dogs,” is one of Dan’s musical ideas. 

But, you know, I’m always stockpiling riffs and ideas. Guy [Maddison, bassist] is a riff machine. Guy’s always showing us things, on bass and sometimes guitar. 

Once we started getting together again, we kind of had to work fast. We had set some deadlines, which we don’t normally do either. I think most people work like this, but we don’t normally. 

And we weren’t ready to go in the studio when we went in the studio. For us that time was a lot of off the cuff, in the studio finding of things, which I’m fine with. Mark [Arm, singer and guitarist] usually likes to have things a little bit more worked out. To me, I thought it was a great process this time around to come in with vague ideas and then just make it up in the studio. There were time constraints this time. 

JF: Wasn’t Guy’s decision to move back to Australia adding some kind of time constraint?

ST: That had been delayed for a while. He was planning on leaving sooner than that but the pandemic and paperwork got in the way a little bit. But yeah, there were lots of time constraints on us. We had tours. We knew when the record should come out so we can do other tours.

JF: Have you talked about how the band is going to function with its bass player in Australia? [Steve has lived in Portland for many years and Mudhoney maintains a home base in and around Seattle, so there’s been 1/10,000 the amount of travel time worth of practice.]

ST: We think about it. We haven’t worked out yet how we would actually record. But we’ve kind of worked out a schedule where we’re gonna try to do a month-long tour every six months. Which is way more organized than we normally are. But that requires, well, like, we toured Europe in the fall and we met in the Netherlands for a week before the tour started and rehearsed. 

It actually worked great, we got climatized to the time change and we were tighter and more ready for the tour than we’ve ever been, I think, because we had five or six days of rehearsing for three or four hours a day. It actually worked out good. 

We’re going to Australia early to do the same thing. [The first show of that tour is April 14, 2023, twelve days after this interview.] 

JF: [I left out a spot of my dumb questions about Australia, the land Steve describes belovedly in his book.The exchange ended with me forgetting to ask him about luring original bassist Matt Lukin back from hammering boards to thumping bass.]…but the plan is to keep going as Mudhoney with Guy on bass?

ST: Yeah. Yeah. It’s another wrinkle. It’s not a, you know, we don’t really view this as a career –  at this point in our lives. We’re very lucky to do it and it does add to our paychecks and everything, but it’s not our whole lives, and it hasn’t been for over 20 years at this point. 

JF: As a fan, I think Mudhoney should be filthy rich from their music. Are you working now?

ST: I’m not at the moment. I was working at a record pressing plant up until right when the pandemic started. But that work really dropped off, which was kind of strange, so we parted ways. Now they’re way busier than when I worked there. They’re doing swing shifts and working weekends. But at first the work dried up completely. So I stopped doing that and went back to selling whatever I could online. You know, records and memorabilia. So that got me through. And the book deal helped as well. It’s not a huge book deal or anything, but there’s that and you know, you just kind of make do. 

It was great to be able to get back touring again. I mean, you know, it was a rough two, two-and-a-half years. For a lot of musicians it was rough going for a while. 

I had some help: I borrowed some money from one of my wealthy rockstar friends when I needed to. And you know, you just kind of figure it out. Like everybody else. 

JF: [Switching, no, grinding gears] Until I read the book I didn’t know what a huge influence skateboarding was for you. I grew up with Thrasher as a music bible and always like to ask people what they remember the mag and the scene getting them into.

ST: Wez is a good buddy of mine. Wez Lundry. He used to live in Seattle but he lives in Mexico City now. He got an advanced copy of the book and he was kind of bummed the way I described him. 

JF: Oh yeah? I don’t remember anything negative. 

ST: I said he was kind of a Spicoli character that worked at the Fallout Records & Skateboards shop. He was. He’s now a professor of political science at a University in Mexico City. I told him I stand by that [laughs]. I am bummed that he’s bummed about it because he’s done so much, but he was the, you know, funny little kid that worked at the punk rock skateboard shop. 

I started listening to punk rock in ‘79 because some of the pros got into punk rock. Steve Olson in particular was kind of the first dude that really made it apparent that he was a punk rocker. And, Skateboarder Magazine had a music page as well, before Thrasher, and they had Black Flag in there. And we bought the first Black Flag 7-inch when it came out. That was ‘79 or ‘80.

Devo was a huge one. That was my first concert. And that was only because of skateboarding. They had Rector pads on their knees. We all had our skateboards and had Rector pads with Bermuda shorts on. 

JF: I don’t think you could get into a show with a skateboard any more. 

ST: Probably not. But back then [we’re talking 1980-81 here], it was chaos basically. But I discovered that stuff, and very quickly discovered the local music scene as well. The Vancouver B.C. bands came down a lot, so D.O.A. was one of the first bands I saw. And the Subhumans – not the UK version. 

JF: I hear a lot of Greg Ginn in your playing. Not like overtly or in an obvious way, but like it’s snuck in over the years at least. 

ST: Oh for sure. He was the master of strangely discordant guitar solos. And I saw Black Flag several times through the years, and he was always just this amazing guitar player. I think he gets a lot of credit at this point. I remember back in the early 80s, Eddie Van Halen giving him credit. 

JF: I don’t remember that one. 

ST: Yeah. [Ginn’s] definitely a big part of it. He was a huge influence on both Mark and myself. I think he’s a big influence on grunge in particular. Black Flag’s My War – I swear, that record instantly made the Melvins slow down to a crawl. Because The Melvins when they started, they were a fairly tight hardcore band and My War came out and they suddenly slowed down. 

And I know it was a huge influence on us as well. Even in the Green River days. 

JF: I know your other big love and influence is 60s garage rock – can you tell us some of your favorites?

ST: There’s a lot. Obviously The Sonics. It seems like as soon as I was aware of punk rock I was aware of the Northwest’s 60s legacy as well. I think just because the dudes that worked at the record stores put those records in with the punk records. So I knew about Paul Revere & the Raiders, which was the commercial end of garage rock, but their records really hold up and they have some amazing songs. The Wailers were another band that was around, they were a Tacoma band that influenced The Sonics. I swear they have some songs that are almost making fun of The Sonics. It’s just really simple, great rock n roll. 

One of my first favorite songs, even before I was really paying attention to music, was “Pushing Too Hard” by The Seeds. That was an LA band. 

…The Litter from Minneapolis put out a couple amazing records. Their first record was called Distortions. I mean, come on [laughs]. 

…The Shadows of Knight from Chicago are pretty amazing. 

…I started buying all those Pebbles compilations, and Back From the Grave, which was a series of compilations that were really obscure and full of primitive teenage garage rock. That was a huge influence on me in the early-to-mid 80s. I probably have 200 compilation LPs of 60s garage-punk stuff. I don’t really know the names of most of the bands because to me it’s just one giant teenage band from the middle of America. 

JF: [I make some comparison between comp records and playlists, and we chuckle through some jokes about making mixtapes for girls, and somehow we end up back on the subject of the new album] …you brought up “Little Dogs” and man, the first time I heard that song, I thought it was so cute, and that’s not a word I would ever associate with Mudhoney. 

ST: Mark laughingly says it’s his first love song…Mark and his wife Emily do a lot of volunteering for dogs and shelters. They’ve hosted many dogs throughout the years. That’s how they ended up with their little dog Russell…We practice at Mark’s house and I never know what’s going to greet me at the door. How many dogs are going to come running to the door? Sometimes it’s such a weird mix of dogs – it looks like a Disney movie or something [laughs].

JF: I’m sure you’ll get plenty of questions about that song, and the album has some unique sounds for Mudhoney all over the place.

ST: We worked with Johnny Sangster again, who’s been a partner of ours for quite a few recordings. Like I said we weren’t quite finished with some of these songs, so he actually contributed some ideas for songs, so he actually gets writer’s credit on a few of the songs and he played guitar and keyboard. Dan played guitar as well on some of the songs with the music that he had come up with. So that’s different. Definitely. It was much more of a collaborative thing with Johnny on this record. Guy does a lot more synth on this record. He’s very passionate about his synthesizer stuff. He has a side project, or had, a project called The Beauty Hunters that put out a couple of albums. 

JF: Well, that’s about all the time we have. One last thing: in the I’m Now documentary from a long while back, either you or Mark quips “We’ll play anywhere someone asks us to play.” With that in mind,  we want to ask you to come play Alex’s Bar in Long Beach. It only holds about 300 people, but it would be rad. 

ST: [Laughs] I’ve heard of that place. Well, we play The Casbah in San Diego and that’s even smaller…that’d be rad. 

Mudhoney’s Plastic Eternity is out April 7 on Sub Pop Records.