Mudhoney adds some grunge to Olympia Film Festival opening night
Grunge is dead, long live grunge.
Though some declared grunge dead soon after Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, Seattle’s Mudhoney — widely acknowledged as one of the most influential grunge bands — rocks on, fueled by fuzz, feedback and fistfuls of attitude.
“After the great backlash of grunge in Seattle, when everybody was sick of it, that’s when we kind of re-embraced the term and said, ‘Damn it, we’re grunge,’ ” Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner of Portland said.
“If anybody is, we are,” he said. “Yeah, we’re a grunge band.”
On Friday night (Nov. 7), the 40- and 50-something quartet — the linchpin of Seattle’s Sub Pop — plays in Olympia for the opening of the 31st annual Olympia Film Festival.
Turner — affable, relaxed and funny — talked with The Olympian last week about the band’s past, present and future.
Q. The band has been together for 26 years now. Did you ever imagine you’d stay together that long?
A. That’s exactly what we planned.
Q. No, but seriously.
A. What we figured honestly was Dan (Peters) was in a bunch of bands, Matt Lukin lived down in Aberdeen still or Montesano, and I was planning on going back to school. We figured we could at least get out a single or two.
I told my parents that I’d be going back to school the next year. I’d dropped out to move back to Seattle from Bellingham, and kind of made a deal: “OK, I’ll do this for, like, a year.”
It took off really quickly. The first single was “Touch Me I’m Sick,” and influential types like Sonic Youth got behind that, and we ended up going on tour. No dues were paid.
Q. How has your music been evolving?
A. We don’t try to be anything but what pops out of our guitars and drums and mouths. When we started, there was definitely some cornerstones that we were coming from: The Stooges and ’60s fuzzed-out garage punk, basically the punk rock underground of the day, post hardcore stuff.
We still are the same people, at least three of us. (Bassist Matt Lukin left the band around 1999. Today the band is Turner, Peters, Mark Arm and Guy Maddison) There are certain patterns that we play together. We’re not the most diverse band. We’ve never tried to spot a trend and go in that direction.
Q. If the music hasn’t changed that much, it seems like the angry lyrics are about different things now. Take “Chardonnay,” from 2013’s “Vanishing Point.” (Sample lyric: You’re “the soccer mom’s favorite sipper.”)
A. That’s age-appropriate anger. Mark (Arm) is a wine connoisseur in his 50s.
Sing about what you know. Write about what you know.
Q. Do you ever see Mudhoney slowing down or mellowing out?
A. There’s room to do whatever we want, but that’s just kind of what we gravitate towards. Our country experiment didn’t work out that well.
Q. Did you actually experiment with that, or is that a joke?
A. We did a split single with Jimmie Dale Gilmore in the ’90s, and it was fine, but it doesn’t come natural to us.
Q. How have you guys stayed together so long?
A. We made a really good decision early on to split the songwriting credits equally. I literally think that takes care of 70 percent of intra-band squabbles.
Since Matt quit in ’99ish, we’ve taken it more mellow. We’re not a full-time thing anymore. We all have jobs and families and things like that. We all like doing it.
We all reserve the right to say no to anything, and no one can really be upset because we all have to say no to certain things that are offered to us.
It’s a lot of compromising and understanding that we like doing this so we will try hard to keep doing it.
This story was originally published November 6, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Mudhoney adds some grunge to Olympia Film Festival opening night."