Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” is the only grunge song I’ve ever truly loved. Who could compete? Pearl Jam’s songs were far too polite. Nirvana produced brilliant pop tunes. “Hands All Over” was a great tune, but Soundgarden may as well have been Led Zeppelin Jr. Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and Screaming Trees were wastes of vinyl better used to reissue R. Dean Taylor albums. But Mudhoney? They were the real, filthy, article. “Touch Me I’m Sick” reeked of spilt beer, bong smoke, sweaty flannel shirts, and some unspecified contagious disease.
Mudhoney were grunge in the truest sense of the word. They were so filthy even the vinyl they pressed their music on smelled wrong. And Mark Arm was the anti-Vedder; he didn’t emo(te) empathy or compassion and he didn’t have a good voice—what he had was same “fuck it” attitude as the wild-eyed crazy kid down the street who would gargle nuclear waste on a dare. Mudhoney gave off the same anarchic stench as The Stooges. You didn’t want them in your house; you didn’t even want them in your zip code.
It’s all there 1988 debut Superfuzz Bigmuff, with songs like “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” and “In ‘n’ Out of Grace.” Filth! Sexual perversion! Ignominy! Send your daughters to the nearest nunnery!! While the Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots of the scene were playing nice in their quest for the major label score, Mudhoney were sending the state of Washington’s perversion level higher than the Seattle Space Needle. There were scuzzier and more demented bands out there, but the others hailed from Chicago, Texas, New York City, Madison, Wisconsin—Australia even. Mudhoney were as close as grunge got to noise rock, and they did it in what was basically a backwards looking genre.
Arm doesn’t have the big voice of an Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell—he gets by on sheer dementia power. And the band’s sound is anything but polished—you’d need a fire hose to blast the muck off it. It’s raw power, with the emphasis on raw. Superfuzz Bigmuff might sounds like it was recorded in the basement of a condemned house cluttered with crushed Olympia beer cans and curious rats.
Superfuzz Bigmuff is the most chaotic album to emerge from the grunge movement. Not the loudest, not the smartest, certainly not the most polished. And that “Superfuzz” ain’t false advertising. Mark Turner’s guitar work on “Touch Me I’m Sick” and “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” is only slightly less scuzzy than the filth-encrusted carpeting in an abandoned dirt road double-wide turned party spot for teen skeezers. And he ups the fuzz quotient to Space Needle heights on “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More.” And he’s not a one-trick pony. He throws some serious distortion into the mix on “No One Has” and “The Rose.” On “Mudslide” he channels the ghost of The Stooges’ Ron Asheton. And I’m pretty sure it’s a chain saw he’s playing on “Chain That Door.”
Arm isn’t the best singer to emerge from the Seattle scene–he could arguably be the worst. But who cares? Let Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell etc. wow the world with their big tonsils and enunciation lessons–it was up to Arm to provide some much needed mayhem. He rescues otherwise so-so songs like “The Rose” (which has an embarrassing spoken word interlude I hope is an inside joke), “If I Think” and “Need” with his deranged vocal performances.
On punk metal highlight “You Got It (Keep It Out of My Face)” he spits vitriol. On the bass-heavy speed metal number “24″ he’s been drunk for one whole day and plans to do the same tomorrow. On “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” he swaps lines with Turner’s guitar. And on “Touch Me I’m Sick”—which he opens with an Iggy Pop “Oof!” and follows with an asylum scream—Arm delivers what I consider the finest vocal performance of the grunge era. With the exception of Kurt Cobain, of course, but I’ve always felt the grunge label did Cobain a grave disservice—it turned him into a movement figurehead, and fame and the limelight were the last things he needed.
When I first heard bands like Pearl Jam I simply didn’t get it—this was merely updated classic rock. But Mudhoney was a different animal altogether. Superfuzz Bigmuff is far from being a perfect album. But it includes at least four landmark tracks, none in the fussy manner of better known songs by their contemporaries. Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus labeled Stone Temple Pilots “elegant bachelors” in “Range Life”—elegant was the last word you’d use to describe Mudhoney. That cruddy carpet in the abandoned double-wide used as a party spot by local dirtballs? It would have cringed had Mudhoney set foot on it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
