WHEN Steve Turner of Mudhoney comes onto the screen, he’s sitting in front of a vast wall of vinyl records.
Both deeply impressed and a little jealous, I acknowledge it looks like a great collection.
“This is my small room of vinyl,” he says with a laugh. “I have another one that’s bigger. I’m not even kidding.”
Damn. Well, it probably should be expected of a guy who’s been playing in bands since the early eighties, and is touring Australia with Mudhoney now.
HOT METAL: It’s going to be great to have Mudhoney here in the country again. You certainly have a relationship with this country.
STEVE TURNER: “Oh definitely! We already loved a lot of Australian music from the seventies and eighties. The Saints were my first Australian love, I guess. But in the mid-eighties there was such a great scene happening down there. It was mysterious and really cool: The Scientists and feedtime, Au-Go-Go Records, Waterfront… there were great labels that were putting out tons of singles that were really cool. The Hard-Ons were a favourite of mine. When we were offered to come down to Australia in 1990, we were still a very young band. We were so excited. We got to meet some of our heroes right away. Lubricated Goat… I can’t leave them out. That first Lubricated Goat record was huge.”
HM: That was the foundation of our scene at the time, but then in the nineties it seemed to become quite focused on what the American scene was doing. It became quite a feedback loop and something of a mutual admiration society.
ST: “We started coming down there a lot! I guess worldwide, the whole Sub Pop thing was seen to be pretty cool to a lot of people. It was still underground and weird in the early days. Before Nevermind and Ten took off. It was kind of different before that. We became friends with Cosmic Psychos, all the Lubricated Goat family of people. A ton of them moved to Seattle in 93 or so. We loved having those bands come over to the States, as well. Some of those bands started putting out records on Sub Pop and Amphetamine Reptile and came over and toured, and we were already friends with them. Lubricated Goat came out, I think they were the first to come to Seattle in 89. We met Guy then, but almost all of them ended up moving to Seattle at some point.”
HM: Obviously that cross-pollination has continued to occur: Guy’s here working again with his new band Bleak Squad, Dan’s done a tour with the Psychos and Mark’s in the Saints now.
ST: “I joke that I’m a little bit bitter because I’m the only member of Mudhoney that’s not in an Australian band!”
HM: Well that might happen! You might get the chance when you’re down here, Steve! Because of that, though, it’s been not just a busy time for Mudhoney but all the other guys in the band. You must be pleased that you can continue to be busy in a band after this length of time. It must be great.
ST: “Yeah. We have a great and long history at this point, 38 years. And sometimes we are busier than at other times. Three of us have kids, and that slowed us down a little. Me and Dan’s kids are adults now, and I can do whatever the guys want to do. But Guy has a teenage daughter who he’s quite involved with down there, with his wife, and Mark’s been busy doing the Saints thing for the last couple of years. We just slowed down a little bit here and there, which is fine. I think at this age, none of us want to be on the road that much more than we are. For a while I think we were saying we would try for a one month or three week tour every six months. I think we managed to do that for six months! Coming down to Australia is great because we love it down there. Melbourne’s my favourite city down there, so sorry everyone else. Guy lives in Melbourne so we get down there early and spend a few days rehearsing and just getting our feet back under us after jetlag. It’s just great. With Guy living in Australia, we start tours tighter than we normally do, because we spend two or three intensive days rehearsing before the tour starts. It’s difficult to schedule something, but if it’s going to be a full tour, it works out well.”
HM: One of the shows you’re doing is the ZED51 festival in Brisbane, which is presented by 4ZZZ, one of the big community radio stations here that has always been supportive of your music. That will be a pretty special event.
ST: “Brisbane’s always been great for us. We became friends with Tym from Tym Guitars, and we also tour a lot there. In Brisbane there’s a plaque in the town square celebrating The Saints, so it’s always been a fun place to go. Tym had a guitar shop there, and a record label, and did shows. And he makes buzzboxes. They were great.”
HM: Brisbane does have a wonderful rock heritage that I think is often overlooked because of Sydney and Melbourne, but it’s great that Mudhoney has such a connection to that city.
ST: “Back in the eighties, when I was getting into a lot of the underground Australian stuff, a compilation called Where Birdmen Flew came out that was celebrating all the rad seventies punk bands that came out of Australia. A lot of that I hadn’t heard before, like Victims, and stuff like that. It seemed that the Brisbane punk bands were very political because of what was happening there in the seventies. It was pretty wild stuff.”
HM: What can you tell us about the special tour vinyl that you’re doing?
ST: “Well we like doing that when we can. We did a tour seven inch once before when we were on tour down there. Guy helped put this one together. They’re both covers, but they’re pretty cool. One’s from a punk band from Texas called Really Red, and there’s a Billy Childish song on the other side.”
HM: I don’t think people put enough stock in covers at times. We had The Damned here in Sydney last night and one of the best known songs of theirs is a cover of a song from the fifties. If you pick a good song, it doesn’t matter if it’s a cover or not.
ST: “In the early days with Mudhoney, we did a whole set of punk covers. I kind of used that as an excuse… they would leak out as singles and on compilations – when we put them all together on the March to Fuzz compilation, I realised it was us trying to show people what our roots actually were. We’re punk rock! Make no mistake – we’re punk rockers.”
HM: Do people make that mistake? Could they?
ST: “Maybe! That whole grunge thing got so weird there, for a while. No, we’re frigging punks! I gotta shaved head and a skateboard!”
HM: You guys were right in the middle of that. I thought that was weird at the time. You said The Scientists were great, and there’s an argument now that they were the first grunge band, but it wasn’t a term that existed before that. A lot of bands got sucked into that definition that just seemed to be a catch-all. It was really just a marketing phrase so that record companies had something to put everyone into.
ST: “Yeah. At first it seemed to be getting used so much about the Seattle scene, but sorry buddy – Screaming Trees, Pearl Jam and us do not sound anything alike. There’s some hair, and we’re friends, and we’re from the same vicinity. When we were making My Brother the Cow we were like, ‘If anybody’s a grunge band, we are!’ We started using the term fairly early. Mark famously used it in a fanzine talking about a dirty guitar sound. The first time I heard the word talking about guitar sound was in Kicks magazine, which was like an oldies garage magazine from the mid-eighties, and they were describing the Rock and Roll Trio of Johnny Burnette doing “Train Kept A-Rollin’”. The first really distorted guitar sound on record, and they described it as “grungy”. We all just used that term to describe our dirty guitars!”
HM: You’re right about bands not sounding anything alike – anything that came out of Seattle was automatically grunge. There were metal bands in Seattle at the time getting completely overlooked because they didn’t have “that” sound.
ST: “There was a great metal scene in Seattle. It was huge there.”
HM: That happened to metal in England in the seventies too, when punk started to emerge there. The metal scene was happening concurrently with that but not getting any attention. I don’t think any scene should be overlooked for another, regardless of what it is.
ST: “Exactly. In Seattle the punk scene was so small, there was a lot of metal folks would come to shows too, and vice versa. There was no lines of demarcation. Oh, you like hard rock and stuff? Cool.”
HM: I’ve always loved the idea of being open-minded about music. I love both punk and metal and I sometimes have an issue when people will completely shut out a complete subset of rock music for whatever reason. We wouldn’t end up with bands like Mudhoney, for example.
ST: “I have to admit there was a time when I was not into metal whatsoever. That was because, back in the Green River days, I was so into sixties garage stuff and the Green River band started going toward Iron Maiden and Venom – I love Venom, I had no problem with them – but they were also starting to get into some of the glam stuff too… I went to see Slayer, and I’m embarrassed to say I did not like Slayer in 1984. I like ‘em now! I like Iron Maiden now! My son really got into Iron Maiden, and so I had to go and buy a double CD of Iron Maiden because he was in School of Rock and had to learn some of the songs. And so, ok, now I like it. Plus, Bruce interviewed me on the radio for some of my solo stuff twenty years ago, and he’s a really cool guy. So I’m much more open-minded now than I was in 1984.”
Mudhoney’s Australian tour continues this week:
20 October – Volta, Ballarat
21 October – Felons Barrel Room, Manly
22 October – Factory Theatre, Sydney
23 October – King Street, Newcastle
24 October – ZED 51, Brisbane
Their tour single, “Aim Tastes Good”/”Sally Sensation” is only available at shows.
