Dear Friends,
We are on our way to Colorado Springs after an awesome evening at the cabin! Michael made us a wonderful meal and some cookies, as well. Then he kicked our ass at Shut the Box and we got to bed. I appreciate having a brother such as him.
I have to say I am excited about today. I haven’t been to Colorado Springs in about 30 years, and I look forward to seeing it again. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say tomorrow, but I anticipate a flood of memories.
The last time I drove up there, Ben and I were going to visit Granny and Papa for several days before Christmas. We had a blast, and it was cold as eff. Sage and I played a lot of basketball and the altitude made me feel a bit high. I wasn’t drinking in those days, and I remember it was a bit of a challenge to my sobriety at the time because I wanted to let loose a little. I don’t anticipate any such troubles today.
So, off we go. Have a wonderful Friday everyone!
*****
I’m hoping my brother Tom J is feeling good enough to smile a little today. Major surgery is not a fun thing any time. My thoughts are with you, my friend. All the love!
*****
I keep a running document of these writings and prior to today’s entry, I have mentioned Mudhoney 18 times. It feels like I have already written about them, but I’ve only used them as a reference. When historians look back at the music of the late 80s, 90s, and 2000s, they will undoubtedly see the huge influence of this band.
As I have shared a lot of the last 35 years or so, I love Mudhoney. Before I had ever heard them and had only read about them in magazines, I thought the name was brilliant. Then, when I started really reading about them, everything that was written about them said how amazing they were (and still are). I had to get some Mudhoney in my life and started scouring the local record shops for them.
The first Mudhoney music I got was the EP, Superfuzz Bigmuff. This was another used CD score from Zia, but it wasn’t $2.99. Being that they were kind of an “It” band at the time, I think the used EP was almost full price, but I had traded my buddy, Bob, weed for Zia credit, so it only cost me maybe the price of a gram of some super seedy crap (by today’s standards) I had laying around.
Giddy, I couldn’t skate home from Zia fast enough so I could throw the six-song EP in the CD player. Even the cover looked cool with its strange-angled live shot done in a blue filter. I was holding grunge history before people really talked a lot about “grunge.”
It was probably a week before I took the CD out of the player after that initial voyage. The guitars sounded so cool and Mark Arm’s voice was the perfect mix of punk and rock and roll. The guy can inflect such attitude in a song. You just know he is sneering.
The real fun is listening to these tunes now. The band definitely evolved from where they started when this was originally recorded back in 1988. A song like “Need” sounds like rudimentary Mudhoney at this point, but it still packs a wallop. The combination of Arm and Steve Turner on guitar is just so thick and bassist Matt Lukin and drummer Dan Peters are so locked in.
There is also a real darkness around these songs. Considering Arm and Turner’s previous band, Green River, was named after a series of killings, I never really thought about how the early Mudhoney lyrics are pretty dark in tone. These were young dudes making some music that sounded kind of simple at the outset but is really quite sophisticated considering how much impact it has had.
If Superfuzz Bigmuff had never come out, there would be a lot of bands that never existed, and a lot of established bands would have never embraced the fuzz as much as they ended up embracing it.
“I got a mouthful of dirt and a handful of charms/I got a rusty old spade, don’t care who I harm.”
“Mudride” just blew me away when I first heard it. Turner’s guitar textures during the verses is just killer. That opening line just grabs you, too. “Mudride” has a really proper use, too, of dueling wah wah pedals. Noisy and delicious, “Mudride” still makes the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Not to exclude tracks two and four, “Chain That Door” and “No One Has” respectively, because I fully dig them, I just like “If I Think” and “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” a ton more. In terms of the former, it was a go to back in the day when I was having girl problems. There is something super comforting about the way Arm delivers this one.
“If ‘n’ Out of Grace” might be my favorite Mudhoney song. It’s just a straight up ripper. It’s also one of those songs that is kind of like a blue print for how to play proper grunge music. I probably put this on fifty mix tapes, too.
I definitely have more Mudhoney stories to tell.
*****
See you tomorrow.
AI: I do not know what Happy Jack, Arizona means so I will give you this.
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