Mudhoney Twenty-Five Years On

What happens to a punk band more than two decades into a career?

"I try to find an opening spot to hit that I haven’t hit before for that particular song to see what that sounds like," says guitarist Steve Turner of Mudhoney. It's 25 years since the release of Bigmuff Superfuzz, but they're still hard and still noisy.  "I’ve always liked the chaos theory of it, to try and get out of whatever you know. It gets old after a while on tour in a certain way because I can’t get out of the box as easily because I’ve been playing the songs too much. I like the unexpectedness of it. As far as playing rock 'n' roll guitar, I like it when things sound like they were happy accidents."

This year's Vanishing Point isn't necessarily chaotic, but Mudhoney still knows its way around a high energy riff. Over the years, singer Mark Arm's voice has become more Iggy-like, and Turner's guitar playing has only become more explosive. The band plays One Eyed Jacks Tuesday night.

When I learned to play the riff to "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple, I played it for 10 minutes. Heavy riffs seem like such a primal pleasure.

I think "Smoke on the Water" is the first riff everybody learned on guitar; I'm pretty sure it was mine. It just seems to come out when you pick up a guitar and beat on the E string.

How have you changed as a guitar player since you started?

I don't think I've changed that much. With soloing, I always aim to try to surprise myself. 

How has Mudhoney changed over the years?

The biggest difference besides 25 years on is that halfway through we switched bass players from Matt [Lukin] to Guy [Maddison]. 

We were going through a bit of a malaise there because we had just gotten dropped from the record label, Matt had quit the band, and we realized that this was no longer going to be our job. We were basically asking ourselves, “Okay, now what are we going to do?” We took that year off basically, and when we got back with Guy we felt really invigorated by it, freed up from any expectations other than to ourselves. 

Since then, because of our schedules and things and family commitments, it obviously meant a lot for us to keep doing it, and I think we matured in our appreciation of it and each other being able to still do it together. We are all really engaged, is what it comes down to, we’re all in it together in the same way at this point.

When I’ve seen you play live, there was no sense that playing older songs had become a chore. Frequently when a band has as much catalogue as you do, there’s a part of it that they really don’t feel like revisiting or feel like they’ve worn out. 

Obviously we can’t play them all, and sometimes we realize that “Oh god, we aren’t playing a single song from ‘X’ record. We better fix that.” It just happens sometimes. 

It’s weird what falls by the wayside. It’s kind of unexpected. It can often be some our favorite songs from whatever record and we just forget about it for a while then we realize that we haven’t played it for five years. But I like a lot our older songs. I have no problem playing them. Anybody will get sick of playing certain songs at some point, and when we do, we just switch it up. That’s how a song gets lost though. One person, one day will say that he doesn’t want to play that song and then it’s off the setlist for five years.

So what was the story behind "Chardonnay" on Vanishing Point?

Well, Mark has always been a hardcore lyricist, right? We got our start in the hardcore days, writing about Reagan and what not. I think he’s gotten to the point where he’s still singing about what really pisses him off and what really pisses him off these days is seeing a bottle of Chardonnay backstage when he has requested a local varietal of white wine. 

I expected you to be beer drinkers. 

At least a couple of us still drink beer. I don’t drink too much beer any more. I probably had way too much of it when I was younger. And if I drink, it’s generally going to be white wine at this point, I can’t even drink red wine.

Has that element of touring changed for y’all?

Of course. We’re older. It can be argued that collectively, we drank way too much. It can be argued that we do that occasionally still, but I can’t play a lot of these songs anymore after having more than a glass or two of wine. It just gets harder physically. Or I’ll forget and ask myself, “What song is this one, again?” 

What does a record mean to you guys these days?

It’s the latest collection of songs we could come up with. 

This one, I didn’t know what to think of it as we were recording it. I really like the last one, Lucky Ones, a lot, but I also knew that Mark wasn’t playing guitar on that one and it was about as stripped down and punked up as we wanted to go. Then one of the first songs we came out with was "Chardonnay," so we thought “Oh, maybe we are going to make a hardcore record” [laughs]. 

But we try to have no expectations. Whatever idea someone came up with in practice, we try to work it into something without any guiding idea. The Lucky Ones was definitely an idea, like Mark put down the guitar and tried to come with lyrics as we were playing shit and tried to meat it up a little. And this one was kind of whatever. If Mark thought he could add something on guitar to those songs, he would grab the guitar or sometimes he wouldn’t. I think about half the record he plays guitar on. So it was a little more open ended. We recorded it quickly and efficiently, I hope. I’m surprised that people noticed this one more than some of ours, so that was kind of cool.

It’s one of the first records that we can play the whole thing live no problem. I think that says a lot about it. The first two records we did with Guy, obviously we expanded it a bit - other people coming in, horns, and stuff like that. So I guess this one has a few extra people, some synthesizers, an organ here and there, backing vocals.

What do you remember about cutting Bigmuff Superfuzz?

I was at the original Reciprocal Recording with Jack Endino. He just switched it to 16 tracks so we had a little more room to play overdubs and things like that. 

It was really easy. We were really young and just blasted through this shit, drunk. We saw what Jack did with it and said, “Cool, man.” There was very little thought to it. 

For more with Steve Turner, see my interview with him in The New Orleans Advocate.