Mudhoney - Sub Pop, Sub Normal, Subversion!” Everett True, Melody Maker, March 11, 1989

Home , Bruce Pavitt, Everett True, Mudhoney, Steve Turner (guitarist), Sub Pop

Handout 2 - Excerpts from “Mudhoney - Sub Pop, Sub Normal, Subversion!” Everett True, Melody Maker, March 11, 1989

In a bid to garner attention for the label’s artists, Sub Pop founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Ponemon invited British journalists to cover the growing Grunge scene in Seattle. Based on these overseas reviews, American record companies and music journalists soon began to take notice of Seattle bands as well.

From Melody Maker: SUDDENLY SEATTLE IS THE CENTRE OF ALL THINGS GRUNGE. EVERETT TRUE TRAVELS TO THE HOME OF THE ANTI-HITS TO MEET MUDHONEY...WHO UNDERTAKE THEIR DEBUT UK TOUR NEXT WEEK. HIS MESSAGE? PREPARE TO BE BLASTED!

BRITAIN IS currently held in thrall by a rock explosion emanating from one small, insigniﬁcant, West Coast American city. Seattle...now has a new claim to fame – the Sub Pop recording emporium, residing on the penthouse suite of First Avenue's Terminal Sales Building.

As if from nowhere, hoards of...grungy gory guitar bands with one foot in the early Seventies and the other on punk rock's grave, are springing up. Names such as Tad, "the Meatloaf of the New Wave", and his spine-crushing band (who make the Swans seem positively half-hearted by comparison) and the incredible NIRVANA, barely alive, yet already one of the ﬁnest exponents anywhere in the art of marrying a simple, instinctive two-chord song to oceans of speakers. Sub Pop's own discovery, SOUNDGARDEN, are now up with the big boys, A&M, and then, of course, there's the magniﬁcent MUDHONEY, who are shortly embarking on a tour over here with Sonic Youth.

SEATTLE HAS been called the most English of American cities, mainly because of its climate. It's chilly, it's foggy, it's rainy. A lot of London fog jackets are out around town. But it's the city's very remoteness (2,000 miles from Chicago) that has been a major cause of Sub Pop's distinctive sound. Freed of the constraints of peer pressure that bands receive on the East Coast, Seattle bands have been given time to develop, away from the harsh demands of fashion.

Steve Turner, lead guitarist [of Mudhoney], who played on the ﬁrst Green River album and is in The Thrown-Ups, is sensitive and sick, with a wide appreciation of art and culture… Charges of being revivalist or derivative are beside the whole point to him. All he wants to do is "rock out" and have a good time.

"What made Blue Cheer such a great band was that they wanted to sound like Hendrix but weren't good enough," Mark states. "So they simply turned the amps up louder."