Mudhoney – Interview – September 2010 [PART 1]
By: Charlie Potter
This was another one of those weird situations where I was thinking things like ‘I can’t believe I’m actually talking to Mark Arm’. Luckily for me, Mark Arm is a really nice guy, and can sense perhaps that I’m a bit nervous. You can easily insert the occasional laugh – I’m not a fan of when you read an interview and it says (laughs) - on his part pretty much anywhere you like in this dialogue, as he was really very jovial, and I came away thinking I’d talked to an adult who was at one with the world.
Hello this is Charlie from Rockfeedback calling to do an interview with Mark?
This is Mark - how ya doin Charlie?
Fine…and how is it over there?
How is it here? Are you talking inside or outside?
Ummmm... inside?
Inside, well I’m in a temperature-controlled facility… so it’s pretty good….it’s not really that hot or cold outside either.
The weather has been absolutely terrible here...pretty much… all year, so you’ve got that to look forward to.
You think it’s going to be cold in October?
Yes. Definitely.
And wet.
Definitely. I was quite impressed that you’re doing so many dates in Britain and Ireland, is that usual?
Well we haven’t done a proper tour of the UK in a really long time, since probably before 95’. In 98’ we came over and only played The Garage in London and didn’t come back until probably 2003, and I think that was just a couple of shows, London of course and Nottingham, and I can’t remember where else, we played a couple of shows with The Catheters. And then last October we played in Edinburgh, Leeds and London and went heading off to eastern Europe. So after that last tour - which was quite a lot of long drives - we decided that maybe this time when we come over we’ll concentrate everything and do the UK and Ireland. And seemed it like a really good option, we’ve never really played very much in Ireland - we’ve played Dublin twice and one time was in 95’ at a festival thing, and the other time was just a couple of years ago, so were hitting places that we’ve never seen that were pretty excited about.
Where are you calling from?
I’m calling from the outskirts of London... the great smog, as they call it. So do you enjoy touring?
Yeah I do; I would like to tour more often than we get to do but at this point we have family responsibilities and jobs and whatnot and so…
And do you notice a lot of differences playing over here to America?
Well we don’t really play a ton in America either: we usually just do fly-in shows here and there. A couple of years ago we did do a three week van tour which started in Chicago, and went east to New York, and then went to Boston, and then went south to Florida and New Orleans. Even within the United States there is a lot of differences, like Florida say is very different to anywhere else... and not in a good way.
In what way is it bad in particular in Florida?
There’s just like a small turn out – and a small turn out of really, really weird people.
I guess this is why when bands come over here from America we only really get one or two shows, and not much more than that, and even then a lot of the time they complain that no one comes to the second show... It’s really good for people in Ireland and Scotland that are going to get to see you.
So why do you think it is that so many bands like yourselves, Dinosaur Jr., Flipper, Soundgarden and Butthole Surfers have had a resurgence recently, got back together or started playing more shows? Maybe I’m imagining it, but it seems like a lot of the bands from the 90’s and your kind of sound have started reappearing.
Well Flipper is an 80’s band, I think their first song on a record came out in 79’: ‘Earthworm Song’. And then 80 I think, 80 or 81 was the ‘Ha Ha Ha Love Canal’ single, but I don’t think that I would lump Mudhoney in with those other bands cause I don’t think we’ve ever gotten back together. We had this short period that lasted for maybe 2 years where we didn’t do anything, and that was after Matt quit in about 2000, 2001. Steve and I spent time working with Monkey Wrench, but to me it doesn’t really seem like the band ever broke up and got back together because there was renewed interest in the band, we just kept doing it because we wanted to keep doing it.
I think there was kind of a feeling though, because at the same time as Matt leaving you put out the ‘Best Of’, and there was this gap…
Yeah well right when you put out a ‘Best Of’ it almost seems like, people definitely thought - I think - we broke up, because that definitely does seem like a sort of a tombstone.
If nothing else there certainly does seem to have been a change in that I think of the albums that you did since Matt as kind of different to the ones you did before.
We started working on the ‘Best Of’ before Matt had actually quit the band, and the reason we started doing that was because we’d heard that Sub Pop were going to do a best of the Sub Pop years; of the early stuff which comes from, y’know, three CDs - Superfuzz being six songs and then two short albums, it seemed like you could almost fit all that material on one CD, and so we thought that it would be cool if we could bring everything together that we had done at that point, and Sub Pop has this weird relationship with Warner Brothers that I’m still not sure exactly how it works but they were able to secure the rights for the songs that came out on Reprise and Warner brothers, so it was more of a kind of expansive ‘this is a best of’ and outtakes up to this point. As far as Sub Pop goes – working here in the warehouse – the only thing that I can tell that Warner brothers actually does for Sub Pop is negotiate really good UPS and Fedex rates.
I couldn’t pretend to understand anything that goes on between labels these days! Am I right In thinking that you did one of these things were you play Superfuzz Bigmuff in its entirety recently?
Yeah we did that two weekends ago, a ‘Don’t Look Back’ as part of the ATP in New York and played between The Scientists and the Stooges.
Wow
Which, ya know…
Yeah wow that’s pretty ideal
It’s something as a youth I would have never dreamed possible.
And were there any old bits from Superfuzz that you hadn’t played for a long time?
Yeah, it took a couple of weeks to brush the dust of some of those songs but we’d done that a couple of years before so it was completely out of nowhere, it wasn’t as hard as it was at one point.
So can we expect a lot of that material when you come here?
Well y’know we always played a fair amount of that stuff anyway.
Yeah I suppose when it’s only six songs.
It’s just songs like ‘Halloween’ that we don’t normally do….
Artists in this article: Mudhoney