Dig the dirt
The album that saved Sub Pop gets a deluxe 30th anniversary reissue. By Stevie Chick.
Mudhoney ★★★★
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge SUB POP. CD/DL/LP
THEY’D EFFECTIVELY coined grunge’s gnarly sound and deadpan attitude, but just as commercial reward approached Seattle’s homegrown scene, pioneers Mudhoney seemed to have run aground. Guitarist Steve Turner felt they’d outlived their purpose. Drummer Dan Peters was moonlighting with Nirvana and Screaming Trees. Frontman Mark Arm was falling deeper under the spell of heroin. And Sub Pop – the label that had cannily marketed grunge – was facing bankruptcy.
Such downer vibes might explain why Mudhoney’s first attempt at their second fulllength LP fizzled out, but the true reason is more prosaic: the modern, 24-track studio they’d been recording in. Turner now grumbles that these early tracks – included on this deluxe 30th anniversary reissue, along with B-sides and outtakes – “didn’t have the dirt”. So Mudhoney relocated to the more primitive Egg Studio, in the basement of producer Conrad Uno and equipped with an 8-track recording desk built for Stax Records back in the ’60s.
At Egg, Turner took the wheel and nudged Mudhoney away from Seattle’s trademark ’70s heaviness, towards his beloved ’60s garage rock, wah wah pedals benched in favour of more era-correct instruments. So the stopstart riff of Who You Drivin’ Now? – swiping at both an unnamed Seattle scenester and the Pinto, a Ford automobile notorious for catching fire – was accented by Arm’s Farfisa organ. Turner wheezed acidic harmonica over Move On and blew plaintive Dylanesque counter-melodies on affecting rumble Pokin’ Around, one of a clutch of songs on …Fudge that showcased songwriting that had matured beyond the blackly comedic rut-rock of their origins. Broken Hands, meanwhile, built the harmonic outro to Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl into a smouldering epic that remains one of Mudhoney’s finest.
Released in July 1991, the initial sales of …Fudge – 100,000 units, which Sub Pop’s Bruce Pavitt considered akin to platinum status for an indie album – won the label a momentary reprieve. However, the actual multi-platinum success of Nirvana’s Nevermind secured Sub Pop’s future, that breakthrough album resulting from an upgrade to a bigtime studio where their sound was buffed up to a radio-friendly sheen.
As the grunge era wore on and punk rock finally “broke”, …Fudge’s raw edges and freewheeling garage-rock moves sounded further and further adrift from the zeitgeist. Instead of grasping the moment, they’d made an album which – with its canny songcraft, biting wit and quest for “the dirt” – remains timeless. Scorning bogus concepts like “careerism” and “professionalism” to follow their instincts and their passions, Every Good
Boy Deserves Fudge finds a group wise enough to outlive the trend they set, who burn brightly and brilliantly to this day.