"Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (533-2111) -- Sept. 9: MUDHONEY. Old grunge heroes never die; they just get fat and irrelevant. The seminal Seattle outfit that gave the world the classic "Too Drunk To Fuck" returns to its postmodern bar-band roots." The New Yorker, September 14, 1998

This inaccurate indictment/listing from the The New Yorker was handed to me about 15 minutes before I went to interview Mudhoney's vocalist/guitarist Mark Arm, and lead guitarist, Steve Turner. Irrelevant... it's like finding out that the wine you gushed about cost $3 and the one you spat out was named one of the year's 10 best by The Wine Spectator. But after countless listens to the new album, Tomorrow Hit Today (arguably their best since '91's Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge), a chat with these wise cracking smart guys, and one of the most exhilarating concerts I've witnessed in too long, I began to think that if more bands adopted Mudhoney's disregard for whether the New Yorker, you, your mama, or your greasy, greasy granny thinks they're relevant, rock might just get a much needed kick in its retro-futuro dry-clean-only big-name-designer pants.

So let's examine the New Yorker's baseless characterizations: Arm and Turner are still waifishly skinny, though Arm now has red hair instead of the blond he sported back in the grunge heyday of '92 (Turner explains, "his wife is a hairdresser."). Bassist Matt Lukin has dropped about 40 pounds--perhaps he's given birth to the beer baby he'd been carrying for years--and drummer Dan Peters is far from fat. When I suggest that the Dead Kennedys's song "Too Drunk Too Fuck" was confused with Mudhoney's "Flat Out Fucked" and could be perceived as a compliment, Turner concludes, "I think it's more a dig at our drinking habits--we brought 'Too Drunk To Fuck' to Life."

Still, Mudhoney started out as a bar band and one could easily argue they never really stopped being that. Before Pearl Jam and Nirvana were giant heads beaming from MTV, few people would have considered the relevance of Mudhoney, or any of the pre-Honey bands: the Melvins (Lukin), the now legendary Green River (Arm and Turner, plus Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, who eventually formed Pearl Jam), a fledgling Nirvana (Dan Peters), to name a few. They were just rocking it for themselves and a few people who wanted to bang heads to metally punk sludge. The issue of relevance went as far as the age old (OK, '60s old) question--what does rock 'n' roll mean to or about our society, ourselves. "We've always--even before Mudhoney--played shit that we liked before nobody a lot of times, just for the sake of it," Arm says. "To satisfy our own egos--we're very easily amused by ourselves," Turner interjects. "We could satisfy ourselves really easily playing in the Thrown Ups back then. And satisfy ten other people, maybe." Arm interrupts, "Maybe--at the most." The two laugh like any pair who have funny/weird memories that can be collectively re-experienced with a word or a glance. Recalling his smallest show ever, Arm says, "Green River played at CBGBs on a Wednesday night in front of like four Japanese tourists and the wait staff."

Things weren't much better when Mudhoney started. "The smallest Mudhoney show was our first time in Lexington, Kentucky and we got paid seven dollars, a six pack of Sprite, and a pack of cigarettes," Arm says. "That was all they could afford after the customers paid. They felt really bad." He does a weak but hilarious imitation of a sweet Southerner searching around for anything--shoelaces, sandwiches--to use as payment. The show might have been small, but the fans--or fan--were rabid. Turner recalls. "We were like 'no one's gonna be there'--this was in 1988. So we get to the place. It's downtown Lexington, Kentucky, and apparently it was in the midst of quite a depression 'cause everything was closed at five in the afternoon. Finally we find the little hole-in-the-wall bar we're supposed to be playing and it's locked up tight. It didn't look like anyone had been there for months--there were broken chairs on the floor. We were like, 'Man, let's just fucking get out of here.'"

"It's weird to me that we were ever associated, however tenuously, with a movement that was really popular and had any effect on anyone," Arm says reflecting on the grunge explosion. He and Turner concur that they always thought of themselves as simply a punk band. "Then the term grunge came along and we were like, 'whatever; as long as they're calling us, we'll answer," Arm says adding, "We've pretty much stood alone." Turner agrees, "It's definitely not a matter of standing as a musical category," concluding sarcastically, "That' s a powerful stance--that's something to look for in your life." Arm adds "I was never very much of a team player. I wasn't into organized sports. We have an affinity for certain bands but usually it's not based on anything ideological." "--Or even necessarily a style," Turner interjects. "Bands that we like, we feel somehow linked to, but not necessarily in any bigger way. We still feel somewhat linked to Sonic Youth and we never shared too many elements with them."

You might be safe linking Mudhoney to Sonic Youth, but take cover if you connect them to the MTV grungelets. "All of the Seattle bands--Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, us, Screaming Trees--they don't sound that similar" Turner says. "There's a couple of similarities, but mostly I don't think we sound very similar. The bands that sound similar are the ones that came later--Stone Temple Pilots..." Arm interjects "Bush" derisively, and Turner chimes in, "The aping bands--I don't think we were ever linked with them." The word them is pronounced with the utmost sneer, and Arm laughs in horror. What would they do if that happened? "I would fucking quit," Turner says. "The messenger is the one we'd have to kill in that case--the person who does the linking," Arm concurs. "That person would be not long of this world." They concede that Mudhoney will always be tied to a movement, at least in many people's minds. "But it's a dead movement," Arm spits out emphatically, finishing off what many thought died when Kurt Cobain put a bullet in his head, though it was already plenty oversaturation-cancer ridden by then.

"It would be album... five," Turner says by way of explaining Mudhoney's latest. "We started working on the record basically two years ago--coming up with songs for it--it's the last two years distilled into 12 soundbites." Arm adds, "There isn't and never has been a master plan," then pauses and adds jokingly, "which might be part of the problem." Tomorrow Hits Today is a reference to "When Tomorrow Hits" from Mudhoney's first, self-titled album, in which Arm repeats ominously, "when tomorrow hits, it'll hit you hard..." And Tomorrow does hit hard, stylistically, as well as lyrically. Though it sounds more carefully produced than other Mudhoney albums (by legendary Memphis boardman Jim Dickinson--Stones, Big Star, and the Replacements), it's still dirty as hell--you're hit and jabbed all over by layered noise rather than thudded through by a crunching bulldozer.

The superfuzz bigmuff remains dictator on Tomorrow (Dickinson wasn't into "rounding the edges," and often wanted to make songs "louder"), but Turner adds heaps of complexity to his guitar playing, ripping out some solos that are worthy of the most rocking stages of Neil Young (maybe the great grandpappy of grunge anyhow). Lyrically, the new record could be described as retro-Honey in that the band moves past the disgust at the music industry and the "scene" that permeated their last album, My Brother The Cow ("Into Your Shtick" and "Generation Spokesmodel,") and returns to that overarching dread and disgust that made songs like "Touch Me, I'm Sick" and "Hate The Police" classics.

To The New Yorker and others who complain that Mudhoney hasn't made any great stylistic shifts, Turner says, "We're still the same four people; we still like a lot of the same things. We like more things that we used too, because we're older. To go after what's happening now, or whatever someone tells me we should be going after because it's the hot new thing, would be pointless." Arm relates: "We had a friend who told me we should incorporate a DJ into our act and get down with some of the 'new' sampling technology. My idea was to have a DJ with a close-and-play and just put on Black Flag's Damaged and start it at the same time we start the set and just play it all the way through--all he'd have to do is flip it." Turner agrees, "Or we could take a little break between each of our songs and have our DJ just play whatever we want to hear." Becoming semi-serious for a moment, Turner adds, "We weren't really worried about what was hip and happening when we started so why would we be now?"

Still he draws back before waving that indie rock flag too fervently, saying, "But it's not like we're against what's popular--that's just not what we want to do, and for a brief moment, what we were doing was hot and happening and that's fine and dandy but..." Arm breaks in and demands, "What are we supposed to disappear after that, I suppose?" Turner picks up the thread: "We weren't one of the big, giant bands, so we should disappear because it makes the New Yorker writer uncomfortable that we still exist? 'They are so '92! They cannot keep going after this because I remember them in 1992!'

Flip on the radio and being "so '92" sounds pretty relevant, especially when compared to so '98's Three-Eyed-Match-Box-Driving-Reel-Big-Cherry-Poppin'-Zippers. According to Turner, the real salvation for music might be if nobody gives a damn about it for a while. "The hope is that everyone just gets sick of it," he says. "I see great hope in that most records don't sell as much as they used to. Because it's all a bunch of f***ing crap and no one trusts anything anymore. And so a lot of people who weren't in it just because they liked it will disappear. And teenage kids won't see being in a faceless modern pop band as a career opportunity because it won't be anymore. If I was in high school now, and I told the career counselor that I wanted a career in music, they'd look at it as a real possibility. They'd say, 'What kind of marketing strategies do you have? Do you have a manager? Blah, blah, blah.' Whereas when I was in high school, it was like, 'OK, you're a bum--So you wanna be a bum, do you? Great--You go play your little music--you be a bum." Arm steps in as the parent agreeing with Turner's counselor, points his finger at his bandmate turned imaginary son, gives him a stern, "You're disowned," and the two chuckle demonically.