It was just a really gnarly, gnarly guitar sound. “I don’t know if it was the guitars or the recording. “There’s something special about that first single, we were never quite able to recapture that sound,” Mark Arm later recalled. It was a two-and-a-half-minute Stooges-alike blast. Mudhoney formed in 1988, releasing their debut single Touch Me I’m Sick just three months later. Mudhoney’s early photographer was a just-graduated Seattle local, Charles Peterson, future imager-in-chief for a slew of bands… Whenever there’s a discussion about grunge’s gnarly family tree, Mudhoney appear to be the trunk. Drummer Dan Peters would briefly moonlight for Nirvana, pre Dave Grohl. Mark Arm (vox/guitar) and Steve Turner (lead guitar) formed Mudhoney from the ashes of another cult punk outfit, Green River (who also featured Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament).
They were name-checked by many of their Seattle peers from the start – Kurt Cobain was particularly enthusiastic – but the reality of their ongoing career is that they’ve only ever had one album even chart in the US’s Billboard 200. There’s an argument that Mudhoney are the true unsung heroes of grunge, the flannel brigade’s prophets without honour. Mudhoney thrashing California’s Castaic Lake Natural Amphitheatre in September 1992. Many of those bands – and sadly, some band-members – have since left us but forgive us some nostalgia as we revisit the artists, records and instruments that saw grunge, 30 years ago, in bloom… Mudhoney Even if only a select few would become megastars, all had their impact on what would come afterward, leading to a family tree that stretches further and wider than anyone could have anticipated. It was a ‘movement’ of often strange bedfellows united by little more than geography or the desire to do something different with guitar than what had gone before. But no one perhaps expected such a shift for the new so-called Generation X.īut in our enthusiasm to canonise, and in some cases pigeonhole a genre, it’s all too easy to focus on the big bands and forget that another important facet of grunge was its diversity.
It didn’t arrive out of nowhere, of course, and change from the 80s predominant trends – be it hair metal, winsome indie or slick virtuoso twiddling – had been coming for a while. Check out how many bright young things in 2021 are pulled to the offset guitars that grunge guitarists used primarily because at the time they were unpopular enough to offer excellent bang for buck. Grunge changed music, fashion, guitar aesthetics, gear trends… all of which reverberate to this day. There’s an argument therefore that grunge was the last truly global phenomenon in guitar culture. Britpop’s shenanigans might have led to an epidemic of young men in Adidas Gazelles reaching for Sheratons, but it famously never really exported beyond these shores. READ MORE: The Beatles’ 20 greatest guitar moments, rankedīut even with so much distance between now and then, grunge remains a truly important and significant moment in the history of our instrument.Talk about “too much fucking perspective”… By way of comparison, go back 30 years from 1991 and the Beatles had yet to sign a record deal, the Stones hadn’t even formed, and Britain’s biggest guitar hero was Hank Marvin. If you want to feel old, remind yourself that 2021 marks 30 years since grunge went overground and, led by Nirvana, a score of revolutionary bands became household names and inspired millions to pick up guitar and play it in a way that was altogether more angular and noisy than what had come before.
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