“And what pedal do you use?”: the origin of grunge, told by its founders | Culture

There are trifles that end up causing planetary impact deflagrations. There is the case of Cellophane Square, a small record store in Seattle where in the early eighties the vinyl bins in the punk section also included old records. sixties of garage bands. It was not an oversight, but a decision by Scott McCaughley—a musician himself, a member of The Young Fresh Fellows, later also in The Minus 5—who worked at Cellophane and who was aware of the invisible thread that connected that sixties music with the loudest punk bands of the moment. In such opposite decades, that common thread challenged youthful passion and rage and a certain sense underground-proud-to-be-off-the-mass-radar.

Steve Turner (Houston, 59 years old), guitarist and founder, along with the singer and also guitarist Mark Arm, of the legendary band grunge Mudhoney. At 14 years old, Turner was looking for albums by Californian punk bands linked to the fever skate like Suicidal Tendencies or TSOL And it was there where he stumbled upon dusty singles as Psycho, from The Sonics, or You Must Be a Witch, from Lollipop Shoppe, falling forever in love with that distorted sound. He already had a guitar and an amplifier, but he didn’t know how to reproduce that roar. “When explaining that one day to a friend who also played the guitar and with whom I worked in a Japanese restaurant, he asked me ‘well, what pedal do you use?’, to which I answered ‘and what is that?’ ”, Turner recalls in conversation from voice notes. The next day that friend “brought me a pedal fuzzI plugged it into the guitar and that’s how it all started. “It was 1983,” he says. He mixed the speed and ferocity of punk with the roar of distortion pedals used by old garage bands or the Stooges themselves. That, added to the metal love and noise from other teenagers like him, gave rise to new Seattle music. A full-fledged sonic punch.

“Mudhoney are he grunge. “They made it up,” Pearl Jam member Stone Gossard writes in the book’s foreword. The explosion of grunge: the story of grunge, told by someone who was there from the beginning (Redbook, 2024), Turner’s memoirs. These days the Seattle group, author of a dozen albums such as the EP Superfuzz Bigmuff (1988), Piece of Cake (1992) or Since We’ve Become Translucent (2002), is back in the mix. Added to Turner’s book is a long tour – with Dan Peters and Guy Maddison on drums and bass, respectively – to present his new album in Europe, Plastic Eternitywhich included five Spanish cities at the beginning of September.

In the book, co-written with journalist Adem Tepedelen, Turner details an adrenaline-filled childhood spent skateboarding, detailing his lack of gregarious sense — “for me it was more important to do the things I liked than for people to like me,” he writes — and an early critical sense. His family was Catholic, but in catechesis classes, when he was around 11 years old, he already warned: “I don’t believe a word you say. Explain it to me.”

Boredom and rain

Seattle was then a city with a great working-class tradition, although in an almost decadent situation. Tens of thousands of families had lost their jobs at Boeing, the giant aircraft company, in the doldrums in the midst of a production stoppage after the Vietnam War. On one street there was a billboard on which someone wrote: “The last one to leave Seattle, turn off the light.”

It was a place where it always rained and the teenagers got bored. But the summer of 1980 something special happened. Turner saw the Californian hardcore band Black Flag, and their opening act Solger. He was impressed by the fierceness of the former and the youth of the latter. “People my own age can also have a band!” he thought. Suddenly, the idea of ​​playing with friends, eating anything and sleeping anywhere, without answering to anyone, seemed like the best life plan. He got to it and, sometimes in the company of his high school friend Mark Arm, he was part of The Duckie Boys, Mr. Epp and the Calculations and Green River (along with Jeff Ament and Gossard, later in Pearl Jam). “In the early eighties the Seattle scene was very small. What we did was go our way and play for the hundred people in the audience, who in turn also had bands. Over time that became a unique thing,” he explains now.

It was in January 1988 when the two friends founded Mudhoney – they got the name from a Russ Meyer film – and shortly after they published the single Touch Me, I’m Sickon “toilet brown water-colored” vinyl, the guitarist specifies. They released 800 copies, it reached number one on the indie charts and it was decided to expand the run with leftover vinyl in different colors—red, green, lilac, orange—which are now the sensation of collectors. Because Touch Me I’m Sick It became a kind of youth anthem, to the point that shortly after Sonic Youth, the new pops of youth music at that time, recorded a single covering it.

They lived times of wild fun. They played a lot and began to be known. In January 1989, they brought Nirvana as an opening act to play in Portland, Oregon, which impressed the Aberdeen trio because they had never played outside of Washington State. According to Turner, upon arriving at the club, Cobain got angry because the band’s name had been written as Nir Vona on the poster. “Fuck, it’s not that hard, and it doesn’t even have an O!” he claims he said angrily.

Suddenly, things began to pick up speed. The magazine Melody Maker, lighthouse of musical trends then, published a report on the vibrant Seattle scene and the avid music industry began to plan for the city. Cameron Crowe also arrived to film Singlesa film starring Bridget Fonda that portrays the lives of a group of insecure young people grunge. In it, Matt Dillon, long-haired and dressed in a plaid shirt, plays the leader of the band City Dick, whose hit is called Touch Me, I’m Dick (exactly like Mudhoney’s, and for which they charged fees).

Swampy and sexy sound

In August, September and October 1991 the course of music changed. They were published Have by Pearl Jam, Nevermind from Nirvana and badmotorfinger by Soundgarden. From then on, the Seattle sound – swampy, angry and sexy – became the soundtrack for millions of young people around the world. Some of their songs already spoke – as did the groups of the Riot Grrrl feminist movement – ​​about what is also being talked about now: about gender fluidity, about the terrifying culture malemental problems, drugs, sexual abuse and paranoia.

Nirvana’s album, as you know, was a real bomb. Around Christmas 1991, he sold more than 350,000 records in one week, and in January 92 he reached number one in the United States, unseating Michael Jackson. Overnight, fame turned Nirvana into a kind of deranged Beatles. It didn’t last long. On April 8, 1994, an electrician who was going to install a security system at Cobain’s Seattle home found his body in a bedroom. He had shot himself in the head and had been dead for three days.

Turner explains that Mudhoney were then on tour supporting Pearl Jam. At the height of their success, Eddie Vedder’s band had been invited to a private audience with President Bill Clinton at the White House. The day before, when the death of the Nirvana leader was announced, Clinton asked Vedder if he should address the nation in some way in the wake of Cobain’s suicide. “That was the degree of impact the Seattle music scene had in 1994,” Turner details.

With the media overexposure of the phenomenon grunge the backlash came. part of the scene underground He began to reject everything that had to do with Seattle, and Turner himself confesses that in 1996 he forced a break from touring, recording and more touring so as not to end up hating the music. Over time, when technology industries like Microsoft and Amazon, based in Seattle, began to succeed, nothing was the same. When one day Turner heard two twenty-somethings on the street talking about hundred-dollar Cuban cigars, he decided it was time to leave his city. He moved to Portland, where he still resides. For a time he worked part-time doing quality control and packing orders at a vinyl record pressing plant. With the pandemic, like so many, he lost his job. He confesses that sometimes he sells some of his old garage singles on repeat or flyers about old Nirvana concerts. And he continues to play whenever he can. “When I was young I had no idea what I was doing. Life takes you. Now it is like a continuation of what I already did from a very young age. I continue playing with my friends and I hope to do so until the last bone in my hips breaks,” he confesses.

In 2021, a popular vote in Seattle decided to name a huge drilling machine to make an underground water tank Mudhoney, in tribute to the Turner and Arm band. Further underground, impossible.