Mudhoney's Piece of Cake

The AV Club is inexplicably doing a tibute to 1992 Week on its site, and did a write up of one of my all-time favorite bands, Mudhoney, and their disastrous foray into the world of major labels. Only Mudhoney (and Lou Reed) would seemingly TRY to make a bad record, just to screw with record executives. Actually, a lot of the album rocks really f'n hard and I think "acetone" is brilliant.

But they are the last great punk rock band.

LINK

quote:

---

That Mudhoney would snarkily predict grunge’s flameout at a time when it was inescapable wasn’t just the group being wiseasses. In many ways, it was also career suicide: “Suck You Dry” was the lead single from Piece Of Cake, Mudhoney’s foray into the major labels it had resisted ever since Seattle had become overrun with desperate A&R types, and its first and best chance at finally capitalizing on the trend. Mudhoney had practically launched the whole genre, after all, with singer Mark Arm and guitarist Steve Turner captaining early, important bands like Green River before unwittingly helping to spawn the feeding frenzy by forming Mudhoney, Sub Pop’s flagship band. Their stew of Stooges fuzz-punk, Blue Cheer psychedelia, and Replacements sloppiness was emulated—or at least, paid lip service to—by every one of their contemporaries.

Half of Seattle (and therefore the world) modeled itself after those early Mudhoney photo shoots of a bunch of cheap-beer-swilling, shaggy bros in ripped jeans and flannel, too drunk to pose.
If Nirvana’s distillation of that could sell millions, the labels no doubt figured, surely Mudhoney’s purer cut could match those numbers. And the fact that Mudhoney hated that hype-fueled line of thinking—as evidenced in the angry, sarcastic “Overblown” from that same year—only made the band more marketable. (After all, hadn’t that song been included on the Singles soundtrack?)

---

The band still cracks me up, and its amazing they really were the one Seattle band to survive. They never broke up, kept putting out good albums, and still tour and release albums to their hardcore fanbase (like me). They made a living out of being wise-asses. It's wonderful, really.