This year marks the 35th anniversary of SubPop and also that of one of the label’s most enduring bands: Mudhoney. Alongside guitarist Steve Turner, bassist Guy Maddison, and drummer Dan Peters, vocalist/ guitarist Mark Arm emerged from the COVID trials and tribulations of the past couple of years to deliver Plastic Eternity on April 7th.
And a highly enjoyable and welcome return by the Seattle veterans it is too.
A few weeks prior to the release of Plastic Eternity Mark Arm spoke with New Noise Magazine — taking time out from his day job as SubPop warehouse manager. What do you ask a musician who’s just about to release their 11th studio album with the band they formed over three decades ago? Well, you ask them about their new album, obviously. But maybe you throw a few curve-balls in there to keep things interesting.
What impact did COVID have on the album making process? Were there any opportunities that came out of it?
No, there were no opportunities. We saw each other once because there was a sewage tunnel boring machine named after us and we got together for the unveiling of that, but we didn’t actually get together and start working on stuff until June 2021.
We had some ideas put down before everything shut down. The last thing we did was we played a show in California, at the end of February. Steven I stayed for several more days and did a recording with the Melvins and then didn’t see each other after that.
In terms of your day job in the warehouse, how was that affected?
It was very affected. Everything stopped and there was a stay at home order. Things were kind of in a holding pattern and production had kind of stopped. Pressing plants stop pressing. The warehouse was fully shut down for about six weeks.
Luckily, our mail order customers were pretty understanding. Initially, there was a lot of fear, and no one really knew exactly how it was transmitted. So you’re paranoid about surfaces and touching the doorknob that someone else might have touched, or whatever the fuck.
It was pretty intense, as you might recall.
Once you were able to get started with the process of making the album how did that compare to other sessions?
It was a lot of fun, more hectic than previous records. What has normally happened since Guy has been in the band — from the early 2000s on we’ve all had jobs and families and whatnot — we would rehearse our songs pretty well, and then go into a studio for a long weekend and just record what we knew.
But this time around we didn’t really have the time to do that sort of homework because we had this deadline, based on Guy moving to Melbourne.
He was in Lubricated Goat. That’s how we first met him, when they came over in 1989. Played Seattle. We were already fans of the band.
His wife got a job in Australia. They were planning on moving in October of 2021. So from our first practice in June, we’d set up a recording date in September, and just we’re scrambling to just get as many ideas down in our practice space as possible.
Initially, we were thinking maybe we’ll just record a bunch of music and edit it later in the Pro Tools. Then it was clear that it was difficult to get into Australia. So they just decided to hang out in Seattle for the full school year, so their daughter could complete that. So we moved the recording back to November, which gave us a little bit more time.
By the time we went to the studio, we had like maybe four or five songs that we knew top to bottom, but the rest of them were riffs that were sort of organized, but not fully. We had a nine day stretch and we work pretty quickly, right? So we came up with arrangements for stuff in the studio. We ended up putting down 20 different things. So we had a good chunk to choose from.
In the end you had 13 tracks on the album. Are you keeping some for b-sides or like an odds n sods collection?
I think we’re gonna do another thing that’s similar to Morning In America. Those were basically the songs that for whatever reason didn’t make it onto Digital Garbage. So yeah, we’ll do another EP.
It might actually end up being a full length album, because Johnny [Sangster], who produced all this stuff, did a dub remix of “Almost Everything” that’s really super cool, and over six minutes long, so I think it’ll bump up from an EP to an album. [laughing]
We’re talking to Clipping and hopefully, they will do some sort of fuck up a song, as well.
On the topic of Johnny Sangster, the sound of the record is noticeably great and you also gave him some writing credits. How important was his contribution?
We were kind of coming up with like, “Oh, this song needs another key change or maybe a bridge” or something like that and he was helpful in coming up with that for a couple of the songs. Like the key change for “Almost Everything”. We could have stumbled upon that on our own, but [laughs] you know, we’re trying to work pretty quickly.
We actually had time, but there was sort of the fog of recording where no one was taking notes of who actually came up with whatever idea. He was definitely coming up with ideas. So you know, why not credit him?
All right, let me throw a couple of out of the box rapid fire questions at you. Stuck in an elevator, with Sting or Bono?
God, I don’t fucking know. Maybe Sting because he won’t be fucking wearing sunglasses.
That’s reason enough. All right. What did you learn from Sir Mix a Lot?
We learned to appreciate the fat bottom girls. [laughing] Actually, I believe we appreciated them before. That was something we learned from Queen [laughing]. And then Spinal Tap.
That was a cool experience, because we just sort of came up with some music and handed it over to him and he looped the parts that he liked. So then when we played it live in the studio with him, that was the arrangement. It was a different way of doing things for us.
With Guy Maddison moving to Australia what will happens with touring and promotion?
We’ll go to Australia. We’re flying there on the release date of the record and we start a tour a week after.
And then will he be available to tour with you?
Yeah, he’s coming over to the US. We have a US tour in the fall. So he’ll probably show up about a week before the tour and we’ll rehearse so we’re not just or we could just be rehearsing in the first couple of shows which are Spokane and two in Montana.[laughing] But that’s a little bit unfair to those people.
How long do you like to tour a record for? Does it change from album to album?
I think our limit is about five weeks. And it just kind of depends on where we’re going. Obviously, a tour of Japan is going to be shorter than a tour of Europe.
Well, on the topic of touring, if you think about the various different places that you’ve gone to, does any city stand out as a place you never want to go back to for whatever reason?
[laughing] Pensacola, Florida.
Because…?
It’s fucked up. [laughing] Basically we would regularly play Florida in the early days, and by 92, or 93 we just had another fucking shitty tour of Florida, and we’re just like, “never again”.
Then some time in the mid 2000s our booking agent was like, “there’s a guy in Florida, he wants to bring you there for four shows, and he swears it’s going to be great.” And we’re like, “okay”, and it fucking sucked — except for Miami — but to get to Miami, because it’s so far south, you might as well hit these other spots and it’s just not worth the effort for us.
We have great shows in various parts of the South. It’s just Florida seems weird.
Going back to the album, one of the standouts is “Here Comes the Flood”. Do you have any particular memories of putting that one together?
Yeah, that was one of the ones that was fully arranged before we went to the studio, like had the lyrics and all the parts.
My guitar part is just weird, like one note. Since we have two guitars, I tried to come up with something that just doesn’t mimic what Steve is playing. Something that maybe wouldn’t make sense to most people. Well, and also something that would be easy enough for me to play while I sing [laughing]
On the topic of vocals, different tracks on the album brought different associations. I guess Iggy Pop is a big inspiration?
For sure. Iggy Pop, Gerry Roslie from the Sonics, you know, those are huge.
And on the topic of Iggy Pop: China Girl, Iggy Pop or David Bowie?
[laughing] I think I’ll go with Iggy Pop on that one, just because I love The Idiot so much, but that’s not really my favorite song on it.
Have you ever met David Lee Roth?
No. But my wife is a huge Van Halen fan: David Lee Roth era. When we were on Reprise, David Katznelson, our A&R guy, got [famed producer] Ted Templeman to autograph a copy of Diver Down for her.
We saw him one time walking down the hall. I just yelled out “Clear Spot!” because he did that Captain Beefheart record as well. [laughing]
So it’s not quite David Lee Roth, but it’s a couple of steps away.
Obviously you’re a well established Seattle band, interconnected with various different people there. I was very sad when Mark Lanegan died last year. Do you have any recollections of him?
Luckily, I got along with Mark, he never got angry at me. [laughing] He seemed to have a hair trigger.
Steve Turner tells a story about being at some party and they’re talking about folk musicians – I think this is early 90s, maybe late 80s – and Steve mentioned that he wasn’t really particularly into Tim Hardin, which got Mark very very angry and Steve thought he was gonna get punched [laughing] … but Steve has come around apparently.
I didn’t really hang out with him that much, but I do remember one time we played the Reading Festival. the [Screaming] Trees must have been on it because they were hanging around and then went back to London.
The next day there was a show with – this is kind of weird – Redd Kross and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and for some reason Mark and I were the only two people who were interested in going to that show.
So we caught a cab together and hung out, but in Seattle, for a while there, he was just sort of a dark figure you’d see just like hanging by a pay telephone, waiting for someone to call him back. It wasn’t necessarily great.
Seeing as you brought up Nick Cave. Old Testament or New Testament Nick Cave?
[laughing] I like it all very, very much, but the stuff that hit me in my formative years was obviously Old Testament.
Part of the reason why I bring it up is that “Flush the Fascists” has a bit of a Birthday Party vibe to me.
That’s cool. I hadn’t thought of that, but I’ll take it.
What’s the story behind that song?
There’s a lot of free association in that, and somehow it ended up coming to the conclusion that it does. I’m not exactly sure how it did or why it did, but it made sense to me, so I just went with it.
The first line was like, “drop the toothpaste in the toilet bowl.” I wrote that down, I’m like, “What am I gonna do with this?” And then just kind of went from there.
I was reading an interview with you from a couple of years ago and you brought up Franz Kafka. And you were an English major, right? So I guess there have been various literary influences?
My competing interests were literature and learning how to write better and also philosophy. And that’s where I met Kim Thayil [former Soundgarden guitarist] at the University of Washington in philosophy class.
After a while, it sort of seemed to me, like, “Oh, this is just learning how to argue”. You know, just like, kind of pick a position, but I enjoyed trying to figure out the history of thought.
Are there any figures that have stuck with you or pushed you on in some significant way?
A lot of that stuff that I read in my teens and 20s, it’s stuck to a certain degree. A lot of stuff I haven’t revisited, and I’m not quite the reader that I used to be. I’m a professional television watcher however [laughing]
There are a couple of sci-fi writers that I could point to for song ideas. There’s this guy, Ted Chiang, who I found out later lives right across the water from Seattle and Bellevue. He wrote Story of Your Life, which was adapted into that movie Arrival.
After watching the movie, my wife got the book. It’s a book of short stories and the short stories are all fucking fantastic. And they’re very different from each other.
Also several years ago around Vanishing Point, there’s a song in there called “In This Rubber Tomb” and Guy was like “Are you familiar with Norman Spinrad?” And I had never even heard of him. Guy was like, “I thought you had ripped that off.” [laughing]
He was a sci-fi writer. I think he’s still around. It was clear that at a certain point, he was getting probably pharmaceutical grade, Sandoz LSD, because he was talking about things that were clearly something you could only arrive at with that experience, you know, but in the sci fi sense.
So I can kind of point to a couple of ideas on this record. Probably most notably “Little Dogs.” [laughing]
You talk about being careful of owls in that song, do you have some personal experience of owls being a threat for small dogs?
No, but we you hear stories. Probably more likely to like your cat. Owls and Eagles. Owl made for a better rhyme than the eagle.
When we go camping out in the coast, there’s a spot we like to go up on the Makah Indian Reservation, and that place is so full of eagles that when you walk your dog on the beach (unless you have like a lab or something) you have to kind of like check the skies periodically to make sure.
On the topic of what rhymes: “Tom Herman’s Hermits” (another album highlight), is this why John McGeoch doesn’t get a song dedicated to him, because his name doesn’t rhyme very effectively?
[laughing] Perhaps. A lot of times when we put down riffs or whatever in the practice space, we’ll just come up with a name, and more often than not try to come up with something that sort of reminds us of Pere Ubu or something. And Tom Herman being the guitar player for Pere Ubu, it’s called “Tom Herman’s Hermits” as a lark and didn’t think that would end up being the name of the song [laughing].
When Guy was showing us the music for “Severed Dreams in the Sleeper Cell”, Steve remarked about how it kind of reminded him like a certain John Mayall record where he’s in the gatefold and on the back in the woods in a loincloth.
So initially, that song was called “Mayall’s Loincloth”. [laughing] That didn’t really seem like that would ever become the title of that song.
Well, I don’t want to keep you for too much longer, but I’ve got a couple more questions. First, a silly one. Mike Watt or Jeff Ament?
Well, I’m better friends with Jeff Ament.
Yeah, maybe that was a bad pick by me. How would you characterize the difference of their bass style?
They’re both in the pocket players. Mike might be a little busier or funkier — at least like if you think about his Minutemen stuff — Jeff can jump higher
Can he do the splits like David Lee Roth?
No one can do the splits like David Lee Roth. Mike McCready comes close
Can he do it in platforms?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in platforms. When he was in Shadow, he used to wear capezios, but those are flat shoes.
Going back to SubPop, is there a band on the label right now that you think deserves more attention?
Pissed Jeans and METZ are two and now Hot Snakes are probably my favorite bands on the label right now. And it’s weird, to me, Pissed Jeans seems like this young new band and they’ve been on the label since before 2010.
Earlier today they had the weekly meeting. Quasi just played a show in Seattle and someone was talking about, like, it was great to see a lot of the old people come out, all the oldsters, and I’m thinking “that’s a generation younger than me”. [laughing] Like, those are the kids to me.
That’s perspective.
Too much fucking perspective, right? [laughing]
Ok, last question, who’s your favorite yarler?
[laughing] Well, I think I’m gonna have to go with the OG and go with Ed [Vedder] And also, he’s an awesome person, so [laughing]
Join the Mudhoney mailing list and order or stream Plastic Eternity
Photo by Emily Rieman
