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Features
At the height of his fame, Steve Turner remembers walking into a grocery store and having some longhaired grunge kid bow down before him.
It was the early ’90s and a brave new world of music was just beginning to seep out of Seattle, Washington, setting angst-ridden teens ablaze with excitement. The music was called grunge, and Turner and his band, Mudhoney, were an integral part of its rise.
Before Nirvana hit, Mudhoney began clearing the way for the new genre that wasn’t quite punk, wasn’t quite garage rock, wasn’t quite classic rock, but was somehow all three at once. And, though they would not reach the heights of fame of their Seattle-based peers, they were at least partially responsible for the groundswell that made Kurt Cobain an era-defining icon.
Now, 20 years after their first recording, Mudhoney is back with a new album, “The Lucky Ones.” Glide caught up with Turner to talk about his career, the new album, and just what the hell happened in Seattle all those years ago.
The new album was recorded in three and a half days, which seems very quick. How did that happen?
The way we generally record is we do it on weekends, so you’ve got three days on the weekend. We just managed to get it done really fast. We thought we were going to write some more songs and record a couple more times and all that kind of stuff, and we just got it all done. We just kept blasting through all the songs, and things were coming really fast. We went out for lunch, left Mark there to do the singing, and when we came back from lunch, he was almost done with the singing.
Were the songs written that quickly?
The songs were written pretty quick too because we had the reduced lineup of just the one guitar. Mark was kind of, as we were coming up with riffs, he was trying to figure out ways to sing it even if he didn’t have lyrics or anything. Songs were written really fast – that was kind of the point of it, of trying it without him playing guitar, just to see if we could get it written really quickly, and it worked.
Do you find that the process of writing and the end product is changed from working that quickly?
Sure. Recording gets to be less fun pretty quick in the studio. Everyone starts freaking out about little details. We just kept blasting through the stuff, so we didn’t have time to freak out about any of the small mistakes. Dan [Peters], being the drummer in particular, his job is huge in the studio, and he can start to fret about little things pretty quick, but we just kept moving on to the next song before he had time to. And if there was a bass mess up, we’d fix that or if there was a guitar mistake, we could fix that, but you can’t really fix the drums. Luckily we just kept getting through it so fast, he didn’t have time to worry about it. And Tucker [Martine], the producer, was really great about that too. He’s also a drummer, Tucker. He got into the spirit of it being good enough. If it’s a good, energetic, killer take and there are some small mess-ups, it doesn’t really matter.
A lot of bands still record on tape because they feel that computers suck the soul out of it. Are you really particular about the way the albums sound in that sense?
Sure. We still record analog. We make sure we get people we really trust and respect to help us record our records. And then, it’s making sure that the microphone is picking up the sound as pure as possible. That’s why it’s really just a pure live setup because that’s what I’m hearing in the practice room and it sounds as good as I think it’s going to sound. I always bring some other guitars and other boxes in and I always just end up using what I use live, generally. Occasionally for overdubs, I use other stuff.
Everything’s going to get digitized eventually. I guess you just try to hold it off until the last possible point.&a
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