Mudhoney is a Grunge band formed by former Green River frontman Mark Arm. Along with Nirvana, Mudhoney is the main Trope Codifier of Grunge. Despite this they received little popularity or media attention besides their college radio hit "Touch Me I'm Sick". However Mudhoney has a strong grassroots fanbase, and they've even managed to stick around for over three decades without any mainstream success. They continue to perform live, despite the waning of Grunge's popularity.
One of the few cases where the lead singer was both the Trope Maker and the Trope Codifier for the same genre, as Green River was one of the first grunge bands along with the Melvins and Malfunkshun.
Studio Discography:
- Superfuzz Bigmuff EP (1988)
- Mudhoney (1989)
- Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (1991)
- Piece of Cake (1992)
- My Brother the Cow (1995)
- Tomorrow Hit Today (1998)
- Since We've Become Translucent (2002)
- Under a Billion Suns (2006)
- The Lucky Ones (2008)
- Vanishing Point (2013)
- Digital Garbage (2018)
- Plastic Eternity (2023)
Compilations:
- Superfuzz Bigmuff Plus Early Singles (1990)
- March to Fuzz (Half Greatest Hits Album, half compilation of rarities and B-sides; 2000)
Mudtropey:
- Album Filler: My Brother the Cow might have the ultimate example, with its thirteenth and final track simply being the entire album (except for tracks 1, 2 and the first half of 3) played backwards, presumably to pad the album's running time to 74 minutes, the maximum length of a Red Book-compliant CD.
- The Cameo: Krist Novoselic is seen sitting at the bar in the "Suck You Dry" music video.
- Garage Rock: Out of all of their grunge peers, they were the closest to this, with a generally stripped-down, punkish, Three Chords and the Truth approach that they never really abandoned (though they would gradually shift more towards punk blues as time went on).
- Hidden Track: My Brother the Cow has the unlisted independent track "woC ehT rehtorB yM", which is a slightly abridged version of the entire album played in reverse.
- I Got a Rock: "Overblown" references the Ur-Example from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with the line "You got a sack full of candy / And all I got was a rock."
- Intercourse with You:
- "Touch Me I'm Sick" is a subversion due to the disgusting, self-loathing, and angsty way that the sex is presented.
- "Suck You Dry", possibly. It's either this or Ode to Intoxication, but it's not very clear.
- Long-Runner Line-up: Type 1 + Type 2. The original line-up of Mark Arm, Steve Turner, Dan Peters, and Matt Lukin, lasted 13 years (1988-2001). Lukin retired from the band and was replaced by Guy Maddison, who has remained with the band since then.
- No Title: Piece of Cake contains four tracks that are untitled on the track listing, all of which are short outtakes of the band goofing around in the studio - at least one promo cassette of the album lists these tracks with "titles" contained within round brackets: track 1 is "Techno"; track 5 is "Snippet--Snip It"; track 11 is "Wooden Legged Cowboy Buck"; and track 15 is "The Fortez".
- Self-Deprecation: The Performance Video for "Suck You Dry", where they're playing a sparsely attended "Ten Years of Grunge" event at a small bar in 1998 (the song was released in 1992). The audience is mainly sitting by the bar looking bored, while the one apparent diehard fan in attendance pogos and slam-dances in front of the stage by himself.
- Shout-Out:
- They're named after a 1965 Exploitation Film. Though the band have said they'd never actually seen the movie, they just noticed the title on a marquee for a theater that was screening other Russ Meyer films all day.
- "Tales of Terror" is named after a Hardcore Punk band Mudhoney were influenced by (Mark Arm's former band Green River had covered the Tales of Terror song "Ozzy").
- The title of "F.D.K. (Fearless Doctor Killers)" is a nod to Bad Brains' "FVK (Fearless Vampire Killers)" - and by extension, the movie of the same name.
- At the end of "When Tomorrow Hits," you can hear Mark softly intone the words "that's the lowdown." This is most likely an acknowledgment that the riff the song is based around is a slowed-down version of an old Wire song
. - They covered Sonic Youth's "Halloween" for a split single, and their version eventually segues into a riff that sounds very similar to "I Wanna Be Your Dog" - this is probably a reference to the fact that Sonic Youth had previously covered "I Wanna Be Your Dog" themselves.
- Plastic Eternity includes "Tom Herman's Hermits", a tribute to former Pere Ubu guitarist Tom Herman which also mentions Herman's Hermits.
- Singer Namedrop:
- In "Freak Momma", a song featuring Sir Mix-A-Lot, Mix-A-Lot works the band name into a pun: "I wanna get you in the mud, honey".
- Their cover of "Hate the Police" inserts the band's name into the song (just like The Dicks did in the original version):"They planted on desert sands; Mudhoney was hatched / Mudhoney hates policemen, yes it's true"
- Similarly, Nirvana's goofy cover of KISS' "Do You Love Me?" replaces the line "all the money, honey that I make" with "all the Mudhoney that I make."
- Something Blues: "Crankcase Blues" from My Brother the Cow and "Talkin' Randy Tate's Specter Blues" from Tomorrow Hit Today.
- Springtime for Hitler: When they were asked to write a song for a specific scene of the movie With Honors, they offered an instrumental outtake, but the studio insisted they submit a song with lyrics. So they added some very repetitive throwaway lyrics to the song, gave it the Title-Only Chorus of "Run Shithead Run", and sent in both the instrumental and vocal versions, figuring they'd either use the instrumental after all or just reject the song entirely. Instead, "Run Shithead Run" appeared complete with vocals both in the movie and on the soundtrack album... However, the band also noted that they never got another soundtrack offer again.
- Stylistic Suck: The "bordering on bad" cover artwork for Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, courtesy of Ed Fotheringham, is intentionally made to look like it was drawn by a young child.
- Toilet Humour: The untitled fifteenth track on Piece of Cake consists of the band playing a simple repeating riff for 30 seconds, with fart sound effects (possibly achieved via Whoopee Cushion) played in time with the music. The final fart sound effect then segues into the start of "Ritzville".
- Visual Pun: The artwork to Piece of Cake includes a cake slice sitting in a urinal... Thus, a literal "urinal cake".
