The Last Laugh

Something strange is happening in Mark Arm's living room: A transformation, of sorts.

At the behest of the Weekly, Mudhoney and El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, have gotten together to mug it up for the camera. Things go smoothly and professionally, for a time. Then, somewhere around the middle of the shoot, this peculiar gathering starts to yield bizarre results.

Chalk it up to four pencil-thin mustaches and a dollop of macho: Mudhoney suddenly become Los Mudhoney.

El Vez, armed with a Sharpie, administers their new facial hair with a deft hand, and the four members are immediately transformed. Twisting their faces up, arching curlicues with their eyebrows, they've turned into Latin lovers, lotharios, strutting cocksmen.

Dan Peters swaggers about comically: "Oh yeah, I feel manly. I feel . . . like slapping someone around."

Arm takes the gag one step further, posing for a portrait with his front tooth blackened out, before settling into a lotus position on the floor.

Meanwhile, Steve Turner and Guy Maddison have shown up for the photo shoot dressed in identical outfits: Leather vests and denim, California cowboy attire. "I've been listening to The Notorious Byrd Brothers," explains Turner. "I look for every opportunity to wear this vest since I got it." Indeed, with the mustaches they're a mutant hybrid: Roger McGuinn meets Xavier Cugat.

They all gather around and compare the size of their belt buckles. El Vez pulls out the winner, a gaudy jewel-encrusted number that looks like it was lifted from one of the King's jumpsuits.

"Well," says Arm, "that's good, but . . . " He lifts his shirt, revealing a brass buckle upon which is emblazoned, in bold lettering, "DICK."

A thousand years ago, in 1991, this was the sort of earthy, unaffected humanity that made so-called grunge rock feel like a cool breeze on a hot day. Without haystack hairdos or fey synth arrangements, with just a few cheap instruments and a shitload of amp wattage, a band like Mudhoney could make records for major labels. And—think back, we're telling the truth about this—the labels would just release the noisy things.

Fellow hype survivors Pearl Jam are perhaps the only other group to emerge from that scene, a decade later, with their unique personality intact—and this in the face of a success that would irreparably warp most other bands. But while Pearl Jam rocked with a heart and a conscience, Mudhoney rocked with a full tank, a six of domestic rolling around in the backseat, and an undeniable sense of the absurd.

Of course, as Arm has often noted, Mudhoney eventually got dropped from Reprise for the only reason that ever matters; they didn't make the label any money.

"In fact," Turner will later observe, "we're making less money than we ever did before. And we're playing more now than we did five years ago."

As the bizarre I-got-that-belt-buckle-beat competition unfolds, it's easy to peg Mudhoney's cockeyed sense of humor as the key to their staying power. As populist a band as Pearl Jam is, it's hard to ever imagine standing in Eddie Vedder's living room witnessing a similar scene.

But then there's the Mudhoney sound, one they've worked at and developed and grown into for nearly 15 years. So maybe there's some kind of alchemical effect that emerges when the clowning meets the volume. Maybe that's why they've lasted, despite the knocks and changes, despite the way a scene has fallen down and risen back up around them. Maybe it's why, after a decade in major label purgatory, they're back on Sub Pop. And happy to be there.

A few days earlier in the same living room, there's very little activity, save for Arm's dog crashing around after his cat.

Mudhoney, meanwhile, are spread around the room: Peters dozes on a davenport; Turner reads at a piano bench; Maddison in a corner munches on a convenience store burrito. As Arm sifts through some mail—his Showgirls DVD has finally arrived—he tries to rally the others to go downstairs and make some noise.

It wasn't always like this. A year ago, making noise was at the bottom of the band's agenda. "We were deliberately keeping quiet," Arm says. "We had a pretty good idea how everything was going to work out, but we weren't a hundred percent sure."

Today Mark Arm can finally come clean about all the hedging he did in early 2001, when the band went tear-assing through a frenzied six-city tour, playing their final shows with founding bassist Matt Lukin. Back then, when asked about Mudhoney's future, Arm would hem-haw about the upcoming Brazilian tour already on the books. Steve Dukich, a longtime associate, had been tapped to play bass on that two-week jaunt. Following that, went the official line, the fate of one of Seattle's hardiest bands was up in the air.

If Mudhoney thought of ending things, however, they rethought their options fairly quickly. Months after the band's return from South America, Guy Maddison, a native of Perth, Australia, who'd played with Arm in a variety of settings, stepped officially into the bass slot.