The Last Laugh

"Maybe that's what happens to you as you get older," he considers. "You get less intimidated about doing things you suspected would be cool. You go ahead and try the things you never thought you'd get away with."

Back in Mark Arm's basement a second wind sweeps through the room, as Mudhoney close their rehearsal with a screaming cover of the Dicks' "Hate the Police." Gripping the mike, Arm is rail thin, a tight ball of sinew—Iggy incarnate in fleeting moments.

Doggie style: Mudhoney and Arm's pooch, ready for their close-up.

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More About

• Mark Arm
• Steve Turner
• Dan Peters
• Mudhoney
• Matt Lukin

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Interestingly, this same song regularly closed the band's final shows with Matt Lukin, over a year ago. At the end of one of those nights, in a damp, dank shit- hole somewhere in the southwest, Mark Arm announced, "This is by the Dicks. We hope it doesn't apply to the police in your town."

The crowd, most of whom could guess what was coming, cheered aggressively. Then Steve Turner chimed in merrily: "It doesn't apply to the cops in Seattle. Seattle cops are pretty cool."

An arrhythmic skip jolted the room. Caught up in the banter, the crowd wanted badly to cheer again; you could hear it in the puzzled, half-formed croaks around the venue. But if we yell, said their worried faces as they looked to each other, are we cheering the police? All at once, 500 punks were flummoxed.

Precisely on cue, when the befuddled silence reached its ebb, Mudhoney— grinning like idiots—ripped into "Hate the Police" at an ear-shattering volume. The room exploded. It sounded like the end of the world.

But it wasn't. Tonight, in the basement, Arm unstraps his guitar and grabs the mike again, neck muscles bulging and straining.

"You better get out of my waaay!" he screams—though by this time Mudhoney's sheer endurance, and the simple power of the music, have kicked most of their pathway clear. Still he sings it, over and over, as if they had anything left to prove, as if the sound might not rise up joyfully around them, like it's always done before. Without tricks, without poses, without a heavily labored sense of gravitas, Mudhoney's survival is, improbably, starting to look like the surest bet in rock 'n' roll.

What a racket. What a bunch of jokers. What a beautiful goddamn noise.

bmehr@seattleweekly.com

Mudhoney's CD release is scheduled for 9 p.m. at the Showbox, Thurs., Aug. 29, with Nebula and DJ Larrywood. All ages. $15/$12 adv.