Steve Turner can tell you about Grunge. As the guitarist for grunge legends Mudhoney, he held a ringside seat as one of the founding fathers of the genre. Thus, it’s not surprising that he would tell his tale in a memoir. Mud Ride is a fun, funny, and insightful look at the genre, the times, and the history of his band from his point of view.
In this excerpt, he discusses the making of Tomorrow Hit Today, the band’s final album in their major label tenure. It’s a great record that didn’t get the love it deserved at the time and it stands as the band’s strongest of their time in the majors.
MUDHONEY DIDN’T HAVE TO MAKE TOMORROW HIT TODAY for Reprise. We could have walked away from our major label deal, paid for the recording ourselves, and released it via Super Electro. And honestly, that’s what I wanted to do. But the other guys—Mark and Dan in particular—argued that we’d never used an outside producer and worked in a more expensive way. We’re never gonna get the chance again, so why don’t we just do it? They won the argument, fair enough. So that’s how we ended up working with Jim Dickinson. (And I don’t
regret it.)
Jim Dickinson may not have seemed like an obvious choice for a grunge band. His resume was all over the place musically: Ry Cooder, Toots and the Maytals, Albert King, G. Love and Special Sauce. But he had also done records Mark and I loved, like the third Big Star record and Like Flies on Sherbert for Alex Chilton. We liked the chaos of them. When Like Flies on Sherbert was released in 1979, it was such an angrily reviewed record because the people who liked Alex Chilton from his Box Tops and Big Star days were like, What the holy crap are you
doing?
Jim had also produced the Replacements’ 1987 album Pleased to Meet Me for Sire Records, which wasn’t my favorite record by the band (a band I loved), but he claims that’s the record they wanted to make. There was no one twisting Replacements front man Paul Westerberg’s arm to put a heavily gated reverb on the snare drum. Jim flew from his home in Memphis to Seattle, and we started work on the album at Stone’s studio, Studio Litho. It was wintertime and it was snowing, miserable, and cold. Let’s just say that the weather didn’t suit Jim’s temperament. So, we decided to go down and do the rest at Ardent Studio in Memphis, which was a place he was very comfortable with. We did manage to record most of the basic tracks at Litho, and then wrapped it up in Memphis.
Working with Jim was a great experience and very different from making records with Conrad Uno and Jack Endino, who were more engineers than producers. Jim was getting paid to produce; he was not a knob-twiddler. He had an engineer do the engineering, while he listened, smoked weed, and had ideas and suggestions for changing the arrangements here and there. He was one of those guys who really digs in and listens hard. I think that’s what he saw his job as. He was hired for his point of view and his ears more than anything else.
Matt was playing less and less bass (he was playing like two notes in every song, where he used to be a busy bass player), but I think that appealed to Jim. He just loved Matt’s bass playing. Overall I think we made a great record together. I like Tomorrow Hit Today. No regrets. Based on the direction that things seemed to be heading with Reprise, I didn’t have high hopes that the label would get behind this record. One concession they made was to let me issue the vinyl version of the record on Super Electro. Major labels had mostly given up on vinyl,
so I was all too happy to take care of that. I was able to sell four thousand copies with no problem. Reprise claimed they couldn’t even sell ten thousand CDs, but that’s because they didn’t try. It was a write-off for them. They’d already given up on us. I knew that I could have sold twice as many CDs through Super Electro. No matter where we went on tour in support of Tomorrow following its release, there were no CDs in any stores. It was obvious that Reprise was done with Mudhoney. I knew that was it.
Despite our degenerating relationship with the label, we were still committed to touring. We did a late summer run with Pearl Jam, hitting stadiums and sheds and playing to thousands of people, before we did a headlining club run with garage/stoner rock band Nebula (who were on Sub Pop) and the Kent 3, a low-fi garage punk band from Bellingham, Washington, whose records I’d released on Super Electro.
I loved the Kent 3 and had been working with them since 1996, putting out their records. I thought they were an amazing band. As much as I loved them, however, the record-buying public didn’t necessarily feel the same. They would draw big crowds in Seattle, but people outside the region didn’t seem to get it. They didn’t quite fit in. They didn’t get close enough to the garage rock sound, and they were too scuzzy to be indie rock. But the tour we did with them and Nebula was a blast, except for when the Kent 3 got busted for marijuana possession in Texas and I had to spend $2,000 to bail them out. That’s how dumb drug laws were in the ’90s.
One of the pluses of touring with Nebula was that their bassist, Mark Abshire, was a great skater. So, when we were touring through California, he got me into a legendary skating place, a great backyard private pool. That was the first time I’d ever been able to skate in a pool. As you can imagine, skating in pools in the Northwest isn’t really an option because, well, people don’t have pools.
Though this tour was a lot of fun, and we loved the bands we were touring with, we couldn’t help but notice that the crowds were getting smaller. In late 1998 there was a definite end-of-an-era vibe creeping in.
Excerpted from the recently released Mud Ride: A Messy Trip Through the Grunge Explosion by Steve Turner with Adem Tepedelen, and foreword by Stone Gossard. Published by Chronicle Prism, an imprint of Chronicle Books. Copyright © 2023 by Steve Turner.
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