Kurt Cobain carried equipment for them. He auditioned to join them on bass and didn't make the cut. He introduced himself to Krist Novoselic at one of their rehearsals in Aberdeen, Washington. He lobbied Atlantic Records to sign them. He showed up to co-produce their major label debut and got fired from the job. The Melvins ran through Nirvana's entire story like a load-bearing wall, and the wall barely gets mentioned when people talk about the house.
The Melvins formed in 1983 in Montesano, Washington, a logging town southwest of Seattle. Buzz Osborne, Matt Lukin, and drummer Mike Dillard started out playing fast hardcore punk, the kind of music Osborne had been introduced to through tapes from a friend out of state. Black Flag, Flipper, MDC. When Dale Crover replaced Dillard in 1984 and the band relocated to Aberdeen, something changed. They started slowing down. The tempos dropped, the riffs got heavier, and the space between notes got louder. What came out of those rehearsals was something that didn't have a name yet. The debut album, Gluey Porch Treatments, recorded in October 1986 at Studio D in Sausalito and produced by Mark Deutrom and Carl Herlofsson, was released in 1987 on Alchemy Records. It is now considered one of the first examples of sludge metal and a blueprint for grunge. Those two things are not unrelated.
The influence moved in every direction at once. Matt Lukin left the Melvins in 1987 and co-founded Mudhoney with Mark Arm, Steve Turner, and Dan Peters. Mudhoney's 1988 debut single, "Touch Me I'm Sick," helped put Sub Pop on the map and became one of the defining sounds of the Seattle moment. Dale Crover, the drummer who had been in the room when the Melvins invented their sound, played on Nirvana's debut album Bleach in 1989. And in September 1990, Buzz Osborne introduced Cobain and Novoselic to a young drummer named Dave Grohl. That introduction is how Nevermind happened. The Melvins didn't just shape the grunge scene. They were the connective tissue it ran through.
Soundgarden's Kim Thayil has said that, despite Soundgarden being credited with pioneering drop-D tuning in hard rock, the band always maintained it was the Melvins who came up with it first. That detail matters because it places the Melvins at the center of the nascent scene before there was a scene to speak of, before Sub Pop existed, before anyone had used the word grunge to describe a style of music. The second Melvins album, Ozma, recorded in May 1989 in San Francisco and produced by Mark Deutrom, arrived the same year as Nirvana's Bleach and Mudhoney's self-titled debut. The third, Bullhead, released January 28, 1991 on Boner Records and produced by Jonathan Burnside, pushed the songs longer and slower. Its opening track gave a Japanese experimental band called Boris their name. That is the kind of downstream consequence that takes decades to fully map.
Houdini, the fifth album, released September 21, 1993 on Atlantic Records, is the record where the Melvins' story and the grunge story converge in the most legible way and also where the credit gets most badly scrambled. Cobain was given co-production credit alongside the Melvins on six tracks, including "Hooch," "Joan of Arc," "Set Me Straight," and "Spread Eagle Beagle." Garth Richardson co-produced two additional tracks. Cobain plays guitar on "Sky Pup" and percussion on "Spread Eagle Beagle." The band had been signed to Atlantic at Cobain's enthusiastic suggestion, with label president Danny Goldberg making it official. Houdini hit record stores on the same day as Nirvana's In Utero, September 21, 1993, and the proximity let a lot of listeners assume the wrong direction of influence. Cobain's production contributions turned out to be minimal. Osborne has said the album is probably their biggest seller, and that he hears it warts and all. The songs, "Hooch," "Night Goat," "Honey Bucket," "Lizzy," held their shape regardless.
The Melvins never broke into the mainstream the way the four big Seattle bands did. They stayed mostly underground even after signing to a major label, which is a fact Osborne has never seemed particularly troubled by. What they did instead was seed nearly every significant development in Pacific Northwest rock from the inside, through personal relationships, shared geography, and a sound so particular it functioned less like an influence and more like a gravitational field. Cobain once said that hearing the Pixies' Surfer Rosa felt like recognizing songs he had written but been too afraid to play for anyone. The Melvins didn't make Surfer Rosa. But they made the conditions in which a person could think that way about music in the first place.
