In the summer of 1991, Mark Arm was loading gear into clubs on tour when he noticed that every venue soundcheck was playing the same song. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was coming out of the monitors before Mudhoney even had their cables plugged in. Arm remembers starting a tour just as Nevermind was about to come out, and it seemed like every club was playing the song as they loaded in. They played the last two shows of that tour with Nirvana in Portland and Seattle, with the idea that one band would headline each city. Once Nevermind was released, it was clear Mudhoney wouldn't headline either show. He laughed about it. That's the important detail. The band that had built the scene, that had handed the blueprint to everyone who subsequently got rich off it, watched the wave break and found the whole thing a little funny. Their response was an album recorded on an eight-track machine in a room whose walls were lined with egg cartons.
Mudhoney's early releases on Sub Pop, particularly their debut single "Touch Me I'm Sick" and the Superfuzz Bigmuff EP, were instrumental in the creation of the grunge genre. That single arrived on August 1, 1988, recorded at Seattle's Reciprocal Recording studio with producer Jack Endino. Endino was surprised by how noisy the sessions were and how dirty the band wanted the guitars to sound, and later said that "for the most part, I just sort of stood back and let them go at it." The song's dirty sound was produced using an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff distortion pedal, augmented by a second guitar providing more distortion. Sub Pop initially released 800 clear coffee-brown vinyl copies and 200 black vinyl copies of the single. That's the scale they were operating at: 800 copies, a white paper bag for a sleeve, a toilet photo on the B-side sticker. The people who came later and sold millions were building on a foundation Mudhoney poured for 800 listeners.
By the time the major labels started circling Seattle in 1991 and 1992, when Nirvana put grunge through the roof and the majors scrambled to sign like bands, they naturally came after Mudhoney. The band didn't mind — they were tired of the money troubles Sub Pop was having. But before any of that happened, Mudhoney made a deliberate choice about the kind of record they wanted to release into that moment. The album that became Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge began at Music Source Studio, a large space equipped with a 24-track mixing board, where the band worked with producer Jack Endino. That session quickly turned into a false start when the results, in guitarist Steve Turner's words, "sounded a little too fancy, too clean." So they walked out. They went to Conrad Uno's eight-track setup at Egg Studio, named after the egg cartons pasted on the walls in an optimistic attempt at soundproofing, which boasted a 1960s vintage eight-track Spectra Sonics recording console originally built for Stax in Memphis. In the spring of 1991, Mudhoney made Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge there. The choice of room was the argument.
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge is Mudhoney's second studio album, recorded at a time when the band was thinking of signing to a major record label, but they decided to release it on Sub Pop in 1991. The album shipped 50,000 copies on its original release and went on to sell approximately 75,000 copies worldwide. It was credited with helping to keep Sub Pop in business. That's a quietly remarkable fact. The record that kept the scene's defining independent label solvent was the one made on a vintage Stax console in a room with egg cartons on the walls, at the exact moment when every other band in Seattle was signing to a major. The album opens with "Generation Genocide" and moves through "Let It Slide," "Good Enough," "Something So Clear," and "Thorn," drawing on the fierce 1960s garage rock of Pacific Northwest predecessors like The Sonics and The Lollipop Shoppe, the gnashing post-hardcore of Drunks With Guns, the heavy guitar moods of Neil Young, and the satirical ferocity of 1980s hardcore punk. Two singles came out of it: "Let It Slide" was issued as an EP in Europe and the United States, and "Into the Drink" was released as a promotional effort. AllMusic's Mark Deming gave the album four and a half stars and wrote that Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge was "Mudhoney's declaration that they didn't need grunge to survive, and if their timing proved to be a bit off, their musical instincts were faultless." Turner has called it his favorite Mudhoney album as a whole. The album also entered the UK album chart at Number 34 in August 1991, five weeks before Nevermind entered at Number 36. That timing is worth sitting with.
Mudhoney did eventually sign to Reprise, and their first record for that label was Piece of Cake, released in 1992. They also contributed "Overblown" to the Singles soundtrack that same year. That song is the clearest statement of where they stood: a sardonic look at the scene's sudden fame, with Arm singing about everybody loving Seattle and thinking lately about leaving, before concluding with venomous sarcasm, "Long live rock and roll." It's a song that bites the hand that was trying to feed them, and they put it on a Cameron Crowe movie soundtrack, which is either a contradiction or a very good joke, depending on your read.
The crossover happened. The money arrived. The flannel went on the runway. Mudhoney watched all of it from inside the thing they'd helped build, and their position was consistent: make the record you'd want to hear, in the room that fits the music, for the people who've been paying attention. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge sold enough copies to keep Sub Pop alive through the gold rush. Turner put it plainly when he said Egg Studio helped them change the way they did things, and that the album "didn't sound like anything else sounding like Seattle." That's the whole story.
