Melvins

Um, Rock Lobster by the B-52s originally.

Uh, Melvins and J-, uh, Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, I told you this story, where, uh, [laughs] his Lydia come.

[laughs] She was like, "How the fuck do you not know who that was?" I played this song, uh, couple of times, uh, m- many moons ago.

And they're gonna do the Alice Cooper cover of Halo on Flies, which is my favorite Alice Cooper song ever.

...

Dio, which is fabulous.

The Melvins and Diablos [laughs].

It's good Katie said.

And then, you know, they had so many different drummers.

They had the one guy from the Melvins.

They had Chad Channing.

You know, and Chad was really small and Kurt was somewhat tall and Chris was taller.

I know the history.

Come on.

And then they did the MTV Unplugged, and they did songs by the Meat Puppets and the Melvins, and they did Lead Belly cover, and then it was over.

It was over.

When Green River and Mudhoney later came onto the scene, you could hear the Husker Du influence in their relentless energy and their refusal to conform to any major label sound.

On the other side of Washington, The Melvins were crushing heavy riffs so slowly that you could hear their bass in every heartbeat.

Their sound was a marriage between punk aggression and sludge metal that would later become a hallmark of grunge's sonic palette.

Buzz Osborne's use of open-throated power chords, coupled with Dale Crover's unrelenting drumming, made The Melvins' first releases feel like a wall of distorted sound that could not be ignored by anyone in Seattle looking for something louder.

The band also experimented with unconventional time signatures, such as in Lizard or Mush.

which introduced a progressive edge that grunge would adopt when it moved from garage to album recordings.

Melvins had an attitude.

They released albums on their own label, then licensed them to SST and later Sub Pop.

When most people hear Nirvana, they think of the 1991 mega-hit Nevermind, the sold-out tour vans in the glossy MTV video for Smells Like Teen Spirit.

But beneath that slick pop culture facade lurked a stubborn DIY ethic that traced its lineage back to a handful of underground pioneers like the Melvins, who taught Cobain to slow down the chaos and grind it into something visceral rather than just noise.

It wasn't until a teenage Kurt stumbled on a gig with the Melvins in his own backyard that he fully grasped punk as both an aesthetic and an ethical framework.

He said later, almost like an epiphany, that he was instantly converted, seeing in their sludge-driven riffing a blueprint for how to take rock's excesses and flip them on their head, making the music feel like it belonged in your living room because you could smash the wall or write angry lyrics on a napkin.

This conversion was critical because it moved Kurt away from the glamour of Seattle's early scene.

So when Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt heard Mudhoney’s demo and handed it over to his label, they knew they were looking at something special.

The first single, Touch Me (I’m Sick), was recorded in April 1988 at Reciprocal Recording with Jack and Dino producing, who’d already been laying down rough tracks for the Melvins.

And Dino’s minimalist approach meant the band kept their raw edge.

He didn’t want to chase studio sheen, but instead capture the way they sounded in a basement.

Like a good poster.

It's usually close to the event because it's kind of like a, well, what am I doing this weekend? And then it's like, oh, the Melvins, you know, or something like that.

But no, I get sucked in by posters big time.

Okay.