Melvins formed a few years before anyone used the word grunge as the name of a genre, but they embodied the term perfectly with their deep, sludgy riffs and left-of-center songwriting. Since 1984, theyve released dozens of albums of uncompromising and sometimes experimental music, and constantly challenged rock norms. When we compiled our recent list of the 50 Greatest Grunge Albums, two of their standout LPs 1991s Bullhead and 1993s Houdini made the cut.
The bands frontman, vocalist-guitarist Buzz Osborne, was surprised to hear the news, but not for the reason you may guess. Amazing. Are there 50 great grunge records? he asks on a phone call a week before the list came out. I guess it depends on how wide your parameters are. Im not overly intrigued by that whole genre. Its OK, theres a few things that are good. But I think most of what people put under that moniker is just garbage. I dont care about any of it. I might as well be listening to fucking Bon Jovi. You know, big production, big everything.
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Despite this, Osborne was game to list a few of his own favorite grunge records to give a better picture of how he saw the genre. To me, grunge was more punk rock than rock or the hair-metal thing, he says. It was putting an emphasis back on the music. Below, he picked 10 records he feels exemplifies the movement. Soundgardens Badmotorfinger is first on my list and the rest of them are in no particular order, he explains. And he adds that hed give Neil Youngs Zuma an honorable mention. That could have been grunge, he says. Heres the rest of what he picked.
Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger (1991)
Thats the one record Ive listened to most thats quote-unquote grunge. I think it was a record that I paid little attention to when it came out, but as time went on, I realized it works far better than any other ones. The songs are better, and it has a more sophisticated musicality to it than most of records by the other bands considered grunge. I like Room a Thousand Years Wide, and Searching With My Good Eye Closed is a good song. Slaves & Bulldozers is good. The album has odd timings and weird stuff that most people dont pick up on, and its buried in the music in a way that you dont really realize exactly what it is youre listening to. Most of the bands that were like them or trying to rip them off never did that. I always admire anything thats outside the box.
Nirvana, Nevermind (1991)
I think its their best record. I didnt like the stuff that much before or after it. I dont necessarily like all the songs on it, but it really solidified what was good about them to begin with. Teen Spirit is OK for that kind of song. You probably cant improve on that. Some of the other songs were taken off of other bands songs, and even Smells Like Teen Spirit, to me, sounds like [Blue yster Cults] Godzilla crossed with [Bostons] More Than a Feeling. He wore his influences on his sleeve, for sure. I think its a little overproduced, personally. I usually prefer a little bit grittier production than that.
We went down to the studio in L.A. when they were recording it. We were there while Butch Vig was trying to tune the cello [on Something in the Way] electronically, because it had been played so out of tune. He was just trying to save it. Whoever played it didnt do a tremendously great job. And my thought was, Why didnt you just get someone who could do it and save yourself some hassle? [Laughs] Oh, well. So we heard the record then. I never would have guessed it would sell 30 million records or however many it sold worldwide. Im a bad A&R guy when it comes to stuff like that.
U-Men, U-Men (1984)
U-Men is one of the best bands from the era that nobody knows about. They were relatively unpredictable live. All the guys were really good players and they had a really cool sense about them. It was very well-rehearsed and well-conceived. Those are lessons I learned at a very early stage in our career from them and I never forgot that stuff. I would just say that the first 12-inch they did is one of the best Seattle rock records ever, including stuff by Jimi Hendrix. At the time it came out, I loved them live, and I was just completely floored by how great that record was. To this day, I listen to that record all the time. All. The. Time. I think its a fucking great record. I will never stop loving it.
Tales of Terror, Tales of Terror (1984)
They were an extraordinary band. I saw them before I heard the record, and I thought they were really, really, really good. It was pretty much exactly the kind of punk-rock thing I wanted. They had a simultaneous destruction and reinvention to their music. And you could tell their influences were really cool, like the Stooges and the Dead Boys with some hardcore thrown in there. And they had a psychedelic edge to it that I thought was amazing. This record would be in my top 20 albums of all time, if not top 10. Weve covered a couple of songs on it, and we may cover more in the future. It was certainly a big influence on me and the Mudhoney guys.
Mudhoney, Touch Me, Im Sick (1988)
I really liked [Mudhoney frontman] Mark Arm from the beginning. He was always very nice to me and a good guy. I learned a lot from him; he was a big influence on me in general, especially in what his sensibilities were musically. I included this seven-inch because of the B side, Sweet Young Thing. When I heard that, I was like, Oh, my God. This is fucking great. These guys really nailed it on this. I think its the best song they ever did, and they did it early on. Its a tough one to surpass.
Flipper, Generic (1982)
This would be in my top five albums of all time. Theyre another band that simultaneously destroyed and invented rock & roll music. They wrote the bible on what was possible with punk-rock music. It was so far beyond anything I had heard before. Its genius is in its simplicity, its end-of-the-world quality. It made me want to make music that sounded like the end of the world, as well.
And I thought they had really hooky songs and very clever lyrics, as well as lyrics that were totally terrifying. If you listen to a song like I Saw You Shine, thats a fucking scary song. And I was just intrigued by Sacrifice, which weve covered for a long time. Generic Flipper is a really high-water mark for music in general. People that dont understand that and dont get it are fucking morons. What do you like? Oh, you like that? Oh, great. Well, youre just a fucking moron.
We just got done recording with Steve [DePace] and Ted [Falconi]; we wrote a new Flipper song with them, and it was an honor to play with those guys. If you told me at the beginning, when I first started in the band, that someday Ill make music with the guys from Flipper and the Butthole Surfers and Steve McDonald from Redd Kross would play in my band, I never would have believed any of that. Thats just too much for me to believe. I do not take it for granted. And my love for Generic Flipper has only intensified.
Nirvana, Bleach (1989)
I picked Bleach because theres just not that many grunge records I think are any good. But that would be one of them. Our influence was massive on them with Bleach, and its obvious. [Melvins drummer] Dale [Crover] even played on a lot of it. Negative Creep is probably my favorite song on it. I like that song probably more than anything on Nevermind, but I think Nevermind is a better record. But Bleach is good. If that was the only record they put out, it would still be good.
I never thought Nirvana would sell a hundred million albums; I didnt hear them being bigger than Sonic Youth. I knew why I liked Nirvana, but I couldnt see why the general public liked it. I was always very excited about Nirvana and Soundgarden becoming famous, rich and successful. I felt like something that I was involved in was right. My sensibilities were right. Watching that happen with those guys only gave me more confidence. Bleach was the beginning of that.
Soundgarden, Superunknown (1994)
This is probably my second favorite album from them. I like a lot of songs on that record. We covered Spoonman at the Chris Cornell tribute because I thought we could do a good job of it, and I didnt think anybody else would play that song. And I wasnt wrong about that; its a weird song to play. The thing is, the Soundgarden guys are good players, and the music they play is, like I said before, very sophisticated. Its not just jive-ass crap in 4/4. Its far superior to that. Those guys had four songwriters in that band, all contributing to what they were doing, and it really shows.
Take a song like 4th of July. How many of their contemporaries would have done a song like that? Thats right, none. And thats what sets those guys far and above the rest of them. And its on the same album as Black Hole Sun. Like, We do Black Hole Sun, and we do this. Thats why theyre better than the other bands. And The Day I Tried to Live is fucking great. I think a lot of people miss the extent of how far their influence reached.
Playing that [Cornell] tribute show was fucking heavy, man. It was like, This is the end. This is it for these guys. And it was tough. It was really hard to feel good about that. Its closure to some degree, but there is no closure on that. Its not like he died of cancer, you know. Its a different kind of thing, and its not something Ill ever be able to get my head around. Him or the Nirvana thing. I will never get over that stuff, and it will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Malfunkshun, Return to Olympus (1995)
Malfunkshun were one of my favorite bands from that era. They never had any albums when we played with them and saw them. I just enjoyed them live, and my memories are of them playing live, not listening to records. My favorite song from them is With Yo Heart (Not Yo Hands). They had a really great sense of humor and they were great players and nice guys. I thought they wrote really great songs and were really fun. When Andy Wood died, it was a total waste. Lord knows what the future could have held for that guy. But they remain one of my favorites.
I dont think Return to Olympus [a comp issued years after the band broke up] is what it could have been, because under the right circumstances they could have hit home runs with all those songs. It felt good to hear this album, but you kind of feel cheated, too, at the same time, because you wish it was under better circumstances. But I love them so much I had to include them.
Babes in Toyland, Spanking Machine (1990)
I dont know that I would have considered Babes in Toyland a grunge band, but I think a lot of people do. They were clearly influenced by the Birthday Party, which I thought was cool. And Hole were kind of a bastardized version of them. To me, anyway. Babes in Toyland were a much, much better band. They wrote much more interesting songs and were much less interested in, like, We have to write pop songs that are gonna be big hits. You never had to worry about that with them. I like Spanking Machine from them best. Hes My Thing is on that one, and I like Vomit Heart. Thats probably my favorite song of theirs ever.
We played a lot of shows with them back then, and they were always fun. We did a tour with them and White Zombie, and we both got treated like fucking dogshit on that tour by the powers that be. It was a massively unnecessary situation of pointless rock-star behavior. I dont know what was going through his [Rob Zombies] head, but if making enemies is what you set out to do, well, mission accomplished. Ive been around people you would consider a rock star, like the guys in Kiss, and they never behaved like that. It just makes you hate lower-level fuckheads like Rob Zombie even more. If I got treated like that by the fucking mailman, Id hate his guts. So it was fun to have Babes in Toyland along.