Melvins always seemed like they knew something everybody else had missed.
I first heard them around 1990 or ’91, back in Queens, when a friend handed me a beat-up cassette with Ozma on it. I don’t remember what the hell he said when he gave it to me. Probably something useful like, “You need to hear this.” That was how half my musical education worked back then. Somebody handed you a record or a tape, told you almost nothing, and you went home and figured out whether they had just improved your life or wasted forty-five minutes of it.
I didn’t really understand what I was hearing at first.
Everything was so damn slow.
Not slow like some band dragging a song because they were stoned or couldn’t play it any faster. This sounded intentional. Buzz Osborne would hit a chord and let the fucking thing sit there, taking up space, while Dale Crover somehow made the drums underneath it feel twice as heavy as everybody else’s. Then the whole band would lurch forward again. Stop. Hang there. Move. There was all this empty space where I expected another guitar part to be, and somehow the empty space was part of the riff.
I kept rewinding the tape.
That was pretty much it for me.
The funny thing I learned once I started digging backward was that Melvins hadn’t always sounded like the band that confused the shit out of me on Ozma. They started in Montesano, Washington, in 1983, with Buzz on guitar, Matt Lukin on bass and Mike Dillard on drums. Montesano, not Seattle, and not Aberdeen either, although Aberdeen becomes part of the story soon enough. They were kids playing punk and hardcore, and the really early stuff could move. That matters because people talk about Melvins now like Buzz came out of the womb playing one chord every fifteen seconds.
Dale Crover replaced Dillard around 1984, and somewhere through those early years the band started slowing things down and getting heavier. Black Flag mattered. Flipper mattered. Black Sabbath was in there. Punk and metal were still supposed to be different tribes to a lot of people, and Melvins seemed to hear all of it as raw material. The speed came out of hardcore, the weight came from somewhere uglier, and instead of choosing one side they just kept fucking with the proportions.
By the time they started getting records out, they already sounded wrong in a useful way.
The first C/Z EP, Six Songs, came out in 1986, recorded at Ironwood in Seattle with Chris Hanzsek. Buzz, Matt and Dale. Six songs on a 7". There are faster pieces on there, but you can hear the band becoming the thing people would later recognize. "At a Crawl" is a pretty good title for where some of this was headed.
They were also on Deep Six, the C/Z compilation that everybody writing about this stuff eventually has to talk about. Soundgarden, Green River, Skin Yard, the U-Men, Malfunkshun, Melvins. It came out in ’86 from recordings made at Ironwood the year before, and the Melvins tracks included "Scared," "Blessing the Operation," "Grinding Process" and "She Waits."
People like to use Deep Six as evidence that there was already this fully formed thing called grunge sitting around Seattle waiting for somebody to give it a name.
Listen to the fucking record.
Those bands do not all sound the same.
What Deep Six does prove is that a bunch of strange, heavy punk-related bands were operating around the same part of Washington at the same time, sharing rooms, engineers, bills, friends and probably somebody’s shitty van. Melvins were one piece of that, and even then they were a weird piece.
Gluey Porch Treatments came next, recorded in 1986 and released by Alchemy in 1987. That was the first full-length, and by then the sound was getting seriously deformed. The riffs grind instead of just move. Dale doesn’t merely keep time; he makes the starts and stops feel physical. Buzz had figured out that repetition could make something heavier instead of just making it repetitive.
I found Gluey after Ozma, so I heard the history backward. That probably affected the way I understood them. I already knew what they would become, and then I got to hear them figuring out how to get there.
There’s another little Melvins detail I love: Mark Deutrom produced Gluey Porch Treatments. Remember that name, because years later he ends up playing bass in the fucking band. Melvins history does that constantly. Somebody turns up as an engineer or a friend or somebody from another band, disappears from the immediate story, and then five years later you’re reading the credits on another record going, wait, him?
Matt Lukin left around that period and eventually became part of Mudhoney. Melvins headed down toward San Francisco, and Lori Black — Lorax — came in on bass. She gets reduced in lazy band histories to “Shirley Temple’s daughter,” which is true and also tells you absolutely nothing useful about what she did in Melvins. She played on the records that really pulled me into this mess.
Ozma came out on Boner in 1989.
That was my doorway.
Even now I can put that record on and remember not knowing what to do with it. "Vile." "Oven." "At a Crawl." "Let God Be Your Gardener." The songs don’t move the way rock songs are supposed to move. Riffs arrive, hang around until you start wondering whether they’re ever going to leave, then get replaced by another one that somehow makes the first one seem reasonable. Buzz’s voice can sound like a threat, a joke or somebody arguing with a machine. Dale is ridiculous all the way through it.
And it’s funny.
That gets lost sometimes when people write about Melvins. Everything becomes HEAVY. SLOW. CRUSHING. INFLUENTIAL. Fine. Sure. But these guys are funny as hell. Not comedy-band funny. More like there’s always a chance the band understands exactly how ridiculous rock music is and intends to make you participate in the joke without explaining it first.
Once Ozma got me, I started hunting.
Gluey. Then Bullhead.
Jesus Christ, Bullhead.
That came out in 1991, and "Boris" alone could ruin your sense of time. The song is over eight minutes long and feels like somebody lowering industrial machinery onto your chest one inch at a time. "Anaconda" moves more, "Your Blessened" is another monster, and the whole record sounds bigger and more patient than Ozma. They had learned that if a riff was good enough, they didn’t have to hurry away from it.
There’s a confidence to Bullhead that I love. A lot of heavy bands sound like they’re trying very hard to convince you they’re heavy. Melvins sound like they couldn’t give less of a shit whether you’ve been convinced.
Around the same time there was Eggnog, four songs and not much mercy. "Charmicarmicat" goes on forever, which is exactly as long as it needs to. By then Joe Preston was entering the bass-player carousel, replacing Lori for a while, and the band was heading toward one of the strangest records they ever made.
Before that, though, you have to deal with the Nirvana thing.
Yes, Melvins mattered enormously to Nirvana.
Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic came out of Aberdeen and were around the Melvins orbit when they were young. Kurt had watched them, knew Buzz, absorbed records and ideas from that world, and Dale Crover played drums on the January 1988 Reciprocal session with Kurt and Krist that produced early versions of "Floyd the Barber," "Paper Cuts," "Downer," "Aero Zeppelin," "Beeswax" and a pile of other stuff. Some of those Dale performances eventually wound up on records people could actually buy.
That connection is real. You don’t have to exaggerate it.
What annoys me is when Melvins get reduced to “the band Kurt Cobain liked before Nirvana got famous,” because that tells the story backward. Melvins were already making records. They already had a sound. They already had their own fucked-up musical logic. Kurt liking them tells you something interesting about Kurt. It does not turn Buzz and Dale into supporting characters in his biography.
The connections kept happening anyway. Buzz helped Dave Grohl make contact with Kurt and Krist when Scream fell apart. In January 1992, Buzz even played a weird little Crocodile show with Krist and Dave, the three of them getting called the Melvanas. I was still in Queens then, of course. Naturally. By the time I finally moved to Seattle that September, I had already managed to miss years of this shit.
Wrong coast. Story of my life.
Then there’s Lysol.
Or the untitled Melvins record.
Or the record everybody I know still calls Lysol because that’s what it said before somebody apparently realized Lysol was a trademark and the name had to be covered up on the packaging.
Record collecting is very educational.
Lysol came out in 1992 with Joe Preston on bass, and it is still one of the strangest records I own. "Hung Bunny" crawls out of the speakers for what feels like geological time before "Roman Dog Bird" comes in, and then the record wanders through Flipper’s "Sacrifice" and Alice Cooper’s "Second Coming" and "The Ballad of Dwight Fry" before "With Teeth" finishes the thing off.
The CD indexes the whole trip as one track.
Of course it does.
That record does not give a shit whether you’re enjoying yourself. It barely seems interested in whether you understand where one song ends and another begins. And yet it never feels random to me. There’s a logic to the pacing. They keep stretching the amount of time between the thing you expect and the thing they finally give you until waiting becomes part of listening.
Joe Preston didn’t stay long. Bass players generally do not seem to stay long in Melvins.
That same year Boner put out three separate EPs: King Buzzo, Dale Crover and Joe Preston. They were done up as a three-man version of those four Kiss solo albums from 1978.
Three.
Not four.
Because Melvins.
I moved to Seattle in September of ’92, and one of the strange things about arriving here was discovering that bands I’d been treating as mysterious objects on records back in Queens were just part of the musical weather. Names came up in conversations. Records turned up in bins. Somebody knew somebody. Somebody had seen a show you’d missed. Somebody had a seven-inch you’d been looking for. Melvins had already moved around geographically by then and weren’t some permanent house band for Seattle, but their fingerprints were all over the music people talked about here.
And then Atlantic signed them.
I still find that funny.
Not because Melvins weren’t good enough for a major label. That’s backwards. They were too good at being Melvins for the whole thing to make obvious business sense. But this was the early ’90s, Nirvana had blown the doors off the record industry, and major labels were signing bands they would have crossed the street to avoid a few years earlier.
So somehow there was a Melvins record on Atlantic.
Houdini came out in 1993.
And because history enjoys making everything about Nirvana if you let it, Kurt Cobain’s involvement became one of the first things people mentioned. His name is legitimately on the record. He co-produced six tracks, played guitar on "Sky Pup" and percussion on "Spread Eagle Beagle." Fine. That happened.
Now listen to the fucking album.
"Hooch."
"Night Goat."
"Honey Bucket."
"Lizzy."
"Set Me Straight."
That record does not need Kurt Cobain’s name attached to it to justify its existence.
Houdini is one of the more immediately graspable Melvins records without actually becoming normal. "Honey Bucket" moves like a truck with bad brakes. "Night Goat" has one of those bass lines that seems to announce the end of civilization. Then they’ll turn around and do Kiss’s "Goin' Blind" because of course they will.
Lori Black is credited on the record, although the bass situation around those sessions was already getting messy. What matters from where I was sitting was that the lineup kept changing and Buzz and Dale kept coming out the other side sounding unmistakably like themselves.
That’s really where my collector problem with this band got worse.
You could follow the albums, sure. But following the albums is not following Melvins.
There were singles. EPs. Split records. Live things. Records on Amphetamine Reptile. Different versions. Limited shit. Things that appeared long enough for you to learn they existed and then disappeared.
The original "Night Goat" single on AmRep came out before Houdini. There’s that ridiculous split with Steel Pole Bath Tub where Melvins cover Mudhoney’s "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More" and Steel Pole Bath Tub cover Sonic Youth’s "I Dreamed I Dream." There are the three Kiss-style solo EPs. There’s Your Choice Live Series Vol. 12. Later there would be Alive at the Fucker Club.
You can’t really be a casual completist with Melvins.
I tried.
Melvins won.
Mark Deutrom eventually came back into the story, this time on the other side of the glass. The guy who had produced Gluey Porch Treatments became their bass player during the Atlantic years. That lineup made Stoner Witch in 1994, and I think that record is one of the best arguments against the idea that signing to a major somehow made Melvins behave.
There are songs on Stoner Witch that almost seem friendly by their standards. "Revolve" has a hook you can grab onto. "Queen" moves. "Roadbull" stomps around like it owns the place. Then you get "At the Stake" or "Magic Pig Detective" and remember who you’re dealing with.
The production is bigger than the Boner records, obviously. There was money now. Better rooms, more possibilities, more ways to make noise. But they used that stuff like Melvins. They didn’t suddenly start writing twelve versions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" because somebody at Atlantic wanted a swimming pool.
And while they were signed to Atlantic, they also put out Prick through Amphetamine Reptile.
Prick is one of those records that makes trying to explain Melvins to somebody feel like a practical joke. Noise, fragments, experiments, things that sound like they wandered in from another record and refused to leave. People have attached all kinds of contract stories to why it came out the way it did. I don’t know which of those stories are true, and unless somebody wants to show me the paperwork I’m not pretending I do.
I just know they were on Atlantic and still found time to make Prick.
That tells me enough.
Then in 1996 they made Stag.
I love Stag because by that point anybody who thought they understood the Atlantic-era Melvins got another problem dropped in their lap. It goes all over the place. Heavy stuff, poppier stuff, noise, strange instrumentation, little pieces that feel like somebody changed the station halfway through the record. "The Bit" is enormous. "Bar-X-The Rocking M" sounds like Melvins getting into a fight with a horn section. "Black Bock" almost sounds like something a normal person might whistle until you remember what album you’re listening to.
There’s a version of the Melvins story where Atlantic spends three albums desperately trying to turn them into a commercial rock band and finally throws them out after Stag because the experiment failed.
That story is too neat.
They made three records for Atlantic. Then that relationship ended. I’m sure people in offices looked at sales numbers because people in offices always look at sales numbers. But I’ve never seen any reason to pretend Melvins spent those years being artistically strangled by the label. If anything, the records sound like somebody gave them access to more equipment.
Meanwhile they were making the collector situation actively hostile.
In 1996 Amphetamine Reptile started putting out a series of twelve Melvins 7"s, one every month. Small pressings. Different artwork. Twelve fucking singles.
Think about that for a minute.
You miss one month, somebody buys the last copy before you get to it, suddenly there’s a hole in the row. Now you’re calling stores. Now somebody wants twice what it cost because it’s three months old. Now you’re staring at a mail-order list wondering whether you really need another version of a song you already own.
You do.
Obviously.
Then AmRep collected the whole mess as Singles 1–12 in 1997, which was both useful and somehow insulting to everybody who had spent the previous year chasing the individual records.
I respect that.
By then the Atlantic run was over. Honky came out on Amphetamine Reptile in 1997, and if anybody expected Melvins to make some triumphant back-to-the-underground statement, they got another strange Melvins record instead. That’s one reason I don’t buy the easy major-label morality play with these guys. They were weird before Atlantic. They were weird on Atlantic. They were weird after Atlantic.
Consistency.
Mark Deutrom left, and Kevin Rutmanis from Cows came in on bass. If you’re keeping score, good luck.
Matt Lukin.
Lori Black.
Joe Preston.
Lori again.
Mark Deutrom.
Kevin Rutmanis.
There were other people around the edges too, depending on whether you’re talking about a tour, a session or somebody filling a hole for five minutes.
The bass-player situation is almost as bad as Fastbacks’ drummer situation.
Almost.
Buzz and Dale are the constants in the version of Melvins most of us have known for years. Dale wasn’t there at the absolute beginning — Mike Dillard was — and that distinction matters if you’re writing down the history. But musically, once Dale arrives, you get the partnership that keeps surviving everything else. Bass players, labels, cities, major-label contracts, indie labels, whatever.
Buzz’s guitar and Dale’s drums are the center of gravity.
That doesn’t mean every record sounds the same. The opposite, really. It means they can wander farther because there’s something recognizable underneath it.
By the end of the ’90s they landed with Ipecac, the label Mike Patton and Greg Werckman started, and that arrangement made almost suspiciously good sense. Here was a label where being difficult wasn’t necessarily treated as a manufacturing defect.
So naturally Melvins responded by putting out three records in about a year.
The Maggot in 1999.
The Bootlicker later that year.
The Crybaby in 2000.
If you want a quick demonstration of why I still bother following this band after all these years, play those three in order.
The Maggot is the heavy one. Big, nasty, direct by Melvins standards. The songs are split across tracks in weird ways because apparently even CD indexing has to become part of the joke.
Then The Bootlicker backs away from that. Quieter. Stranger. More restrained. It breathes differently. If somebody bought it because The Maggot had kicked their head in and they wanted the same thing again, tough shit.
Then The Crybaby turns into this guest-filled freak show.
Mike Patton is on there. Hank Williams III is on there. David Yow is on there. J.G. Thirlwell is on there. Bliss Blood. Kevin Sharp. And somehow Leif Garrett winds up singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a Melvins record.
Read that sentence again.
Leif Garrett.
"Smells Like Teen Spirit."
Melvins.
There are moments when record collecting rewards you in ways no responsible adult could possibly defend.
Those three records work like a set to me because they refuse to give you the same version of the band twice. Heavy record. Quieter record. Collaboration circus. By the time you’ve adjusted to one, they’re already somewhere else.
Which brings us to 2001.
First there was Electroretard on Man’s Ruin, another record that refuses to sit cleanly in one category. Re-recorded Melvins material, covers, studio weirdness. They even take "Revolve" and screw around with it again because apparently owning the perfectly good Stoner Witch version is not enough for us.
The planned vinyl got caught up in Man’s Ruin collapsing, which is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you collect this band. There is always some pressing that exists differently than you thought it did, some version that got delayed, some label disappearing underneath the record.
Then Ipecac put out Colossus of Destiny.
This thing had been recorded live a few years earlier, and calling it a live album creates completely the wrong expectation. It’s basically one enormous stretch of noise and electronics and drones and whatever the hell else they felt like doing, nearly an hour of it, before "Eye Flys" finally crawls out near the end.
Imagine buying a Melvins live record because you want to hear "Honey Bucket."
Ha.
That’s the thing.
Almost twenty years into this band, I still don’t know what I’m supposed to expect from them.
And I mean that as one of the highest compliments I can give.
There are bands where you can hear the career settling into place. They figure out what people like, they figure out what they’re good at, and eventually every new record becomes a slightly different photograph of the same building.
Melvins have never seemed interested in that.
They’ve repeated themselves sometimes. Of course they have. Anybody who makes this much music is going to step in their own footprints occasionally. Not every experiment works. Not every weird record becomes secretly brilliant because Buzz made it. There’s Melvins stuff I play constantly and Melvins stuff I own mostly because apparently I have a disease.
But I never get the feeling they’re asking permission.
That’s probably what I was hearing on that shitty cassette in Queens before I knew enough to put words around it.
It wasn’t just that Ozma was slow.
It was that the band had decided slowness could be the whole fucking point.
The pause could be part of the riff.
The ugly sound could be the good sound.
A joke didn’t have to be explained.
A major-label record didn’t have to sound commercial.
An indie record didn’t have to prove anything.
A live album didn’t have to give you the songs you wanted.
And if you finally thought you understood what a Melvins record was supposed to be, they could make another one and ruin your definition.
They’re still playing.
Still making records.
Buzz is still Buzz. Dale is still Dale. Kevin Rutmanis is holding down the dangerous bass-player position at the moment.
I have no idea what they’re going to do next.
I’m not even going to guess anymore.
I learned that lesson years ago.
I kept rewinding the tape.
I’m still listening.
