Melvins always seemed like they knew something everybody else had missed.
I first heard them around ’90 or ’91, back in Queens, when a friend handed me a beat-up cassette with Ozma on it.
I didn’t really understand what I was hearing at first.
Everything was so damn slow.
Buzz would hit one chord and just let the thing sit there while Dale somehow made the drums sound twice as heavy as everybody else’s. Then the whole band would lurch forward again.
I kept rewinding the tape.
That was pretty much it for me.
Then I found Gluey Porch Treatments and Bullhead and started figuring out where these guys came from. Montesano, Aberdeen, Matt Lukin on bass in the early days, Dale replacing Mike Dillard on drums. By the time most people started paying attention to Seattle, Melvins had already been making this horrible beautiful noise for years.
And Kurt loved them.
Everybody talks about the bands that influenced Nirvana, but with Melvins you can practically draw a straight line. Kurt used to hang around their rehearsals down in Aberdeen, and Dale even played with an early version of Nirvana for a while.
Of course, Melvins being Melvins, they never seemed particularly interested in making that connection easy for anybody to sell.
I saw them opening for Soundgarden at the Paramount on March 6, 1992.
Same show I wrote about on the Soundgarden page.
Soundgarden were enormous that night, but Melvins were something else entirely. Buzz standing there with that giant head of hair, Dale beating the absolute shit out of the drums, the whole thing moving at this ugly crawling pace.
I remember looking around at some of the people waiting for Soundgarden and wondering how many of them had any idea what the hell they were watching.
I loved it.
Around then they put out Lysol, which is still one of the strangest records I own. One long ugly trip from “Hung Bunny” into “Roman Dog Bird,” then Alice Cooper, Flipper...
That record does not give a shit whether you’re enjoying yourself.
Then somehow Atlantic signed them.
I still find that funny.
Houdini came out in ’93 and suddenly there were people buying Melvins records who probably hadn’t known they existed a year earlier. Kurt was involved with some of the sessions, which obviously got everybody’s attention, but “Hooch,” “Night Goat,” “Honey Bucket” — that record didn’t need anybody’s name attached to it.
Then instead of trying to make Houdini II, they made Stoner Witch.
Then Stag.
Of course they did.
Atlantic eventually gave up, but Melvins didn’t seem to notice. They ended up with Ipecac and somehow got even more productive. The Maggot, The Bootlicker, The Crybaby — three completely different records in about a year.
That’s another thing I love about them. You can’t really be a casual completist with Melvins. There’s always another EP, another weird single, another collaboration, another record with a title you swear you’ve never seen before.
And the bass player situation is almost as bad as Fastbacks’ drummer situation.
Matt Lukin. Lori Black. Joe Preston. Mark Deutrom. Kevin Rutmanis.
I’m probably forgetting somebody.
Buzz and Dale are the constants.
That’s really Melvins as far as I’m concerned.
They’re still playing, still making records, and apparently there’s another one coming pretty soon. I have absolutely no idea what it’s going to sound like.
With Melvins, that’s kind of the point.
Almost twenty years in and they still haven’t figured out how to behave like a normal band.
Thank God.
