Denim & Distortion: How Heavy Metal Accidentally Invented Punk, Part 8

So far, this series has documented two supposedly opposing musical tribes contaminating each other. And now, we’ve reached the point where the contamination is complete.

By this point, any division between punk and heavy metal is pretty much non-existent. Anyone playing punk rock by now has a metal background, and all the big metal acts have serious punk DNA in ‘em, whether it’s Metallica or GN’R. I’m probably the last person alive in the punk rock world who hated this crossover shit, because I do not have a metallic bone in my body. And I’m standing there, wondering, “Wait a fucking minute — when did everyone agree this was OKAY?!”

But no one’s gonna listen to me. I’m just a loudmouth with a chip on my shoulder, who’s left the ‘zines to write for Alternative Press. I’m the only guy in the room who doesn’t want this marriage happening, but I’m the reporter covering the wedding, and I’ve discovered the bride and groom have eloped to Seattle.

Nevertheless, I gotta admit: this grunge shit sounds pretty damned good.

You can argue where it all began all day long. Black Flag’s descent into sludge around ‘84 had a lot to do with it. And pretty much the entire hardcore generation’s childhood KISS fandom had something to do with it. But grunge’s story begins with the Melvins.

The Melvins began in 1983 in Montesano, Washington, a logging town not far from Aberdeen. High school classmates Buzz Osborne (guitar & vocals), Mike Dillard (drums), and Matt Lukin (bass) were making a racket that couldn’t decide whether it was hardcore or hard rock, before finally deciding it was neither.

Kurt Cobain grew up mostly in Aberdeen. According to Cobain’s own journals, one day that summer he encountered Osborne working as a box boy at the Montesano Thriftway. Buzz handed him a flyer for a backyard Melvins gig. Suddenly, the kid who would eventually front Nirvana had a doorway into punk rock by the guy whose band was busy helping invent the ugly, lumbering bastard child punk and metal was about to produce.

The idea was already in the air. Flipper was down in San Francisco, antagonizing Mohawk youth by playing at roughly five miles per hour, louder than sin. And Black Flag were busy becoming Black Sabbath, except more atonal.

So, if everyone in punk now wants to break the sound barrier, what could be more punk than reducing your beats per minute to one? And playing even LOUDER and MORE DISTORTED than Black Flag? Be the inverse of Bad Brains! Run in the opposite direction from land speed records!

So, now the Melvins were slower than any band alive. And louder. And once you start pulling that thread, everybody starts turning up: Osborne, Cobain, Dale Crover, Krist Novoselic. The family tree starts looking less like a tree and more like four guys passing the same guitar around somebody’s basement.

But it was like somebody passed that guitar to Seattle. Around the same time that the Melvins began slamming hard on the one, then pummeling the two with similar force a minute later, Seattle began producing some bands who similarly looked to the blunt force trauma inherent in early hard rock outfits like Blue Cheer and the propulsion and fuzz-drenched blast radius of the first Stooges album. There was Soundgarden, born in 1984, who seemed to wanna boil all of rock history down to Sabbath, Zeppelin, and Killing Joke. You also had Green River, who verged on The Stooges dressing in the Dolls’ castoff rags. Two members – Mark Arm and Steve Turner – served time in high school hardcore outfit Mr. Epp and the Calculations , who were likely the first egg punk band. The rest — Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Alex Shumway, and Turner’s replacement Bruce Fairweather — all basically wanted to become a commercial hard rock band.

This wasn’t gonna work, if you had Mark Arm fronting your group. He wanted to be Iggy Pop, or at least Sky Saxon. If you were the rest of Green River, you were wishing he was Vince Neil instead.

The funny thing was, Arm had a day job at Muzak alongside a guy named Bruce Pavitt. Yes, that Muzak — the company responsible for all that innocuous background music that used to follow you around elevators, shopping malls, and dentists’ offices. So naturally, this became one of the places where the loudest, ugliest rock ‘n’ roll movement of the next decade began incubating.

A Chicago native, Pavitt had been beating the underground drum for years by then. While attending Evergreen State College in Olympia, he’d started a radio show called Subterranean Pop on KAOS-FM in 1979, then turned the concept into a ‘zine the following year, covering regional punk, new wave, and assorted independent racket that wasn’t getting much attention elsewhere. Subterranean Pop eventually simply became Sub Pop, complete with cassette compilations. After Pavitt moved to Seattle in 1983, the name followed him to a column in The Rocket, the local alternative weekly newspaper, and another radio show on KCMU.

Then in 1986, Pavitt scraped together enough money to put out Sub Pop 100, a compilation album featuring the likes of Sonic Youth, Scratch Acid, The Wipers, and Big Black. Suddenly, the ‘zine guy was becoming a record label guy. He followed it with Green River’s Dry As A Bone EP, which came damned close to being the Pacific Northwest’s answer to the first Dead Boys album, then teamed with KCMU DJ Jonathan Poneman — a fellow midwestern emigre from Toledo — to release Soundgarden’s Screaming Life. By April 1988, Pavitt and Poneman had both quit their day jobs, and Sub Pop Records was officially a full-time business.

Which is where things get personal.

I’d started calling Pavitt around the time of Sub Pop 100, trying to hustle a promo copy out of him to review at a Minneapolis ‘zine I’d just begun writing an underground punk column for, Sheet Metal. Soon enough, Bruce started sending me the Green River records, including a test pressing of what was to become their second LP, Rehab Doll. Every time we got on the phone, he was telling me about all these local bands up in Seattle who were playing hard rock. Considering I was one of those punk rock true believers who thought heavy metal was the fucking enemy — yeah, still(!!) — this wasn’t necessarily the greatest sales pitch he could have given me.

But the records kept showing up.

Meanwhile back at Muzak, Arm eventually brought Pavitt a crude demo of his new post-Green River band. They were called Mudhoney, named for a Russ Meyer picture. (Always a good sign!) Arm was back on guitar, besides his snarly drawl being front and center where it belonged. His old Green River comrade Steve Turner, who was eyebrow-deep into 1960s Northwestern garage noise and skate-punk culture, joined him on dueling fuzz guitar. They cadged drummer Dan Peters from Bundle of Hiss…and Matt Lukin from the Melvins(!!). How could you lose with all these world-class pedigrees turned loose in one band?

Bruce thought the demo was epic. Before long, one of those little Sub Pop packages landed in my hands containing Mudhoney’s debut single, “Touch Me I’m Sick.”And goddammit, Bruce was right. As he always was.

“Touch Me I’m Sick” sounded like this entire series compressed into one fucking guitar riff. They clearly got it off “I’m Sick Of You” by The Stooges, but they got it off The Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” Garage/psychedelic freakbeat becomes Stooges proto-punk hard rock becomes Seattle punk/metal. Which Pavitt dubbed “grunge” in a fanzine advertisement hyping Dry As A Bone, probably due to the fuzz boxes all of Seattle used to put some dirt and hair on their cheap ‘n’ nasty guitar tones. Turners and Arm’s pedals — the Super Fuzz and the Big Muff — later provided a title for Mudhoney’s debut EP.

So, yeah. “Touch Me I’m Sick” was where The Yardbirds met Blue Cheer met Black Sabbath met The Stooges, and created a barely-over-two-minute explosion you could bang your long, greasy hair to, working up a nice sweat in

I should have recoiled like somebody waved a crucifix at Dracula when “Touch Me I’m Sick” arrived at my door. But how could I? It was the “Heartbreak Hotel”/”I Want To Hold Your Hand”/”Anarchy In The UK” of the late ‘80s. Yeah, it sounded that good.

Not long after, Pavitt sent me Nirvana’s debut single, featuring that Cobain kid Buzz Osborne handed his backyard punk show flyer to five years earlier. “Love Buzz” was a cover, cribbed from Shocking Blue, the phonetic-English-singing Dutch rockers behind “Venus,” which burnt up the charts two years earlier in a remake by UK new wavers Bananarama. Not long after, we’d realize Cobain wrote the best songs of any contemporary rock musician. He’d figured out how to wed his angst-ridden power pop tunes to that Super Fuzz/Big Muff sludge-riffing.

And Poison would never play a show outside the rib burn-off circuit again. Thank God.

In fact, some guy I do not know messaged me last night on Facebook Messenger to tell me he just got his pre-order from Ruffian Books: “Unboxing is crazy,” he wrote, before he enumerated all he received, including a “note from (Mike) Shea, flyers, crazy wrapping paper, unreal box.”

“Usually you rip open an Amazon box,” he continued raving. “Not here! 👀 Book looks amazing. Time to get reading.🎉”

Then, after more enthusiasm (“Best packing and surprises. Amazing book! Going to take several (many) evenings to go through”), he asked a dangerous question: “When’s Part 2 coming?”

LOL! Oh, man!

I had to be honest: Volume 2, on the ‘80s, is a few years away. C’mon, it took us three years to get THIS one out! Give this one a chance, and give us a chance to sell a few before you start making me spend three years holed up in East Austin, researching Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Hüsker Dü!

I do appreciate the enthusiasm. Like my old Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski at his Substack: “Anarchy in the Studio unfolds like a guided tour through punk’s evolutionary tree. Stegall seamlessly blends meticulous historical research with outrageous stories, generous musical analysis, and firsthand observations from the artists themselves… You don’t simply read the book—you keep turning the pages because he’s convinced you there’s another great story waiting just around the corner.” Or this, from fellow Austin Chronicle scribe Caroline Drew’s recent profile: “You’re likely familiar with Tim Stegall’s…clever, rhapsodic writing. Some people are born to be punk – and this longtime Chronicle contributor is one of them, through and through.”

If you haven’t bought my 528-page, 10 lb. attempt at telling the story of punk’s first 10 years, 12-inches at a time, isn’t it time you did so? Click this link to buy directly from Ruffian Books. And tell Mike Shea I sent ya! I will offer the last signed editions I have on hand next week.

TODAY is the FINAL DAY of The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack’s Fourth Birthday Subscription Sale. Take 20% off all paid subscriptions. Annual subs, normally $52, are now $41.60! Monthly subscribers? You get 20% off too, down from the usual $7/month to $5.60! And you pay the discounted rate for life! Mash the button while you still can!

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Now here comes the hashtag block. (Were you expecting me to say “the warm jets”?)

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