Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).
Touch Me I'm Sick
A lot was happening in the summer of 1988. Medical waste was washing up on beaches in the greater New York area, Michael Dukakis was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, Wrigley Field had its first night game and Wayne Gretzky was traded to the LA Kings.
I spent the summer as a reporting intern at the Peabody Times, a small daily newspaper in Massachusetts. I was commuting from Kingston, NH, to Peabody, which was about 45 minutes each way, and getting great experience as I worked in what I expected would be my career for life. The Times had three full-time reporters in addition to me, so I was doing a lot of puff pieces and stuff like that but I didn't care. I was having a blast. But by early August, one of the reporters took another job and suddenly I had to the opportunity to cover some more interesting stories. I went back for my senior year at UNH in the fall, but I impressed the higher-ups enough that they offered me a job before I even graduated.
Album sales that summer were dominated by the likes of Van Halen, Def Leppard and Guns N' Roses, while the singles chart was topped by Steve Winwood, Cheap Trick, Debbie Gibson and Michael Jackson, among others. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, a scruffy group of outcasts called Mudhoney released its first single, "Touch Me I'm Sick" on the Sub Pop label on Aug. 1.
A full three years before grunge mania captured the music industry's attention, Mudhoney was delivering the template: yowling vocals, guitars drenched in fuzz and distortion, pummeling bass and rapid-fire drumming singing about disease and sex for two and a half minutes. The band has cited the Stooges and the Yardbirds as direct influences on the song, which launches into a razor-wire riff and doesn't let up. The cover of the single was a toilet bowl. The band had originally planned to make "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More" the A side and "Touch Me I'm Sick" the B side, but wisely reversed it.
It wasn't long before college radio picked it up and the song became an underground hit. Sub Pop sold out of its initial pressings of the single and the band later included it on the Superfuzz Bigmuff EP. Sonic Youth and Mudhoney ended up releasing a split single where SY covered "Touch Me I'm Sick" with Kim Gordon on vocals and Mudhoney covered SY's "Halloween." Mudhoney soon became the premier act on Sub Pop. Soundgarden had been on the label but left for SST in '88.
Mudhoney's members weren't new to the Seattle scene. Arm and guitarist Steve Turner were previously in Mr. Epp and the Calculations and Green River (with future Pearl Jammers Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament). They teamed up with bassist Matt Lukin, who was previously in the Melvins.
The band released a self-titled album in '89 and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge in '91 before signing with Reprise in '92. By this point, pretty much every band in the greater Seattle area and beyond was getting signed to a major. I first saw them play at the Paradise in Boston in 1992 with my brother, and again the following year at Avalon on the Piece of Cake tour (and several more times over the years). While Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were blowing up, Mudhoney was sort off to the side watching the frenzy and laughing. They didn't appear in Cameron Crowe's Seattle-set movie Singles, but they contributed the excellent "Overblown" to the soundtrack, making fun of the whole scene. And even though they poked fun at Chris Cornell being "shirtless and flexing," the band was friendly with him and pretty much everybody else. They opened for Nirvana and Pearl Jam, they appeared as themselves in the Chris Farley movie Black Sheep and they just kept playing the messy fuzz-rock they always had.
As grunge petered out in the late '90s, Mudhoney was dumped by Reprise. Lukin left the band and they added Guy Maddison to replace him. The band has sporadically released albums on Sub Pop over the last 20 years, including last year's solid Plastic Eternity, and have toured behind them. Arm is the manager of the Sub Pop warehouse now.
It's been 35+ years, but Mudhoney's still playing loud, messy and fun music. They've outlasted many of their contemporaries and they still sound great. And their best song is still "Touch Me I'm Sick."
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