A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Mudhoney - I’m Spun (11 October 1992)

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The debt that American alternative rock owed to Mudhoney in the early 1990s was considerable.  Singer Mark Arm coined the phrase “grunge” as part of a dismissive put-down of Seattle, and yet by 1992, the term he had used was the epitome of the musical zeitgeist and the sound that Mudhoney and bands such as Melvins and Tad had come to attention with had helped make Nirvana into the biggest band in the world, and inspired a major label feeding frenzy of signing bands with long hair, loud guitars, a passing acquaintance with Seattle and singers who could pull off something approximating a vulnerable, angst-ridden roar.

For Arm, Nirvana’s success must have been like looking in a mirror and seeing his doppelgänger being given the keys to the kingdom.  Arm and Kurt Cobain shared several traits such as hairstyles, good looks, vocal styles that were distinctively memorable and predilections for heroin.  I’m Spun, a track from Mudhoney’s major label debut album, Piece of Cake positively thrums with the restless, itchy, impatient energy of someone between fixes.  The relentless, almost mocking six note riff that drives the track along sounds just like somebody standing up to stop sitting down and then walking around to stop standing around before sitting back down again so as to avoid wearing a hole in the carpet. And rinse and repeat...
A better title may have been I’m Bound because the over-riding feeling in the lyrics is of someone in thrall to their addictions.  Arm sounds simultaneously energised and angry about this - the drugs give him a sense of life, (“I’m a ricochet” etc) but the majority of the song is a warning to others about the consequences of getting too close to him or keeping him from his fix, (“Bouncing off these walls, I could hit you all/When you see me come, you’d better run”.). However, by 3:07, Arm is openly acknowledging that the games he’s been playing are dangerous and that he’s in danger of spinning off down a road he may never return from (“Never know when you’ll snap/Never know when you’ll break/Never know when you’ll crack/All you know is you can’t trust fate.”).
In the event, Arm’s heroin use reached breaking point on New Year’s Eve 1992 when he suffered his fourth experience of an overdose.  Having survived it, he cleaned up through 1993, helped by beginning a relationship with his future wife and doubtless to the relief of the rest of Mudhoney who attributed some of the poor feeling around Piece of Cake to Arm being in the grip of his demons.

When he played Blinding Sun the previous week, Peel had mentioned that his son William had passed no comment about Piece of Cake, something which worried his father.  This week the plot thickened further as Peel revealed that Mudhoney had cancelled several dates on their UK tour including shows in Cambridge and Norwich, which had robbed Peel and his family of the opportunity to see Mudhoney play relatively close to where they lived. Peel was philosophical about it, reasoning
that the venues may not have been regarded as big enough for a band that was on a major label and
that such decisions were very likely not taken by the band themselves. However, William was livid
about the cancellations.  So much so that, “I think they may have lost a fan.”

Ten years later, I had cause to sympathise with William when The Electric Soft Parade cancelled a gig they were scheduled to play at The Pirate Inn in Falmouth, so that they could support The Who at
 the Royal Albert Hall.  I understood the reasoning from the band’s point of view, but I was massively pissed off with them too.  Never did the cultural slap in the face of living in Cornwall seemed to sting more than it did in that moment.  I could just picture them sitting around deciding “Fuck those carrot crunching bumpkins down there.  Why should we bother going to honour a booking for people who will treat us as the top of the bill when we can do a shorter night’s work and get ignored by most of the crowd, just so we can get a photo with Pete Townshend.  And if we’re disappointing anybody, then fuck them.  They’re only Cornish, they don’t count compared to London music fans.” Although things like The Eden Sessions were imminent, featuring bands much bigger than The Electric Soft Parade, the ease with which they could drop the gig felt incredibly isolating to a Cornish music fan. I should have marked them out as wrong’uns based on that and had nothing more to do with them but somehow, I found myself spending large amounts of time during 2002 on the message board of their website, connecting with some fascinating characters but feeling jealous of people on there who were going to see gigs in better connected parts of the country which weren’t getting cancelled because the bands thought there was a more prestigious gig on offer elsewhere.  I did make one long-lasting online friend from the site who sent me a lovely mixtape containing The Last Thing I Should Do by Jetplane Landing which became one of my favourite songs ever,  but my abiding memory from my time on the site was of being emotionally manipulated and then unceremoniously ghosted by another girl - we didn’t call it ghosting back then though, it was known by its old-fashioned label of behaving like a fucking piece of shit.  It hasn’t quite spoiled my appreciation of the brilliance of Silent to the Dark, but between that and the cancelled gig, The Electric Soft Parade remain off my Christmas card list.  At least no-one on the Mudhoney mailing list buggered around with William’s emotions.  He should give thanks for that, as sometimes there are worse things to go through than a cancelled gig.

Many thanks to the lovely Fiona for introducing me to this wonderful song and Merry Christmas to her in advance.



Videos courtesy of Suck O Rama (Mudhoney) and Jetplane Landing - Topic
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.