I purchased a book with a chapter on Mudhoney, discussing Sub Pop as needed. What I received was a book with a chapter on Sub Pop, discussing Mudhoney as needed. What happened?

I couldn't wait for Our Band Could Be Your Life to be released. Having read Come as You Are, as well as several shorter pieces of his, I was a fan of his writing and looked forward to him taking on Mudhoney as a subject. The honeymoon period between and me and this book ended about thirty minutes after I purchased it.

Simply put, this book doesn't have much on Mudhoney, and what's there isn't particularly new. The 40 page chapter may be titled "Mudhoney" and there may be quotes from Dan, Mark, Matt and Steve, but that's not what you're getting. It's less the history of Mudhoney from 1988-1991 than it is the history of Sub Pop from 1979-1991. For every quote from Dan, there's half a dozen each from Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt. It's disappointing. If given a full book to write about Mudhoney, background on Sub Pop would be valuable and germane. However, given the space constraints of a single chapter, anecdotes about Pavitt selling blood twice a week and eating sardines steals precious space without adding much to the subject at hand.

Beyond that, the majority of what information is there is recycled from old articles. Given that Azerrad most likely could have obtained as many new interviews as he needed, this strikes me as being a bit lazy. There just isn't that much that is new to a decent fan of the band, as most people visiting this site probably are. You can get just as much, if not more, by reading some of the better articles on this site. Charles Cross' 1998 profile in The Rocket and the 1990 Maximumrocknroll interview with all the guys are good places to start.

That being said, from my perspective the other chapters are excellent. However, I am significantly less aware of the other bands than I am of Mudhoney. There's probably a Black Flag fan sitting around right now saying, "The Black Flag chapter was just a bunch of quotes taken from Get in the Van, but I thought the Mudhoney chapter was pretty good." There's also probably my analogue of a Beat Happening fan thinking, "Why did he spend all that time talking about the International Pop Underground Convention and K Records? That's not Beat Happening." It's possible, but this is my perspective, and my perspective is that the Mudhoney chapter is quite lacking.

To those that are considering purchasing this book, I would recommend checking it out of your local public library and using the money that you would otherwise spend on the book to buy those couple of Mudhoney albums that you don't own or the New Original Sonic Sound record.

Factual Errors

There's a few factual errors in the book, some of which are addressed by Mark in a 8/16/01 Westword Online article. Those not mentioned there are below:

p. 431: It's Mark rather than Steve who plays slide guitar on Superfuzz Bigmuff (and everything else)
p. 448: Circa 1990, Mark Lanegan only had a single solo record released.
p. 450: Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge was most likely not released on July 1, 1991 since that day isn't a Tuesday.
p. 453: Mudhoney is not on indefinate hiatus (though this section may very well have been written in late 1999).