If you can remember hearing your first rock and roll song - that first wondrous flash of excitement - then you have a key to the musical instincts of Mudhoney. This Seattle band's rough, inspired energy has made their LPs, EPs, and 7" discs alternative favorites, and their new album, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (Sub Pop), continues their tradition of fusing gnash-toothed '6Os punk with a nothing's sacred sense of humor and tube-heavy guitars. Guitarist Steve Turner admits it's difficult to keep their euphoric live shows under control, but on Mudhoney's agenda, control is not necessarily a high priority. "I don't really admire skill,' Turner says unabashedly. "It just doesn't matter to me." Turner, along with singer/guitarist Mark Arm, plays for the songs and for the raw punch. "My favorite guitar players are Bo Diddley, Neil Young, the late Lee Stevens from Blue Cheer, and I really like the first Stooges record with Ran Ashton," Steve says, revealing a plethora of acquired '60s influences.

"Davy Allen is another guitar player I really like. He did a lot of the old biker soundtracks as Davy Allen and The Arrows. Before that he had a partial hit with 'Apache '65.' The Seeds are also a real favorite of mine." Such a developed taste for the obscure makes sense considering Turner's cultural instincts. The 27year-old intellectual guitar beater spent lost spring working on his anthropology degree, a hiatus that cooled the Mudhoneys out for a bit, while drummer Dan Peters toured with Sub Pop brethren the Screaming Trees. Fortunately, Turner's knack for uncovering the valuable artifact lends itself well to his equipment pursuits.

While old Fender Mustangs are his main paramour ("I'm used to them - that was the first guitar I had"), Steve cultivates a modest collection of rarer birds, naturally coveting mod '60s models. "I like Harmony guitars a lot," he says, "the Harmony Rocket, the Harmony Stratotone. Real low-level guitars. Mark and I seem to have a lot of Hagstroms between us. Also, I'd love to have a Mosrite Ventures-type solidbody and a Gretsch DuoJet solidbody." When grilled about his "dream guitar," Turner unearths a real prize: "I really like the Gretsch Astro-Jet, is pretty cool looking - like an SG pulled and stretched." Steve's amp aesthetic is way groovy too. "I've got a pretty old Fender Super Reverb. It doesn't even have a master volume or anything. And I've got smaller things like an Ampeg Portaflex. You can flip the top up and carry it like a suitcase." Turner is particularly proud of his most recent amp dig-up, called the Excelsior. "I bought it at a store that mainly sells accordions. Some accordion player had it in his basement for 20 years. I have no idea where it was made, but the store that sold it to me sold it to this guy 20 years ago!"

Turner and Ann don't break stylistic stride with their pedal choices either. "We use a lot of different fuzz boxes. On the road I use a Big Muff, a wah-wah pedal, and a Memphis distortion box, which looks like an MXR. I've never paid more than $15 for one - they break easily, but they're cheap."

True to their proto-punk roots, Mudhoney albums usually include at least one fuzzed-out instrumental. The new album opens with "Generation Genocide," which, with Arm's stiff organ playing, sounds a bit like Book Of Taliesyn-era Deep Purple. "Fuzz Gun '91" is a Hendrixian power jam with a soaring, round, midrangey fuzztone lead and Peters' spray-gun drum fills. The whole Mudhoney package really bums on songs like 'Thorn,' a gritty, speedy personal complaint in rushed 4/4, and "Let It Slide," with its slithering chords and cynical, resentful lyrics. "Don't Fade IV" rubs clean twang against raw grunge with resultant psychedelic friction, while the whammy chord swirl at the end of "Broken Hands" speaks for itself. For older stuff, check out 1988's now-classic 'Touch Me I'm Sick" (the 7" is a rare collector's item) and Superfuzz Bigmuff's "In 'N Out of Grace," written by bassist Matt Lukin, where Turner and Arm intertwine snarling feedback and resonant power chords to accentuate the song's nihilistic thrust.

To capture their true grit on tape, Turner and his purist bandmates have consistently gone low-tech, preferring the sound and simplicity of smaller studios. "We did a bunch of stuff in a 24-track studio about a year before the now album was made, and didn't like it at all!" Steve recalls. "It just didn't sound right, so we decided to go down to 8-track just to limit ourselves, and also because it usually sounds better."

Turner, who insists that "there's not really any 'Seattle Sound,'" has been a fixture on the Seattle scene for years, having played with Arm in numerous groups, including Limp Richerds, the Thrown Ups, and Green River with Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam. Despite the occasional sabbatical, and what some might see as a reluctance to dive into the major label drink, Mudhoney are tight and committed to their music. "We never break up so much as we just stop doing things for a while,' Turner comments on Mudhoney's unspoken low of doing it their way. "And we have the freedom to do it because we say we're going to do it."