"This might be all you're ever going to hear of Mudhoney, but that's ok with us," says guitarist Steve Turner about March To Fuzz, the 2 disc Mudhoney best of and rarities collection their old buddies at Sub Pop have just released. Sadly, he also means that after 12 years the Seattle band just might be no more. Last year, founding bassist/laugh riot Matt Lukin "retired" from music and the band parted ways with Warner Bros./Reprise. Fortunately, if this indeed is the last we hear from these fine Seattleittes, it's a helluva farewell. Full of loud, dirgy guitars, and Mark Arm's sarcastic snarl and shriek, the collection spans everything from 1988's seminal "Touch Me, I'm Sick" to three gems from 1998's underappreciated Tomorrow Hit Today. The effect of squeezing 22 "best of" songs onto one disc and 30 "rarities" onto the other is a lot like scarfing Kool-Aid powder right out of the damn packet: a concentrated, face puckeringly sweet-sour high. On the eve of the release of March to Fuzz, Spin.com's Jessica Letkemann (skoopjr@aol.com) spoke to Mudhoney's Steve Turner about the album, the past and the future.

Wouldn't it be ironic if March To Fuzz turned out to be the best selling Mudhoney record?

Steve Turner: I hope it is. Honestly. I'd be satisfied if this was the only Mudhoney record out there. It definitely feels like a capper.

It was good to see that songs from Mudhoney's last studio album, Tomorrow Hit Today, were well represented.

Turner: We really like that record. Mark was kind of joking that we should just rerelease it as a best of and chop the price in half. [laughs] We tried to keep it pretty balanced. We tried to get lots of opinions from friends like David Katznelson and [Sub-Pop co-founder] Bruce Pavitt. David was the youngest and lowest paid A&R guy when he signed us. A lot of it was in my hands for lack of anyone else willing to do it. We wanted it to be something that would pretty much sum up what we did and also get all of the odd stuff on there too.

Was it weird to go back and listen to everything Mudhoney's done?

Turner: It was really funny. Mark and I would get together and spend like 5 or 6 hours listening to ourselves together trying to figure out what to use. The best of was hard to do. The b-sides kind of took care of itself.

There's a certain nostalgia to some of it. It makes me wonder what Mudhoney's first shows were like.

Turner: We don't remember it that well. I remember being drunk somewhere once. [laughs] We'd recorded the "Touch Me I'm Sick" single in March of '88. We hadn't played a show yet. By July we played a big show with, I think, Blood Circus and Catt Butt at the Boxing Club, a gay bar where they didn't have many shows. It was sold out, lines around the block, fire marshalls were there. The interest in these brand new bands that didn't have any [records] out took people by surprise. The local scene was starting to explode all of the sudden.

What about early tours?

Turner: In September of '88 we were flown over to Berlin by their government for the Berlin Independence days, just one show. It was unbelieveable. It's this big music festival with independent artists of all different types. European countries fund their arts so much better. They actually view art as importnant somehow. So we were flown over there and Bruce and Jonathan from Sub Pop went with us and we couldn't believe that somebody would do that. It was absolutely ridiculous. We fucked the place up, acted like fools. Then right when we got home, we took off on the us tour where we got in a van and drove across the country and back and then had another couple days off and then we went down the West coast with Sonic Youth. It was all in the fall of '88. It happened pretty fast.

I smiled when I re-read a quote from Krist Novoselic recently in the official Nirvana book where he talking about the days when your drummer, Dan Peters, was drumming simultaneously for Nirvana. And he said they couldn't keep him because "it would be theend of Mudhoney and we loved Mudhoney so much, we didn't want to be responsible for that."

Turner: When Dan was drumming with Nirvana, I was taking a break from Mudhoney too. So Mudhoney was in question even then. It was the end of '90 when I said I'm going to go back to school because I don't want to go on tour. I was getting burnt out.

At that point, a lot of Muhoney's best music was still to come! What about now? Is there any chance of continuing?

Turner: We don't have any plans to do anything. We're not going to replace Matt and that kind of leaves us a little hog tied. Maybe the three of us that are left will get together and see what comes out of it.