In a recent Talkhouse article, Mudhoney singer Mark Arm discussed witnessing ‘mini-Kurt Cobains’ at a show in London after the band released Tomorrow Hit Today. He also discussed having to get a day job after the Grunge explosion died in the late 90’s.
“Somewhere around ’98, ’99, I started working at Fantagraphics. It just seemed like things were petering out a bit. Our style of music was well out of fashion. There was the so-called “grunge” thing, and then the ’90s punk revival happened, and then there was this wave of electronica, where magazines were saying things like, “Rock & roll is dead”—those kinds of fashion-y magazines, especially the UK weeklies like Melody Maker and NME.
That lasted until The White Stripes and The Strokes. I remember after Tomorrow Hit Today, we did two consecutive U.S. tours, and it definitely seemed after the first one that interest dropped off dramatically in some spots. We flew to the UK for one show in London. We didn’t even do a European tour at that time.
Just one show to kind of test the water; there was no press or anything. It was, I think, the first time that we noticed, Oh my God, there’s this group of mini-Kurt Cobains running around. It was kind of weird.”
