Mark Deutrom Decibel interview - 2004

[manleedanlee]

Part 1: http://decibelmagazine.com/index.php/2007/09/24/bonus-feature-mark-deutrom-part-1/

Part 2: http://decibelmagazine.com/index.php/2007/09/25/bonus-feature-mark-deutrom-part-2/

[>>>JZS<<<]

"If you wanna ride, don't ride the white horse."

[manleedanlee]

"If you wanna ride, don't ride the white horse."

[turnacus]

That's the most canny shit I've ever read.

[>>>JZS<<<]

The Melvins are awesome & Mark D is awesome.

Shit happens,talk is cheap.

[erin]

I didnt think buzz ever shot up but ah well

[dead mike]

 "huge oral history of the melvins that appeared in issue #3"?
has someone posted scans of this?

best part about the mark d interview:

"Sure enough, when we got to Amsterdam, Buzz and Lori disappeared off into some housing project or squat and came back to the hotel and started shooting up right in front of me with some homeless guy they picked up. ... This homeless guy they invited to stay in the van with us stank like a pirate

[Uncle Fester]

funny/touching/dramatic interview. me rikey.

[joelk]

did anyone scan this? no longer online. also how seriously are we to take D's comments on Buzz and Lori?

[meezer]

did anyone scan this? no longer online. also how seriously are we to take D's comments on Buzz and Lori?

Just glad that this band isn't like a Wino project. They put things out on time. Make it through customs. Make it to tour dates.

[bUTTHOLEmAN]

There's a huge oral history of the Melvins that appeared in issue #3 of Decibel that isn't online, probably for the same reason that the Hall of Fame features aren't online. We want you to buy back issues of our magazine, ok? Putting these things together is always a bear, especially in the case of the Melvins piece. We ended up with something like 15-20 hours of tape when the dust settled, including about 2 hours worth of conversations with former Melvins bassist/producer and longtime associate Mark Deutrom. Mark hadn't spoken to anyone about the Melvins for years before that, and probably hasn't since, but he had a lot to get off of his chest during that interview. Since we're in a Melvins kinda mood, here's part 1 of an excerpt of the conversation; part 2 follows tomorrow!

db:Very early on, you put out Gluey Porch Treatments on your own Alchemy label and you also produced Ozma. Is that how you came to know the Melvins?
MD:My business partner Victor Hayden went up to Seattle, saw the Melvins, and came back and said, "They were crawling up the wall!"And he played me a tape of them, or played me there first ten song thing on C/V, and I thought it was good, so we decided to do a record with them. They came down from Aberdeen and we started working on Gluey Porch Treatments. Before that, my band with Lori Black, Clown Alley, played a gig in Olympia with the Melvins and Greg Anderson's first band — he was only 16 at the time!

Years later, Buzz told me they had wanted to prove to themselves that they make this record without drinking any beer, which they actually did, much to their credit. At the time, I didn't realize it was, you know, that much of a mountain for them to climb, but they did it and credit to them. We recorded in the record in Sausalito, where we got some really cheap time at a studio that Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston were doing tracks at. And there was this incredibly huge room and it had moveable panels on the walls and that's how that monster reverb was captured on "Eye Flies." Another little piece of trivia is that I took the picture on the back of Gluey Porch Treatments; that's the living room of the house that Lori Black and I were living in at the time.

db:Do you have any sense of what the general impression of the Melvins was when they were still based in Aberdeen/Seattle/the Olympia area, and was there a general awareness in that scene of community of the group moving to the Bay Area?
MD:In 1984, you had Van Halen, punk rock was dead, and the only thing that was really cool and kind of cutting edge was crossover metal bands or bands like Black Flag or Bad Brains, you know, stuff like that. But it was still totally difficult if you had a band and you weren't doing hair metal. But locally it was just like it's always been, you know, people despised your bands, you went out and played a gig and there were always some pissed off people there who would just go to the gigs to yell "fuck you!" Bands were very isolated from each other. When the Melvins left, they left before everything got really huge in the Northwest, so it's funny that they're still considered the godfathers of grunge or whatever, because they were out so far ahead, they were out of Aberdeen, so far ahead of that whole kind of major label feeding frenzy in the Northwest that they weren't even really part of it. I think of them as more of a San Francisco band, really. When you're in an isolated community like Aberdeen, which is the end of the Earth you know really, there's nothing to do there but drink and smoke weed and just pray to God that there's some way out before you kill yourself. Who knows what would've happened to the Melvins if they had stayed there

db:They'd be dead.
MD:They'd still be sitting around their front porch like drinking OE and smoking bud, you know. And I can relate to that, because I grew up in El Paso as a teenager, and that was like the end of the world, too. They were literally, like, if they could have burned that town to the ground, they would have. If they could have gotten away with it, they would have burned that town to the ground and left, laughing as the flames shot up in their review mirrors, you know.

db:You were living in England when the Melvins played at the Reading Festival, right?
MD:Yes. I think it might have been '91; it's the only date Nirvana played at Reading Festival. The Melvins were the opening band, and of course there were 20 bands and then there was Nirvana at the other end, so the irony was not lost on me at that. That was a really brutal gig. All these British people were completely hung over and they staggered out, it was pouring with rain and there was a sea of mud and the wind was blowing about 50 miles an hour, and here's the Melvins playing, It was kind of apocalyptic and interesting

db:I read that for the show, the organizers dubbed the Melvins "the worst band ever."
MD:Yeah, that's true. With Reading, it's a tradition to have...I mean, its run by the British, they've got all the stupid flavor of the month bands up there. Before I did that tour with them, I knew that Buzz and Lori were using, and I was like, "I'm not interested in doing this if you guys are on drugs." Sure enough, when we got to Amsterdam, Buzz and Lori disappeared off into some housing project or squat and came back to the hotel and started shooting up right in front of me with some homeless guy they picked up. And, of course, I've done my share of drugs, too. And I said, "You know what, I think I'm going to stay and just do dope with everybody else, because at least then I won't be pissed off."

But I wasn't strung out yet at the time, so I could get away with it. This homeless guy they invited to stay in the van with us stank like a pirate's graveyard and I told Buzz, "You gotta get this guy out of here, it's like carrying a corpse around." After that, the tour sort of fell apart. Lori got sick and I don't know where Buzz went, he went back to San Francisco or something, I'm not sure, but Dale ended up staying at my place in London for about a week and I just kind of took him aside and said, "Look, you have people in your band who have a problem here with drugs. You can do whatever you want with that information but you can't say where it came from." And he was appalled and flabbergasted, he couldn't believe it.

[joelk]

All this rumor mill dust! It does make me wonder why Buzz hasn't publicly addressed this issue, if it is in fact true (which it may not be, I have no idea).

P.S. Thanks Butthole! Do you have part 2?

[bUTTHOLEmAN]

All this rumor mill dust! It does make me wonder why Buzz hasn't publicly addressed this issue, if it is in fact true (which it may not be, I have no idea).

P.S. Thanks Butthole! Do you have part 2?

Sadly, no.

[Buzzinthebox]

I'm confused. So the reading festival they played was in August of 92, so that means Joe was on bass I'd think. But mark and Lori were there apparently. Maybe I'm tired and forgetting my Melvin history but can someone explain this to me, who was playing bass at the reading festival and why Lori and mark were there. I'm probably slipping up with my facts i thought i knew. Also talk about awkward that buzz and mark both were with lori. I had read that somewhere but forgot until now

[Rusty Shackleford]

why Lori and mark were there.

Mark was doing the live mixing for them for a while, I think.