Cat No: SP1414

By going back to basics with Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, Mudhoney flipped conventional wisdom. Not for the first time or the last they would be vindicated. A month after release in July 1991, the album entered the UK album chart at Number 34 (five weeks later, Nirvanas Nevermind entered at 36) and went on to sell 75,000 copies worldwide. A more meaningful measure of success, however, lay in its revitalisation of the band, casting a touchstone for the future. The record is a major chapter in Mudhoneys ongoing story, the moral of which has to be: when in doubt, fudge it.

The album began at Music Source Studio, a large space equipped with a 24-track mixing board – downright futuristic, compared to the 8-track setup that birthed the bands catalytic 1988 debut, Touch Me I’m Sick. The Music Source session quickly turned into a false start when the results, in guitarist Steve Turners words, sounded a little too fancy, too clean. Lesson learned, the band went primitive and got to work at Conrad Unos 8-track setup at Egg Studio. Named after the cartons pasted on the walls in an optimistic attempt at sound-proofing, Egg boasted a 60s vintage 8-track Spectra Sonics recording console, originally built for Stax in Memphis.

So it was that, in the spring of 1991, Mudhoney made Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. The resulting album is a whirlwind of the bands influences at the time: the fierce 60s garage rock of their Pacific Northwest predecessors The Sonics and The Lollipop Shoppe, the gnashing post-hardcore of Drunks With Guns, the heavy guitar moods of Neil Young, the lysergic workouts of Spacemen 3 and Hawkwind, the gloomy existentialism of Zounds, and the satirical ferocity of 80s hardcore punk. The quartets special alchemy meant these fond homages never slid into pastiche. Ultimately, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge epitomised the best of Mudhoney: here was a band reconnecting with its purest instincts, and in the process reinventing itself.

This 30th anniversary edition, remastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service, stands as testimony to the creative surge that drove them in this period. The album sessions yielded a clutch of material that would subsequently appear on B-sides, compilations, and split-singles. This edition includes all those tracks, and a slew of previously unreleased songs, including the entire five-track Music Source session.

A1 Generation Genocide
A2 Let It Slide
A3 Good Enough
A4 Something So Clear
A5 Thorn
A6 Into The Drink
A7 Broken Hands
B1 Who You Drivin’ Now?
B2 Move Out
B3 Shoot The Moon
B4 Fuzz Gun ’91
B5 Pokin’ Around
B6 Don’t Fade IV
B7 Check-Out Time
C1 March To Fuzz
C2 Ounce Of Deception
C3 Paperback Life (Alternate Version)
C4 Fuzzbuster
C5 Bushpusher Man
C6 Flowers For Industry
C7 Thorn (1st Attempt)
C8 Overblown
C9 March From Fuzz
D1 You’re Gone
D2 Something So Clear (24-track Demo)
D3 Bushpusher Man (24-track Demo)
D4 Pokin’ Around (24-track Demo)
D5 Check-Out Time (24-track Demo)
D6 Generation Genocide (24-track Demo)