When the Melvins roll into Portland’s Revolution Hall on June 3, they’ll bring with them two drummers, tourmates Napalm Death, and a slew of new songs to play from their recent album Thunderball. The release is the latest entry in the band’s incredibly expansive discography of 30+ albums, EPs, and live recordings—all chock-full of the trademark heavy, sludgy music the Melvins’ have developed over their decades-long slog through rock’s trenches.
Thunderball is the third album in the band’s “Melvins 1983” iteration, the band’s current era nodding to the year they formed that has seen frontman Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne reuniting with drummer Mike Dillard—both founding members. The album is, in a way, a tribute to the band’s deep Pacific Northwest roots.
Not that King Buzzo has any interest in re-living the past, especially not his time growing up in Montesano—the small Washington town just east of Aberdeen where Osbourne spent his unhappy teen years. “I didn't enjoy the company there. I didn't have too many friends,” he says, calling after soundcheck at the band’s Baton Rouge tour stop. “I had a high school teacher tell me, ‘You gotta get out of here, you just don't fit in here. It's not gonna work for you, you gotta go,’ and he was right,” Buzz recalls. “It was depressing and simple-minded and not really my cup of tea. I left around 86-87, and never looked back.”
The one thing Osbourne had going for him was a deep appreciation for music. “I like weird music and nobody turned me onto any of it,” he says. “No older brothers or sisters to turn me onto good music or help me pick out stuff or find stuff. I found it all on my own.” In those pre-internet days of the early 1980s, in a town without a record store, getting new music was a long process. “I would dig through music magazines like Creem and see these pictures of bands, and then I would save my money—I was about 14—working or doing something, and then give my mom the money, and she would write a check for the amount, and I would send it out for records,” Osbourne explains. “It would take six weeks for you to get the record to even see if you liked it or not.”
It was in those halcyon days of snail-mail record collecting that he discovered Bowie, the Clash, and so much more. “It was all the stuff that nobody I knew was interested in,” Osbourne says.
Osborune didn't even try to share his new tunes until he started playing guitar at 18, teaming up with two fellow teenage music enthusiasts—drummer Mike Dillard and bassist Matt Lukin—sharing his vinyl treasure trove with them, and founding the Melvins. “They kinda were a little more open to it. They caught on. It was the same with the Nirvana guys,” Osbourne says. “I played them stuff that for years and years and years I had been into. They got it a little bit more and then went from there.” The newly-formed band took their musical influences, added a uniquely heavy darkness, and created a sound that was punk, hard, and wholly their own.
The band’s first show was at the Tropicana in Olympia in 1983. “There might've been 100 people or something,” Osbourne remembers. “They seemed to like us. Then we played another show, and all these people came up close to the stage, so I guess they liked us too.” After the band played Olympia they headed north to Seattle and Tacoma, building a following up and down the northern I-5 corridor. “There were a lot of punk rock shows in Seattle and Olympia that people said, 'You guys can play a show here,’ so we did that. It just kind of grew from there.” One place they didn’t really play, though, was Portland. The reason for that was pretty simple: “I didn't know anybody there,” Osbourne says. “I went to a lot of shows there, but I just never had any connections with anybody that would let me play shows with them.”
They put out a seven-inch on Seattle’s C/Z Records and then split for San Francisco. “We started the band over, down there, and quickly got a lot of good shows and a record deal pretty fast,” Osbourne says. “It didn't take long once we got out of Seattle.”
Osbourne isn’t exactly able to pinpoint why the band didn’t connect with crowds in the Emerald City, “They weren't interested in what we were doing—the audiences were great, but we started playing bigger shows after we left.”
While the band has left the Pacific Northwest, their imprint on the scene lingers. Thanks, in part, to the bands that came up alongside them and in their wake—Nirvana, Hole, Green River, Soundgarden, Mudhoney—giving them their due, name-dropping the Melvins in interviews and at shows. In particular, Nirvana were huge fans of the Melvins; rumor has it that Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic met at a Melvins’ hang. The bands toured together (Cobain decorated Melvan, the band’s tour van), put out a split single, and Melvins’ drummer Dale Crover played on some Incesticide tracks. Cobain also infamously helped produce the Melvins’ 1993 album, Houdini.
Osbourne is grateful that his friends were champions of his band and so he wasn’t particularly bothered when—after the Melvins left Seattle—grunge, the sound they helped create, became a global phenomenon. “I appreciated that [they spread the word about us], but I didn't worry about it too much, you know? I was already on my own thing before that stuff ever exploded. We were already doing OK. I was already making a living making music before those bands took off,” he says.
If it’s not abundantly clear from this interview, for the Melvins, the past is not particularly interesting. “I'm not a ‘good old days’ type of guy,” Osbourne states. “I'm more the ‘what you done lately’ type of guy.” This makes sense, because despite their long legacy, they’re not a legacy band. They are very much in the present with a new album out and another in the works. “We never stopped,” says Buzzo. “We never took a break and then came back. We never did that. We just played through this whole thing.”
The Melvins and Napalm Death play at Revolution Hall on Tues June 3 at 7 pm, all ages. The show is sold out but this one’s a biggie—it’ll be worth it to call in some favors or scan Craigslist for tickets.
