I want this hoodie so bad….
 
Noisey has a marvelous post up right now I would urge Nirvana fans to go check out. The post is by Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt, and it features a bunch of photos from Nirvana’s first European tour with Mudhoney and Tad that have never been published before.
 

Kurt Cobain, holding his coat. Presumably, that’s Tad Doyle on the right.
 
These photos really bring me back. First, a word on Tad. Nobody talks about them any more, but in some ways Tad was the ultimate Seattle grunge band, fronted by Tad Doyle, who everybody always said was “this 300-pound dentist, man!” That element was always the same, “this 300-pound dentist.” I was very fond of their album God’s Balls, and especially the song “Behemoth,” which I’ve included below. After Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson and who knows who else, “Behemoth” doesn’t sound that exceptional any more, but at the time, it went to a dark, angry, intimidating place very few “pop” songs had gone. 

In the post, Pavitt emphasizes the drama of touring with the emotionally and physically fragile Kurt Cobain. Here’s Pavitt on the Rome show:
 

Nirvana’s turn was next… Ten songs into their set, Kurt, frustrated with his guitar, smashed it completely and climbed a tall stack of speakers. The crowd looked on, with many drunk spectators yelling “Jump!” It was a dramatic moment, potentially harmful. I witnessed the event from the club floor, stunned, while Jon and Tad looked down from the artists’ area on the second floor. Everyone was holding their breath, not sure if Kurt would actually jump. We were panicked, and extremely concerned for Kurt’s well-being.

“Hello, we’re one of the three official representatives of the Seattle Sub Pop scene from Washington State!” Kurt Cobain screeched into the microphone. Nirvana then tore into their typical opener, the riff-heavy “School.” Rocking hard, Kurt immediately broke a string. Frustrated, he hustled off stage to replace it while Krist and Chad starting pounding out a Stooges cover, “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” In the confusion, some of the crowd climbed onstage and began diving off.

 
Pavitt’s post addresses a question I’ve been wondering about since late 1991, when Nirvana took over the world, or actually slightly even earlier, when Nirvana’s Bleach was wearing out my CD player in the summer of 1990—that being what Mudhoney made of all the hoopla about Nirvana.

People forget, but there was a couple years there where Mudhoney, not Nirvana, were the darlings of the Seattle grunge scene. Mudhoney had been around a little longer, and they had toured the UK well before Nevermind came out, and they were the toast of the UK press for a good stretch. Even after the buzz about Nirvana started, you would often hear Mudhoney and Nirvana mentioned in about equal terms. “Touch Me, I’m Sick” was Seattle’s anthem for a while. After Nevermind, of course, that stopped being the case.
 

Mark Arm and Dan Peters of Mudhoney and Steve Double
 
One of the greatest gigs I ever saw was seeing Mudhoney play Vienna’s U4 venue in the summer of 1990. I was stuck in Vienna for the summer, staying at my grandparents’ empty apartment for a few weeks while I took a German course. I was lonely and my German wasn’t very good and I didn’t really have any clue, in an unfamiliar foreign city, how to connect with anything that was going on that was appropriate for my age, which was 20. It was a little depressing, to be honest. Somehow I figured out that Mudhoney was coming to town and I scored a ticket. That show was incredibly intense, the mosh pit (mosh pits were crossing over around then) was insane, and that show supplied a necessary release when I most needed it.

I got ahold of Mudhoney’s self-titled debut album a little before Nirvana’s Bleach. For a long time—even after Nirvana went huge—I professed Mudhoney to be my favorite band. In fact, I can remember buying Nevermind and Mudhoney’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge on the same day at Rhino Records in New Paltz, New York, and while Nevermind had the undeniable allure of a massively successful album, it was EGBDF that remained closer to my heart in many ways. EGBDF hasn’t aged very well, and in retrospect my stubborn refusal to acknowledge Nirvana’s superiority over Mudhoney seems like a piece of fandom reminiscent of the love one has for a sports team.

Anyway, in Pavitt’s account of that Rome show, he adds, “Mark Arm from Mudhoney looked on, speechless, at the band that was about to dethrone his own.”

So there we have it—the moment, well before Nevermind was even a thing—when, according to Pavitt, Mark Arm realized that his days of ruling Seattle were about to come to an end. The truth is that the willfully sludge-y and perverse Mudhoney were never going to be a huge act for the long haul—check out their Piece of Cake to hear an album that is going out of its way to alienate its listeners.
 

Matt Lukin of Mudhoney and Kurt Cobain
 
According to the post, the pictures are a taste of Pavitt’s new book about that tour, Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe, 1989, which is available in hardback in December (pre-order), but you can apparently buy the Kindle version right now. I really hope Pavitt discusses the legendary “troll village” show Nirvana played in Austria, which I remember reading about in Gina Arnold’s Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana.

Tad, “Behemoth”:

 
After the jump, more of Pavitt’s pics….