The Melvins were one of the first bands to take metal and slow it down so disaffected kids could feel the heaviness. Yes, some called it "grunge." While the Melvins never got their episode of MTV Unplugged, both Mudhoney and Nirvana counted
themselves among their disciples. Leader Buzz "King Buzzo" Osborne is carrying the Melvins' torch into the next millennium, this year releasing both Electroretard and the song-long album Colossus of Destiny. VH1 talked to him about introducing Kurt Cobain to punk rock and feeling a scene's birth pangs.
VH1: How did grunge get its name?
Buzz Osborne: Journalists often need to categorize a type of music, and right off the bat that's a little weird to me 'cause I never felt that what I did was any one type of thing, you know? I don't feel comfortable with it. It was like saying you have herpes or something.
VH1: How did you fall into the scene?
Osborne: I grew up in Aberdeen [Washington], the home of Mr. Cobain and Mr. Novoselic from the band Nirvana. From junior high school on up I was in and around the area with those guys. At the time it was very depressing and horrible and we were a desperate bunch that had absolutely no direction and no hope for the future. And none of us went to school. I don't know about those guys that were in Soundgarden or any of the rest of those people [in other grunge bands], but I know that our formative years were not unlike a Charles Dickens novel.
VH1: When did you become actively involved in playing music?
Osborne: I started playing guitar when I was in my late teens, and within two years I was starting to play shows. I graduated high school in 1982 and about a year after that I ran back into Cobain and took him to his very first punk rock concert, which was Black Flag. And I remember him being very overwhelmed by the whole entire experience; it was just like, once that kind of thing happens there's no looking back. If it affects you the way that it did us, then there's just no way you can go home again; there's no going back to listening to Led Zeppelin in the same way. By the time our bands started playing in Seattle the music scene was changing a little bit there and all of the older people seemed to have drifted onto something else. I don't know where or how that happened, but it seemed like the people were a little more our own age. A band I liked at that time was Malfunkshun. There was also a band from Portland called the Wipers, who I really can't stress enough the amount of influence and impact that band had on our beginnings.
VH1: What did you think when grunge as a brand name grew so quickly?
Osborne: It was surprising that it happened in such a big way, but I'm never surprised with what the media does. It was a little unbelievable that we were able to score a major-label deal. That was quite interesting and it made me think that maybe these people hadn't ever heard our band because we were certainly not anything like the rest of these other bands. Certainly nowhere near as commercial. Soundgarden had already sold close to a million records. If you listen to [Soundgarden and Nirvana] it's not surprising that they sold a lot of records - it's very commercial music; I mean, it's basically utilizing the same formula that Chuck Berry used to sell songs in the '50s. But what irritated me the most about this whole thing was that these people come from the punk rock world and should, as far as I'm concerned, know better about the ways that they handled themselves, and it just got really disgusting watching what happened. I mean, at what point do you say "I've got enough money, now I'm going to do whatever I want"?
VH1: Did Nirvana's success have a significant impact on the Melvins?
Osborne: It affected us greatly. It got us a lot of interest, 'cause those guys talked about us highly in the press. Those guys and Soundgarden talked great things about us and it enabled us to get signed to a major label. We went into that knowing that we were never going to sell a major record 'cause we didn't sound like these bands, so I just thought this was an opportunity for us to make the kind of records that we wanted and make some money at the same time. We signed an amazing deal with 100 percent artistic control simply because when we signed it Nirvana were at the height of their fame. It was great. I would do that again in a second. But these people came to us, wanting to sign us. I never solicited a major label and I certainly wouldn't now. I always find somebody to make our records, and we've made 16 albums or more at this point. We're the only band that's surviving from that era, other than like Mudhoney, but we started well before them. I've toured the U.S. every single year and I've put a record out every single year whether it was on a major label or not; that doesn't make any difference to me. You know, this is what I do and I was doing it before any of this stuff happened.
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