"I chose Meet The Beatles!, not With The Beatles, it was the first album (released by Capitol) in America. It’s mostly coming from With The Beatles, but I think there’s a few songs on there that are not on Meet The Beatles!. I’ve been talking about Sgt. Pepper and Revolver recently because those records are to the fore in terms of my new record but I chose this one because The Beatles are such an undying, unending influence and that’s the record I heard first. I was very young when it came out but for some reason my father brought it home and he brought home the singles that preceded it on these obscure little labels in America – Vee-Jay Records, Swan Records before Capitol took over, so I have all those records. I always cite Meet The Beatles! because I’m so very happy that, even though I was very young, I was able to experience the arc of The Beatles career in its time rather than coming to it afterwards. When Steve Shelley joined Sonic Youth, he’s a huge Beatles freak and we’d ask “What was your first Beatles record Steve?” and he’d say the red one or the blue one, the two doubles that came out after they dispersed and we’d be like “ok…” It doesn’t really matter where it starts, it’s not like an ‘I’m better than you’ sort of thing, but to have experienced that momentous change in music and culture in our society in its time is a very important thing to me in terms of who I am and how it shaped me. It all really started with that record. Pop music was always on the radio, but that record changed something in me. You never think when you’re a little kid that you’re going to grow up to be a pop musician, you never really think that it’s going to happen for you. But that record changed the things I found important in my life and it just made music such a central obsession and just showed how intelligent that process can be. It can start with something as simple as that record that’s got ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ on it, songs of that ilk, to go through to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’ and all these super sophisticated musical compositions. So just watching that arc gave me a lot of inspiration on a lot of levels and it didn’t even have to be for music it could be for whatever you wanted to do in terms of showing how deeply and committedly you could throw yourselves into the work you were going to do."

"Tales Of Terror were this band from Sacramento. Unfortunately this record hasn't physically been reissued yet. They came through Seattle and played a show. It was random, nobody had heard of them, they hadn't got a record out. It was at an all-ages venue where you'd just go for something to do and this band came on and destroyed the place. And this was probably around '84 so at that point I was kind of looking for other things besides hardcore, which I was much more into a year or two previously. Green River had started at this point and I was trying to do something a bit differently, and this band came out and among the covers they played they did 'Search and Destroy' and 'Spanish Castle Magic' and everyone in the band was just an awesome, crazed musician. The singer would do backflips and land on his feet and by the end of the set all of them except for the drummer were wrapped up in cords. Somehow they all got tangled up and it didn't seem like something pre-planned, it was the natural course of events for that particular show. They were just wild, wild dudes and unfortunately a couple of them are dead now, and one of them is severely debilitated due to too much drugs, which is kind of a bummer. They were the kind of people who were just up for everything and they'd push whatever boundaries and envelopes there were. Supposedly they would carry a blender with them and they'd just put whatever in the blender. They'd go to someone's house, find the alcohol and weird shit from the fridge and put it in and then they'd drink it. I even heard they would put dirt in it. I don't know if that's true, it seems a little over the top. They were a great band that unfortunately only lasted for one record. The only flaw of that record is that it starts off with a cover of 'Hound Dog' but once they kick into their own songs after that it's a fantastic fucking record. It's really super loose. The record seems like you can almost hear them getting drunker and drunker as everything continues. Green River covered one of their songs from that record - a song called 'Ozzie' - we didn't do it nearly as good but... we did it. They were a big influence in our approach to live performance. Unfortunately I don't have the limberness and the wherewithal to do that now. There was one crazy Mudhoney show at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London where everybody tried to fit up on stage."