Every Good Boy Deserves Sludge

"Has it really only been 30 years?”

Melvins founder, frontman and songwriter Buzz Osbourne asks this rhetorical question wryly, knowing full well how much he's been through since he started messing around with bassist Matt Lukin and drummer Mike Dillard in Montesano, Washington back in 1983. Within a year Dillard was gone – replaced by Dale Crover – and soon Lukin left to join Mudhoney, but the Melvins were up and running.

Since those innocuous beginnings Osbourne and Crover – with a revolving line-up of bassists and musicians – have transformed Melvins into possibly the most influential sludge metal band in history, forging a reputation as one of the most innovative and uncompromising bands in the business, buoyed by their steadfast belief in doing things their own way. Take most recent album, Tres Cabrones, for instance, which found Dillard invited back into the fold after nearly 30 years, and the multi-tasking Crover moving to bass. While the record contains all new songs it's still as close as we'll ever get to the original Melvins line-up, and it's a cracking album to boot.

“He's a family man and a union machinist – that's what he does,” laughs Osbourne about the re-drafted Dillard. “He's married to the same woman he was going out with when he was in high school. Me and him have been friends ever since [his stint in the band], we never stopped being friends. I just left there and it wasn't his destiny to be involved in this sorta thing. He's got three kids and works in a regular straight job so it was great to get him to do it. He put a bunch of his vacation time down and came here for a few days so that we could finish most of it. We got as much as we could done in that short amount of time, and then me and Dale finished the rest of it.

“We'd actually done a few live shows with him with Dale playing bass, and that's actually how we got the idea to do the album. So we were playing with him live, and during rehearsals Mike goes, 'We should do some new songs!', and I was, like, 'Yeah, okay, I'll do it'. That was it. Mike doesn't play like Dale and Dale doesn't play like [The Who bassist] John Entwistle, so we did the best we could.”

Dillard is back being a family man now, so the four-piece version of the Melvins replete with two drummers that's been their live mainstay of late is who we'll be seeing on their impending Australian visit.

“I love it. More is more!” Osbourne gushes of the two-drummer incarnation. “What happened was our last bass player Kevin [Rutmanis], we had to kick him out of the band for excessive drug and alcohol use, and basic insanity. Me and Dale were very discouraged fellows. Kevin has since got his act together, and we actually did a song with him on our last record [early 2013's covers collection Everybody Loves Sausages], so it's all good.

“We were very discouraged fellows though when we had to quit playing for him for personal reasons [in 2005], and we wanted to do something that was completely new so we basically reinvented the entire band with these two new guys [bassist Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis], and it really reinvigorated us. You can't imagine how hard it is to have that happen – I cared about him a whole lot, and he was basically going to croak – so if people think that I just flippantly made those decisions then they're fucking nuts.

“It's not a fun thing to do, believe me – it's a pain in the arse, not fun – but we moved on and it really worked, and I don't regret anything. The only thing I really wanted was for Kevin to be okay, and now he says that had we not done that he could very well be dead now, so it's not even a question of whether we made the right decision – of course we did! For everybody involved.”

It's incredible that Melvins are still putting out relevant music at this stage of their storied career, whilst remaining as uncompromising as ever.

“Well I've never understood anybody who did [compromise],” Osbourne shrugs. “Why can't you do whatever you want? It's not so much the 'can't' it's the 'won't' that does everybody in. I've done an extremely huge amount of work, it's uncommon for that to happen – music usually doesn't work that way – so I'm a freak. An actual freak. I'm way out there at the end, way out there in the tall weeds. There's no doubt about that.”