Lost in the Supermarket: The Melvins Live!

The NW stalwarts survive 30 years and two earthquakes.

Back in February, sludge-rock godfathers the Melvins were checking in at Christchurch Airport in New Zealand when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake hit the city.

“We grabbed our passports, ran out to the parking lot and watched the aftershocks,” says frontman Buzz Osborne. “Five hours later we figured out how to get out of there.” The quartet stayed in a youth hostel that night and took a ferry to their next gig in Auckland, on New Zealand’s north island.

Less than a month later, the band was sound checking for a show in Tokyo when a 9.0 quake hit in the north of Japan.

“Now I’ve been in major earthquakes in three separate parts of the world,” says Osborne, who’s been shaken up a few times in California, where he’s lived since moving from Aberdeen, Washington in ‘86. “That’s gotta be some kind of record. That’s not one you could really plan out. We’re part of the club now—whatever club that is.”

The Melvins occupy a heavy space in music history. Long associated with their accidental protégé, Kurt Cobain, the trio trudged their way out of Aberdeen and into the collective consciousness of punk-minded metalheads in the late ’80s. Thirty years later, the Melvins continue to matter because they define the Northwest’s bedrock sound while remaining more forward-thinking than any of their peers. They’re survivors, in more ways than one.

Drummer Dale Crover dislocated his finger during the melee in Tokyo. “We saw the big lights hanging above the stage swinging, and ran down the stairs,” Crover recalls. “The door there was locked, so we ran upstairs and outside—that whole time [the ground] was shaking. I hit my finger on something and didn’t realize till I was outside.”

Half an hour after the earthquake, the band arrived at the emergency care facility that tended to Crover’s finger. That’s when word of the impending tsunami came down. “We were watching it on TV, wondering how far away it is,” he says.

The Tokyo show was cancelled and the band was stranded. “We stayed the night [in Tokyo], which was awful—aftershocks all night long,” Osborne says. “The airport was akin to Vietnam circa 1975. Got to the plane in the nick of time and flew out on one of the most turbulent flights I’ve ever been on.”

Between New Zealand and Japan, the band played a series of festival dates in Australia, where they encountered a different sort of disaster: heckling from the festival’s most ghoulish goober. “We didn’t run into any earthquakes, but we did run into a bunch of ego-quakes,” Osborne says. “Rob Zombie called us ‘motherfuckers’ from the stage. Ego-quakes almost make you feel worse than the real earthquakes.”

After returning stateside, the Melvins laid plans for a brief “residency tour” in select cities. Throughout May, the band will do two-night, album-oriented stints in small clubs in Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Boston, Brooklyn and Seattle. The first night will feature songs from Lysol, Eggnog and Houdini; the second features complete performances of Bullhead and Stoner Witch. “We thought it was a good cross-section,” Osborne says of the selection.

Don’t expect a by-the-books rendition when the band hits the Crocodile on Friday and Saturday, May 13 and 14. “We’re not trying to recreate the record top to bottom, just make it work in a live situation,” Crover says. “As Buzz says, ‘The record’s just there as a suggestion.’”

Coady Willis, the band’s second drummer, was recruited to augment the Melvins’ already elephantine rhythm section in 2006, along with his Big Business bandmate, bassist Jared Warren. Willis lives in Los Angeles and shares the Melvins’ Northwest roots: He was 19 years old and living in Mt. Vernon, Wash., when Stoner Witch was released in 1994.

“I listened to that record a lot when it came out,” he says. “When we sat down to learn the songs, I felt confident I knew the material. But as I found out with the Melvins, some of the simplest-sounding songs are the hardest to play. Buzz is really good at hiding musical Easter eggs in his songs...little skips, hiccups and extra notes that kind of slide right off your ears. There’s secret messages in the songs for those who know what to listen for.”

After a harrowing few months, Osborne comes back to another, more obvious message. “What I went through is nothing compared to what those people went through—and it’s not over yet,” he says, reacting to news of yet another Japanese aftershock. “It’s just one of those things you have to walk through, you know? People walk through tragedy every day.”

Hannah Levin is the host of KEXP’s local show, Audioasis, which airs Saturday nights from 6 to 9 p.m.