Buzz Osborne talks King Dunn Tour, Melvins, and surviving the ’90s: “It’s difficult for me to look back on it like, ‘Oh yeah, the good old days.’”

Published On July 18, 2024 » By »
Buzz "King Buzzo" Osborne (photo: Chris Cassela)

Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne (photo: Chris Cassela)

“I only seem massively creative compared to all the other lazy musicians,” Buzz Osborne modestly quips, as he discusses his prolific output in recent years.

The artist also known as King Buzzo is about to hit the road with his longtime friend and collaborator, Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle fame, on the King Dunn Tour — a trek that was supposed to happen way back in 2020, in support of the duo’s recently reissued joint acoustic album Gift of Sacrifice, before COVID-19 derailed those plans. But in the interim, Osborne has been very busy, releasing no fewer than four Melvins albums — including the double-LP Five Legged Dog (the band’s first acoustic record) and this year’s Tarantula Heart, the 27th Melvins full-length — and reissuing his acoustic solo debut, This Machine Kills Artists, for its 10th anniversary.

While many of Buzz’s peers (some hailing from the ‘90s Seattle scene that, he quickly points out, Melvins greatly influenced but were never really a part of) are resting on their laurels or are no longer around, Osborne has survived and thrived. And this is largely because he never played the industry game and was always content to remain on the fringes. “We were uglier and weirder, and I just didn’t think it would work,” he shrugs, insisting that he never expected to wanted to be an MTV star.

“I could be a really bitter person. I’ve had interviewers ask me millions of times, why aren’t I upset that [other] bands [became more successful]? Or, shouldn’t I be upset? And I was like, ‘They’re dead. [Kurt Cobain is] dead. What are you talking about? You think I am jealous of somebody that had that tragic of an ending? Really?’ I mean, that’s pretty fucked-up,” Buzz says bluntly, reflecting on his unorthodox and somewhat underground 35-year career as an alt-rock survivor. “I’m still alive. I’m still doing what I’m doing. I’m not sure if they want me to be bitter. I’m not bitter about anything. I’m not happy that any of that kind of stuff happened, but I am very satisfied and very happy that music that I’ve made and my attitude towards music helped influence and change music on a global level. And that’s something they can’t take away from me. So, as far as that goes, great, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that either. I need to continue doing what I’m doing. I need to keep my feet moving. I need to hustle. And I’m very excited and happy about all of that.”

Osborne is already planning to record the 28th Melvins album, which is already “90 percent” written, this November after the King Dunn Tour wraps. “I always laugh that by the time my album comes out, I’ve already lived with it for so long that I’m ready to move on. By the time it hits the streets, I’m done,” he explains. But in the meantime, he opens up here about why acoustic music is “the most punk-rock thing” he’s ever done, the perils of megafame, his thoughts about the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell, why he doesn’t consider the ‘90s to be “the good old days,” his working-class work ethic, how he’s doing some of his best work right now, and why hasn’t lost his passion for music-making after all these years.

Trevor Dunn & Buzz Osborne (photo: Mackie Osborne)

Trevor Dunn & Buzz Osborne (photo: Mackie Osborne)

There might be some more casual fans who’d be surprised that you have this acoustic side to you, because when people think of Melvins, they think of them as being sludge, or grunge, or just very heavy. They don’t expect that you have this whole softer side.

Well, I don’t know how soft it is!

That’s an interesting point: the idea that acoustic music doesn’t have to be soft, coffeehouse fare.

No, it always bugged me whenever I would see rock ‘n’ rollers pick up an acoustic guitar, and then they start trying to sound like either bad country or James Taylor. Eh, it’s just not for me. Or they start wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots or something. It seems like that’s what always happens, and I had no interest in that. Also, if I had to pick somebody [to emulate], it would be an acoustic heavy metal version of Tom Waits and Bob Dylan mixed together. That’s what it is. I find Bob Dylan and Tom Waits’s stuff fairly confrontational. I don’t think that there’s a kumbaya element to Bob Dylan at all. His stuff is very weird and sharply pointed, to me, especially if you listen to songs like “It’s All Right.” He had something that was not a groovy, folk-rock type of thing — not to me. I thought it was really confrontational and really poignant and powerful. And same with Tom Waits. And these are guys that wouldn’t be considered virtuosos at anything, but they come across as having so much knowledge and they’re so passionate about what they’re doing, and so obviously smart, that it draws you in and makes you want to hear what message they have. I always love entertainers that look like they know something that I don’t. That’s why I want to be there. That’s to be the best example of what I’m trying to get across — the same power and powerful message that I would put across in any musical thing I would do acoustically. Mark Arm from Mudhoney saw me do [acoustic music] 10 years ago when I did my first [solo] tour, and he was like, “It’s the most punk-rock thing you’ve ever done.”

I want to give you something you’re not getting in your normal, everyday life. … That’s the point of my existence as a musician, is to give people that type of thing. And by God, I’m going to do my job as hard as I can. I feel very blessed that all my hard work has paid off in a way to where I can be a professional musician, and I don’t take it for granted. I work all the time and I want to do as many live shows and make as many records as I can.

We were talking about misconceptions of what acoustic music is, and you were talking about when rock acts go unplugged. That has me thinking, of course, about the ‘90s, the era when the Melvins came to prominence, and how MTV Unplugged was airing all time. Obviously your peers Nirvana had a really successful Unplugged, but so many bands were doing Unplugged back then. Some episodes were iconic, and some I kind of forgot about. What did you think of that whole phenomenon?

Yeah, well I don’t know how “acoustic” any of that stuff was!

There might’ve been a few instruments plugged in, here and there.

I don’t want to sit on a stool. I never watched MTV, so I was vaguely aware of it, but when MTV was in its heyday, I certainly didn’t have cable. I don’t know where I would’ve seen it.

Melvins weren’t ever approached to do MTV Unplugged?

No, no, no, no. We never sold millions of records, so no. … MTV couldn’t have cared less about us. … We were on 120 Minutes a little bit, but they never showed any of our videos in regular rotation. I mean, if they would’ve, I’m sure we would’ve sold more, but in order to get onto that, to get to that situation, it’s just as dastardly as any other business. It’s arbitrarily decided, what their playlist is. I mean, if you played — let’s take our most commercial song, like “Revolve” — if you had played that eight times a day on every major radio station in America, we would’ve sold way more records That’s just how it works. So, how do you get to that point?

But many of your peers who were on MTV and mainstream radio quite openly said they owed a debt to Melvins. And you did have a major-label deal, during a weird era when majors were scooping up bands that were so willfully uncommercial — like Royal Trux, Cop Shoot Cop, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, or even Butthole Surfers, who actually did have a radio/MTV hit. You don’t seem bitter at all, but was that sort of success something you were once hoping or expecting would happen for you?

I never thought it would happen. I just thought with the major-label thing, we’ll do one album and then we’ll walk and go back to what we’ve been doing. I had been making a living playing music since 1988, and we got signed in the early ‘90s. And I never had that wounded-junkie look that a lot of those bands did. And our music was far weirder. If you look at a band like the Butthole Surfers, the song that got famous [“Pepper”], which was their biggest song, sounded like Beck. So, it wasn’t a big surprise. It wasn’t like their song “Cherub” was going to sell millions for them, as much as I think it should. The world’s not a right place. So, we never made music that catered to that kind of thing. And I knew that I didn’t look like those guys. We were uglier and weirder, and I just didn’t think it would work.

You never did drugs, right? You lived a pretty normal life, at least in terms of the “rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle” cliché.

I don’t do drugs. I’ve done stuff like that in the past, but I haven’t done anything like that in a long time, 30-plus years. … I’ve never done the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle cliché thing. But I’ve not lived a normal life! [laughs]

True! Were there any powers-that-be at your ‘90s record label, Atlantic, who were like, “Give us our ‘Pepper,’ give us our ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ give us our ‘Black Hole Sun’? Basically, were they asking for one commercial song for radio? And if so, what came of such conversations?

I’m sure if we’d have gone to them and said, “What do we have to do? Tell us what to do to make it!”…  I was surprised how many bands were doing that. But [Atlantic] never told us anything like that. They never said, “You’re going to have to do this. We don’t hear any hits.” They got weird by the third record, but by that time, every single person, including the president of the label that was there when we got signed, had all been fired. It was all new people who weren’t there when we first got signed, so nobody gave a shit what we were doing. … I could see the writing on the wall, but I couldn’t believe that we even did three albums! I thought that we would do the one album and then I would go back to what I’d always done up to that point. But they would ask us, “Do you want to go to this Grammy party? Do you want to do this?” And I would just say, “Nah, I don’t want to do it.” … I don’t feel comfortable with those things. I’m not good at it. I’m not good at that kind of networking. I don’t care about that. If that’s what I have to do to make it in a traditional way, then it’s not for me. They would say, “There’s this big radio thing where you come and gladhand all these radio people,” and I’m just like, “Well, if I have to go kiss somebody’s ass in order to try to make them play my record, then I’ll just be another stooge. I just don’t want to do it.” I watched lots of bands do that, and none of those bands are here now. And I’m still making music, still making a living playing music. If you don’t want to do it just on the music alone, I’m not interested in playing this game. I’m just not. I don’t have any faith in it, anyway.

Did Atlantic think they were signing their own version of Nirvana, their Pearl Jam, their own “grunge” bandwagon-hopping band? If so, they obviously got something completely different.

I think they signed us because they thought it would attract other cooler bands. … We got really decent budgets to make albums, and we were very careful with our budgets and knew that this is probably all the money we were ever going to get from these records. And I wasn’t wrong about that. We didn’t get tens of thousands of dollars in each of our pockets. We got a little bit of money, made our records, and then two of those albums, Houdini and Stoner Witch, are probably two of our more popular albums.

It actually sounds like you were in a really amazing position. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about bands getting pressure from record labels to change their sound, or getting dropped when they don’t sell tons of records. But it seems you got as much out of the experience as you could.

Well, let’s start a little earlier, Nirvana and those bands, [the system] just took those bands and plugged them into the same apparatus that’d sold Mötley Crüe albums prior to that. [Record labels] didn’t do anything different. It wasn’t like the industry changed at all. The music changed, but not how they sold it. … And it wasn’t like that music was so obscure and weird that it would be unpalatable to normal people. Not at all. It was fairly pop music. But what was interesting about that was [those bands’] attitudes. Like, the guys in Nirvana and Soundgarden were much more punk-rock and weird than their fans would have ever known. They had eclectic tastes and they liked weird bands, and they liked our band. And they could see how the vast majority of their fans would never hear a record of ours and see a connection at all, because [fans’] understanding of their rock heroes is minimal; they don’t really have an intimate understanding of what these [artists] think at all. If they did, they would have more faith in what they considered to be good and inspirational — which they don’t. So, the world’s not a right place. It’s just how it works. And I already understood that, so I wasn’t disappointed, because I didn’t set myself up to be disappointed. I just never thought it would work. I just never thought it would work on that level. I just never believed it.

Most bands, they think that that is it, and if it doesn’t work, they can’t restart. They can’t start over. And we didn’t have to start over. We were actually walked out of that deal after three albums in a better position for us. We were more popular than we’d ever been. We’d sold more records than we’d ever sold, even though it wasn’t on a gold-album-status level. We were fine. I already knew what to do that prior to that, and we just went back to doing what we’d always done, except now we’re in a better position. And as time went on, it’s better now than it ever was then. So, if you view it as a war of attrition as opposed to a rocketship straight to the heaven, I think you’re better off. I’m more interested in having a career, a long-lasting career, where I get to be a musician, than I am in fame. I mean, I’ll take half of that in cash. The fame is the worst part of it.

And obviously, you saw some of your peers struggle with fame.

Yes, yes, absolutely. I approach this from a very working-class position and try to make it work and be realistic. Our booking agent says that I’m the most realistic person he’s ever worked with, as far as what I expect or what I think should happen or will happen. And it’s worked so far. I mean, no complaints. If I can make my living as a musician, that’s all I ever wanted.

It’s funny when I recall how in the ‘90s, once-indie bands like Green Day or Smashing Pumpkins or Girls Against Boys would be accused of “selling out” if they signed to a major. It’s almost a quaint mindset to look back at now. But it doesn’t seem like Melvins experienced that sort of backlash either.

Well, it wasn’t like we were universally accepted by the hipsters, so no, not really. We were always marginalized by the hipster people. … And even with the grunge bands, we’re lumped into that stuff, but we’re a lot weirder than any of those bands. We really don’t have any brother bands. I’m not part of any scene. I never felt comfortable with that. I moved to California in ’86, ’87, long before any of that stuff happened. … I never even lived in Seattle!

Did you resent being lumped in with the “grunge “trend? I suppose there were some professional benefits to that categorization, but it wasn’t accurate.

I was always very excited that people like the Soundgarden guys and Nirvana guys got big success. I was friends with those people. They came from nothing. Those are rags-to-riches stories. Those are true American stories. That’s a Hollywood ending. And then there’s the Hollywood ending with the death as well. I never felt anything other than I was proud to be associated with those bands. … I only ever felt happy for those guys. But especially with the Nirvana case, and then later with the Soundgarden thing that ended so badly, it’s difficult for me to look back on it like, “Oh yeah, the good old days.” I would honestly much rather have Cobain alive and not famous. Because I was friends with him before he could buy cars with a credit card, and that made no difference to me. I mean, if you can be friends with people when you have nothing and they have nothing, that’s real, true friendship. So, it wouldn’t have mattered to me if he never got famous. I was still friends with those guys and would’ve remained friends with them. It’s a tragic story with a terrible ending, and I don’t know if that’s anything I’ll ever get over.

I remember I did an interview after Cobain died, it might’ve been for MTV, and they were like, “We don’t want to talk about that other part of it. We just want to talk about the good parts.” And I’m just like, “Well, it’s all mixed together. I’m sorry, I don’t have the ability to just write that off, nor will I do that.” As great as it was, it ended so badly that I can’t fully enjoy that.

I think a lot of people actually almost forget these are real people who were people’s friends, people’s relatives. They weren’t just these tragic rock icons.

Well, once you get that level of fame, it all does become not real. They become the property of other people, and that’s the deal. That’s just how this works. And I think you have to work really hard to not let that go to your head. I could be a really bitter person. I’ve had interviewers ask me millions of times, why aren’t I upset that those bands [became more successful than Melvins]? Or, shouldn’t I be upset? And I was like, “They’re dead. He’s dead. What are you talking about? You think I am jealous of somebody that had that tragic of an ending? Really?” I mean, that’s pretty fucked-up.

I’m still alive. I’m still doing what I’m doing. I’m not sure if they want me to be bitter. I’m not bitter about anything. I’m not happy that any of that kind of stuff happened, but I am very satisfied and very happy that music that I’ve made and my attitude towards music helped influence and change music on a global level. And that’s something they can’t take away from me. So, as far as that goes, great, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that either. I need to continue doing what I’m doing. I need to keep my feet moving. I need to hustle. And I’m very excited and happy about all of that.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. Watch Buzz Osbourne’s full conversation in the split-screen video above.

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