5 Records That Changed Mark Arm's Life

The Monkeywrench are a supergroup comprised of Mark Arm and Steve Turner of legendary Seattle outfit Mudhoney and Tim Kerr, guitarist for bands like the Big Boys and Poison 13.

Originally intended as a one-time-only, one-LP band, they’ve now linked up with Tom Price of the U-Men and Gas Huffer and Martin Bland of Australian noise rockers Lubricated Goat.

Together, this motley (and noisy) crew are set to embark on their first ever Australian tour this month. This is your chance to see some of alt-rock’s finest musicians share a stage.

We recently caught up with the legendary Mark Arm to talk about some of the records that impacted him the most and set him on the path to iconic status in the history of rock music.

See Mark Arm live with The Monkeywrench when they embark on their debut Australian tour later this month – check below for dates and ticketing details and don’t miss out!

The Beatles – ‘She Loves You’

For some reason, I was really attracted to rock and roll as I heard it as a little kid through AM radio and stuff. And it might be because that music was sort of banished from my household. Not because of any churchy Satanic reason, but just because my mum was an opera singer and she thought anything that wasn’t classical music was s**t.

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I remember singing a Beatles song without even knowing it. Like, I’d never heard it before but other kids had been singing like, ‘She Loves You’, and I think I might’ve been singing ‘I love you.’ That said, I wasn’t even allowed to bring records into the house, much less buy them.

The Sweet – Desolation Boulevard

Finally, in eighth grade my mother relented. I was a person with a will of my own [laughs] and she finally permitted me to bring in the first record that I bought of my own volition, which was The Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard.

The impact was huge [laughs] I only had one record so I would just sit there and listen to it over and over again. And to my mother’s credit, she looked at it and read the lyrics and instead of just throwing it away she said, ‘I just hope you don’t understand this.’

The Stooges – The Stooges / Funhouse / Raw Power

The albums I’ve played the most in my lifetime would probably have to be the three Stooges records. Not The Three Stooges, but the three records by The Stooges. I don’t have a favourite really, they each have kind of their own charms.

I really, really love the guitar sound on the first album and that sort of laid-back, bored vibe. But I also really like the aggression and almost the veering off into jazz on the Funhouse album and then just the darkness of Raw Power.

Aerosmith – Rocks

Once the floodgates got opened up and I started buying more records — I didn’t have money to buy a tonne of them — but after Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard, I think the next album to have a big impact on me was Aerosmith’s Rocks, and I kind of went along that trajectory until I started getting into punk and new wave.

I remember skateboarding over at these kids’ house and they had brothers and one of them was given the first Devo album, kind of as a joke. And there was three records that we’d play, it was a Led Zeppelin record, a Jimi Hendrix record, and that Devo record just as a joke.

The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico

Somehow my friends got really into The Velvet Underground and Brian Eno and John Cale, so I was kind of trying to figure out where I was at at that time. There was a really cool record store I’d go to and they’d point me in cool directions, like check out Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler or the New York Dolls, but they wouldn’t make fun of me for what I was looking for.

For a while in high-school I was a huge, huge Rush fan, because they didn’t get played on the radio and their songs weren’t songs about just cars and girls and I think at age 16 I wanted to seem smarter than I was. But then after a while I was like, well, AC/DC is f***ing great. Songs about cars and girls are great too.