The Next Level of Grunge : Can Mudhoney, the chaotic soul of late-’80s indie rock and basis of that fuzzed-out Seattle sound, be happy in major-label land?

By now everybody knows that Seattle breeds loud, sloppy rock the way that Los Angeles used to breed teen-age glam-rockers in lipstick, and of all the famous Seattle bands--Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Pearl Jam--Mudhoney is the one you want to be jumping up and down to, ecstatic with the noise, a long-neck Budweiser foaming down your wrist.

When they talk about new rock ‘n’ roll bands, certain aficionados ask, “Do they rock as hard as Mudhoney?” in the tone of voice a car buff might use to wonder whether a new car is as fast as a Porsche.

You’ve heard the term grunge ? It refers to bands that try to sound like Mudhoney.

Mudhoney--which headlines the Hollywood Palladium on Friday and SOMA in San Diego on Saturday--lets its guitars feed back as much as they want, and they play ferocious riffs, and they collide with one another onstage like random pinballs. Sometimes the song and the riff and the groove are so complex that they seem to dissolve into chaos.

Sometimes Mark Arm’s vocals, which are bellowed in the tone of voice most people use to make fun of a song, become so ironic in tone that they sort of turn in on themselves and disappear, as if they had punched through a wall into some alternative reality. Even the drum beats sound sarcastic.

Mudhoney was in fact the soul of late-’80s independent rock ‘n’ roll: deeply influenced by Blue Cheer and cheesy late-’60s bands, bouncing around the country in beat-up vans, revered by college radio, playing in a zillion side projects, releasing limited-edition singles, loyal to Seattle’s independent Sub Pop label while lesser bands from the scene they helped create were busy with MTV Buzz Clips and Rip magazine photo specials.

They’ve said numerous times in interviews over the years that they saw no point in signing with a major label. They recorded their last album, 1991’s college-radio smash “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge,” for a reported $3,000, and decorated the CD jacket with their first-grade photographs. Mudhoney even broke up for a while last year, near the height of the Seattle mania, so that guitarist Steve Turner could finish up an anthropology degree.

So it’s strange to see Mudhoney slouched into office chairs in a plush Warner Bros. Records conference room recently, staring blankly into space and slugging Evian out of little paper pill cups as if it were straight shots of Jagermeister, plugging their fine major-label debut, “Piece of Cake,” contemplating a life of indentured servitude to the corporate ogre. The four guys in the band seem rather more interested in rating the woodworking shows on PBS than in talking about the band one more time. To a man, Mudhoney is a little sad that Bob Vilas had been forced off the air.

“If Sub Pop hadn’t gotten so overextended,” says guitarist Turner, jiggling in his swivel chair, “we wouldn’t have seen the need to leave. We could have been really satisfied there, and it really bummed us out that we weren’t.”

Singer Arm speaks up from the corner: “They used the money that was generated by our last album to pay their bills instead of paying us.”

“And we weren’t sure we would ever see anything,” says Turner, “until Nirvana broke (last year), when we finally saw our advance, long after the record had been out.”

“And we wanted to remain friends with them,” says Arm. “It’s a lot easier seeing them out at clubs and stuff, knowing that we don’t have to beg them for our own money and have them tell us to come down to the office tomorrow.”

So how is life as a corporate lackey?

“Basically,” says bassist Matt Lukin, “I’m more noted in Seattle for being the drunk guy at the bar than I am for being on a major label.”

“Yeah,” Arm says. “The drunk guy at the bar with his pants down.”

“Actually,” Turner says, “Warner Bros. has been pretty cool. Their whole attitude was basically, like, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. And when we first met with them, we played them our last record and said, ‘Look, we recorded this record on an old eight-track machine. Do you like it?’ They were like, ‘Really? It sounds great.’ ”

“We met with (Warner Bros. Records President) Lenny Waronker,” Arm continues, “and he told us some of the best records ever recorded were done on eight-track, and we spent the next hour and a half talking about John Fogerty and Neil Young. It was cool.”

“We did the new record 16-track,” says Turner, adjusting his glasses, “but at the same place, with the same producer and engineer as our last one, and our sounds went through the same old ’68 mixing board that used to be the main session board at Stax studios in Memphis. Otis Redding and Mudhoney--that board has seen it all.”

“Our booking agent calls us a lucky bunch of knuckleheads,” says Lukin, “and I think that’s true.”

Mudhoney, which started out in ’88 as sort of an instantly popular Seattle grunge supergroup, more or less had its roots in the mid-’80s Seattle band Green River, known for bottom-heavy riffing and Mark Arm’s keening, off-key vocals.

Like plutonium, Green River was too heavy to long remain in a stable form: Three of the more commercially minded guys split off to form Mother Love Bone and eventually Pearl Jam, whose debut album, “Ten,” has sold more than 3 million copies. Arm and Turner (who was the original Green River guitarist) started Mudhoney. Lukin came from the Melvins, a sludgy Aberdeen group that is pretty much acknowledged to be the source of the Seattle rock thing. Peters came from the band Bundle of Hiss, and would later supplement his Mudhoney career with stints in Nirvana and the Screaming Trees.

They named themselves after a Russ Meyer movie that they claimed none of them had ever seen. They were profiled worshipfully in the English rock magazines, and were pumped up by the BBC’s legendary deejay John Peel. Before they had even performed live, they recorded “Touch Me I’m Sick” for Sub Pop, the single that would crystallize the sloppy, overdriven, fuzzed-out, super-saturated “Seattle sound.”

“Our guitar sounds are way trashier than any other band that we know,” Arm says. “I mean, we go pretty much for really old equipment, and really messed-up distortion boxes and tweaked-out amps, where most people will just plug a Les Paul into a Marshall and get that generic rock sound.”

“But sloppy?” says Turner. “It was probably me. I’ve been accused of not having rhythm before.”

“We were all coming from bands that had like 50,000 different parts in the songs,” says Lukin, “and it was pretty complex and really concentrated. All of a sudden, we were playing three chords. I can count to 90, but I can’t count to three.”

Sloppy or no, their ’88 EP “Superfuzz Bigmuff” (named after cheeseball ‘70s guitar-effects devices) and their self-titled ’89 album stayed on the British indie charts for the better part of a year; the success of their second, poppier album, “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge,” has been credited for bailing Sub Pop out of bankruptcy.

When film director Cameron Crowe wanted the archetypal Seattle song for his recent movie “Singles,” he had the band that features prominently in the movie play “Touch Me I’m Sick,” retitled “Touch Me I’m Dick.” Somehow the rumor got around that “Singles” was loosely based on the life of Arm, and by the time it got through the mill, people in Europe were seriously thinking that the movie was supposed to be about Mudhoney.

“Every journalist had a list of questions to ask about the movie,” says Turner, “and we’d answer, ‘First off, it’s not about Mudhoney, and second of all, we’ve never seen it.’ They’d look real disappointed.”

“So it’s not about you,” Peters says in a mock-Swedish accent. “What do you do in the movie?”

“Nobody asks about our lyrics,” Arm says.

“Most of our songs are written about (Pearl Jam singer) Eddie Vedder,” Lukin says.

“People are always asking him about his lyrics,” Turner whines.

“And (Nirvana’s) Kurt Cobain,” says Arm. “But nobody really asks (Soundgarden’s) Chris Cornell about his lyrics.”

Lukin affects a French accent: “Vat do you mean, ‘Get on zee snake?’ Has zees to do vit your feelings for your muzzer?’ ”