Melvins Drop Cover of Soundgarden’s ‘Spoonman’ With Matt Cameron
Attention fans of Seattle's 1980s and '90s rock scene — Melvins have dropped a cover of Soundgarden's 1994 hit "Spoonman," featuring the percussive talent of Matt Cameron.
The track is part of Melvins' Lord of the Flies EP, which was just released on Jan. 10 through Amphetamine Reptile Records. However, it's not available digitally, so the cover was just uploaded to YouTube earlier this week. Frontman Buzz Osborne tackled the vocals and guitar, Cameron played the drums along with Dale Cover and Steven McDonald played the bass. And, of course, it's all topped off with a bizarre video.
Check it out below.
If you ask Osborne, he'll deny that his band was actually part of the Seattle grunge scene since they moved to California in the latter half of the '80s. However, the connections are rampant, between his friendships with the members of Soundgarden and Nirvana and the fact that Osborne taught drop-D tuning to several of his contemporaries — including Soundgarden's Kim Thayil.
"Spoonman" was part of Soundgarden's massively successful album Superunknown, and was partially inspired by a Seattle street performer named Artis the Spoonman.
"The lyrics aren’t specifically about Artis the Spoonman... I had known there was this guy Spoonman — his business card was these little disposable wooden spoons you would get with ice cream — but it was an ode to an imaginary person in my head, because I didn’t know him yet," Chris Cornell later told Entertainment Weekly of the song's origins.
"And the song was based entirely on the title, so what’s happening musically is the attitude of supporting this guy who stands on a street corner and plays the shit out of some spoons. Then the song became a reality, and we got Artis to actually play spoons on the song.”